Fragile Darkness by Ellie James Page A

the passenger’s seat, scrolling through the messages he and Grace had been sending for the past hour.
    How’s Trinity?
    Resting. Tell me about the party.
    It’s like a bunch of zombies. There’s something really dark here, something gathering. The vibrations are muted, distorted, but I can feel the panic, like someone crying out for help.
    It’s like before Katrina, when we all knew what was coming, but knew we couldn’t stop it.
    Be careful and let me know if anything changes.
    Trinity doesn’t belong in a place like this.
    There’s no telling what she picked up on or who picked up on her.
    I was right. That was all I could think. The flash of white meant something bad.
    Grace’s last few texts, the ones she’d sent while Dylan and I had been on the patio, were about Kendall and Will.
    We found Will. He was freaked, kept saying Kendall shouldn’t be there.
    We all left at the same time, but she won’t go home. We’re following him now.
    We tracked him to a wooded area, but we can’t find him. Kendall’s a mess. She won’t leave without him but she’s scared to call his parents. She doesn’t want him to get in trouble again.
    That’s when Dylan texted back.
    We’re on our way. Where exactly are you?
    City Park.
    I stared at the stark words against the white background. For a second everything else fell away, leaving only memory. Of Chase. Silhouetted against a tall white column in a clearing, with the blue, blue sky behind him.
    Am I ever in your dreams? he’d asked.
    My heart squeezed. Everything had seemed so crazy innocent at the time. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t known about the premonitions, or why I had them.
    Chase was the one who’d led me to those answers.
    Chase was the one who’d led me to Dylan, and a dream as dangerous as it was forbidden.
    And then everything went all watery, and I blinked against the sting, returning Chase to the quiet sanctuary of memory, and me to the truck with Dylan, racing toward the blur of trees hulking against the blanket of stars.
    *   *   *
    Grace met us by the fountain. Last fall water had sprayed up in a high arc to rain down around us. Now all that moved was the steady breath of the night wind through the hundred-year-old oaks.
    In the moonlight, reddish-brown hair slapped at Grace’s face. “We found him.” Her eyes were like dark pools, reflecting the horror of all she’d seen, and all she knew. “He’s in a tree.”
    Dylan looked beyond her, toward the line between the fall of moonlight and the shadows beyond.
    â€œA tree?” A quick whisper of cold moved through me. “Why? Where’s Kendall?”
    â€œShe climbed up after him, saying she won’t come down until he does. But he says he can’t. That he can’t let them find him.”
    â€œLet who find him?” I asked, but before Grace answered Dylan took off toward the back of the clearing.
    We followed, Grace shooting me a quick, worried look as we left the open space and entered the shift of shadows. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
    With every minute that passed, the blurry edges from whatever I’d been slipped faded, and normalcy returned.
    â€œYeah,” I assured her, tearing through a clump of Spanish moss, that was just Spanish moss. The trees were just trees, the vines just vines. Everything was back to normal.
    Almost.
    Wordlessly we veered into the darkness, running along the carpet of decaying leaves. The night hummed around us, crickets and toads and all those other night sounds—and something else.
    Chanting.
    Dylan glanced back to me, his hair long and stringy against his face, but I saw the quick flash of his eyes.
    We edged closer, each second playing like a slow, cautious breath as the monk-like cadence gave way to the fervor of a doomsday preacher.
    â€œThen the kings of the earth, the very important people, the