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back to her feet, but each word felt caught in some sadistic bubble in her throat. She couldn’t make a sound and she couldn’t will herself to move, even though she knew she could run the length of the world and back and she’d never run far enough away to escape him.
    If running was useless, that left her only one other alternative.
    If she could not face her fears in her dreams where it was safe, how could she ever hope to overcome them in her real life where real monsters lurked?
    Her nails bit into the sof t flesh of her palms as she wrenched around to face her pursuer. She gasped hard as she realized it was the gypsy from the funeral. Her hands were placed on the small shoulders of Lily Maldonado, standing quite handily for a dead girl. Her eyes were open and an unusual shade of yellow.
    “ They came for me,” she stated plainly. “Now we’re coming for you.”
    A scream strangled in Adele’s throat as she jolted from her tormented sleep and sat upright on her bed, her sheets saturated with sweat. She opened her palms to find the half-moon circles her nails had carved in her skin.
    These same hands trembled as she reached over and snapped on her bedside lamp. Light spilled into the quiet room, centering her again in what was real. She gasped for refreshing gulps of air as she groped for one of the small brown bottles that lined her nightstand. Her hands shook so badly she could barely manage the child proof cap to spill out tiny pills into her hand. She shoved them in her mouth and chased them down with the glass of water she also kept by her bed for just such an emergency.
    For Adele Lumas , there had been plenty.
    The hallway dream had recurred since she was about thirteen, oddly enough around the time of her first period. It used to scare her much more when she was a kid. Adele never concerned herself with the monsters under the bed; it was the one in her mind that terrified her the most. Pills were prescribed and they worked for a time. Over the years her medicinal cocktail had increased, the narcotics getting stronger by the year, yet what lived inside her was stronger still. The nightmare would return. It would always return.
    R ecently it brought unwelcome companions. Her dreams about the murdered children were more disturbing than her recurring nightmare, mostly because she wasn’t running from the menace anymore. She was the menace. She would wake from those dreams and run into the bathroom to vomit, to purge the thoughts from her head that she could ever hurt a child, while still tasting their blood in her mouth.
    For the tireless , crusading reporter, these thoughts were both foreign and mortifying. To her mind, children were the innocent byproduct of how adults hurt each other. Their plight would always be the one she’d return to, in some mission to save them from such a fate, to fight for those much too young to fight for themselves. It was why she threw herself into this newest murder case no matter how vile it was turning out to be. Someone was in her town, paving its forest with the blood of innocent children.
    It was unfathomable.
    In fact, the only creatures currently more hunted in the Darlington community were the wolves of their forest. For some reason dead wolf carcasses appeared more and more, almost as though they had been ravaged on, fed upon and torn apart. It was gruesome, even for a hunting town. And there were no leads on what could be causing it.
    The animal rights activists of the area already pinned the blame on Nicholas Sterling of Sterling International. It was a big cooperation that bought up much of the private land adjacent to the Darlington Regional Forest to bring a logging company to their community. The environmentalists were up in arms, claiming that such an industry would destroy the balance that Darlington had always maintained between its industry and its environment. They charged Sterling International with planting the wolf threat to justify tearing down the