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their hearts only now subsiding.
    I’d just about made it to the farmyard when damned if I didn’t get that feeling again, that same sense that something or someone was whispering into the darkest of the night. I doubled back a few yardsand slipped into the shadow of the barn, having no idea what I was waiting for, but waiting all the same.
    I don’t how long I was there, ten minutes or more maybe, over and over telling myself it was nothing, ’til finally I actually believed it. I had a warm bed and a wonderful woman waiting for me, and after what’d happened over in the woods, I wanted to be back in her arms. Whatever I’d heard or felt the previous night—and I wondered if the most likely explanation was some kind of meteorological phenomenon—it could wait ’til morning.
    I started to make my way over toward the porch, feeling like at last I might be able to give sleep a really good go, then suddenly stopped, this time even more frightened than before. What in God’s name was that ?
    Something big and black had just slid across the land, triggering the objects on the wires, setting the cans rattling, the bottles chinking—like the rumbling approach of an earthquake. Again I looked up into the night sky, but nothing passed across the face of the moon or the stars, not as far as I could see. So what the hell was it?

CHAPTER FOUR
    The following morning dawned so bright and uncompromised it was hard to believe the events of the previous night. I told the others what had happened but found myself backing away a little from the final part of the story. Bad enough they had to deal with me coming face to face with whatever had been howling in the night, let alone some mysterious dark force stealing across the land like a hunting shark; which was probably why they concentrated on what had happened in the woods and treated the rest a bit like it might be the product of the over-stimulated imagination of an insomniac.
    “Gotta be an animal,” Delilah said, “ain’t it?”
    “I guess,” I replied.
    “Are there wolves around here?” Hanna asked.
    I shrugged; Nick had mentioned he’d once caught a glimpse of a small pack, but what had swept past me had been on its own, and much bigger than a wolf.
    “Should’ve brought the lasers,” Jimmy grumbled. “I told ya. Not cool.”
    I sighed; God knew how many times he’d brought that up—and maybe it irritated me so much ’cuz I knew he was probably right.Once we’d decided we were coming over the mountains and getting well away from our previous life I’d kinda insisted we got rid of the lasers, convinced that we’d have no need of that sort of thing anymore.
    Lena and Hanna had been in complete agreement, Gigi—a little surprisingly—had sat on the fence, but Jimmy, Gordie and Lile had been dead against it. In fact, they’d gone on about my stupidity so much that, in a spirit of compromise, when I hid the limo in the cave, I stashed the lasers in the trunk, just in case. Now, of course, that wasn’t looking like such a great decision.
    “Someone could go back for them?” Lile suggested, though Gordie’s mind was heading off elsewhere.
    “Why don’t we set traps?”
    Hanna stared at him as if he’d betrayed her in some way. “ No! ” she cried.
    “Why not?”
    “It’s cruel!”
    “Cruel to what?” he asked, pointing out that we had no idea what we were dealing with.
    “I think it’s a good idea,” Gigi ventured, always ready to seize the chance to stir things up a little.
    “Wouldn’t hurt,” Delilah commented. “Least we might find out what it is.”
    Jimmy nodded. “I can make something up—we might even get a little fresh meat out of it.”
    Hanna made this face, like she wanted to argue some more but knew there was something in what they were saying. Since we’d arrived on the farm we’d been mainly living off the stored fruit and vegetables and what we’d been able to dig up, most of it well past its eat-by date, ’specially as