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Colonel Black rue the day he
first heard the name Matt Archer.
    Mamie twisted one of her pigtails around her finger over and
over, her way of telling me that I better start talking soon or she’d carve a
laser-hole in my forehead with her eyes. Now that she was a college girl, her
one concession to becoming an adult was to stop wearing ribbons on the ends of
her braids. Since the pigtails seemed like a good way to discourage frat guys
from asking her out, I wholeheartedly approved her stubborn refusal to wear her
hair down. She was also still wearing the sapphire earrings I gave her for
graduation—another thing she refused to change. I liked that, too.
    “So how’s school going?” I asked, just to mess with her.
    My sister crossed her arms. “You’re stalling.”
    “That’s my cue to leave, I guess.” Mom laughed and stood.
“I’ll let Mamie grill you, Matt—she’s better at it. I should put dinner on the
table before you decide to eat the table.”
    My stomach growled loudly. “Good idea.”
    Once Mom was out of earshot, Mamie gestured for me to sit
with her on the couch. “Something happened, didn’t it?”
    “Yeah. It was supposed to be a research trip, but Will and I
got ambushed by two fourteen-feet-tall rock monsters.”
    I proceeded to fill her in on everything: the minion’s
warning about the blood-red moon, Dr. Longtree’s possession, and especially
about the missing physicist. “I’m thinking the demons or monsters or whatever
came for her, not the Iroquois. Maybe they needed the others for something
else, but I think the primary objective was this Dr. Burton-Hughes.”
    Mamie had that faraway look in her eyes, the one that said,
“data compile in progress.” I leaned my head back on a couch cushion and
watched the flames dance in the fireplace while she worked things out.
Considering how accurate her research had been over the last two years, I
trusted her more than anyone in the military. More even than Aunt Julie, and
she worked in Military Intelligence. Mamie just had this ability to figure
things out when no one else could.
    “I think you’re onto something, Matt,” Mamie said, coming
out of her data-crunch trance. “Maybe Dr. Burton-Hughes was close to making a
very important discovery—kind of like Jorge. Maybe she found a new connection
between science and the occult like Jorge did and she needed to be eliminated.”
    “So what could it be?” I asked. “She was supposedly
studying…uh, I think the guy said theoretical…” What was it that Bill had said
again? “Um…dark energy! Yeah, that’s the thing.”
    “Dark Energy,” Mamie said, emphasizing each word like it was
capitalized. “So, I’m taking honors Physics this semester—”
    I grunted out a laugh. “Only you would take honors anything
in your first semester of school.”
    “Bite me, Matthew.”
    I laughed harder. “Listen to you, saying such crude
things…college is a bad influence.”
    Mamie’s forehead furrowed, sending her glasses slipping down
her nose. “ Anyway , I learned a lot about light and dark. Dark isn’t just
the absence of light.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “it’s where the bogeyman lives.”
    “Maybe, but that’s not what I mean.” She pushed her glasses
up and assumed her “I’m teaching you something” stance. “Dark has substance. It exists in the truest sense of the word. Dark matter and dark energy have
power and gravity of their own.”
    I scrunched up my forehead. “But it’s…darkness. How can it
have substance?”
    “A black hole is dark, and it has substance. You wouldn’t
want to get too close to one, right?” she insisted. “Dark matter is very weak.
It’s almost impossible to catch, but it’s there. I won’t bore you with the
details, but scientists estimate twenty-five percent of space is made up of the
stuff.”
    “And the other seventy-five percent is regular matter?”
    Mamie gave me an exasperated look. “When you look at the
night sky, what fills up