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have expected them to have spread out. Come at him in staggered waves. Find more than just that one rift. Instead it looked as if they had launched a massed assault at this spot to keep him busy and anchored to one position.
    Sonny swore explosively and spun in a circle on his heel, casting out with his Janus perception, so heavily preoccupied until now. A sudden, blinding crimson light shot through hismind. His insides went cold. Something was terribly wrong somewhere south. He struggled to focus, to pinpoint the blazing light on the map in his mind….
    There it was. Or, rather, there it had been .
    Sonny started to run.
    But he knew, in his heart, that he was already much too late.
     
    Crouching near the edge of the Lake, Sonny put his cheek to the cold ground and peered along the surface of the water, still swirling with iridescence—evidence of recent passage through the Samhain Gate to this realm from the Otherworld.
    Something other than piskies had come through the Gate, very recently. Maybe half an hour earlier. Sonny lay with his cheek to the ground for a better view and stared eye-level out over the obsidian surface of the Lake.
    There .
    There was a faintly glowing trail leading out of the water. Sonny sprang to his feet and ran over to investigate.
    The soft ground at the edge of the Lake was churned to mud. It looked as if there had been some kind of struggle, or as if something had been dragged out of the water and onto the path. Here and there Sonny saw the elongated circular impressions of what could only have been hoofprints. He crouched on the path for a closer look.
    It was Central Park, after all. Horses pulled carriages throughthe park, and wealthy equestrians rode their mounts along the bridle paths. But these prints had come from unshod hooves. And the water that pooled in the impressions had the same telltale iridescent sheen.
    A kelpie? Sonny turned over the clues in his mind.
    In one of the prints, Sonny found strands of coarse red horsehair and three glittering black onyx beads carved in the shapes of tiny stags’ heads.
    He pocketed the hair and beads and stood, looking around. From the corner of his eye, Sonny saw something pale hidden in the reeds. He retrieved the object, brushing damp vegetation from its surface. It was a script, held together with brass fasteners through the punch holes. The front cover was gone, but the Dramatis Personae page was mostly intact, although marred by a hoofprint that looked as though its edges were very slightly scorched. Handwritten notes were scribbled in the margins, and at the top of the page a note in marker said Kelley’s Script . Sonny frowned, fanning through the play, until a smattering of dialogue caught his eye.
    “Out of this wood do not desire to go,” began the speech, and Sonny almost dropped the pages in surprise.
    He’d heard those very words not long before.
    Sonny scanned the lakeshore one last time and knelt at the edge of the path.
    Buried almost completely in the mud lay the trampledremains of a single peach-colored rose. Sonny plucked a bruised petal and held it up before his eyes. The script. The girl from the Shakespeare Garden.
    His firecracker.
    Kelley …

V
    E xhausted, muddy, and soaked to the skin, Kelley kicked the apartment door closed behind her and yelled out for her roommate. There was no answer— Tyff must be out, she thought. Just as well. At that moment she didn’t really feel like launching into a recap of her strange adventure in the park. The cold of the Lake still gripped her bones, even though she’d jogged the last few blocks home. It made her thought processes slow and sluggish.
    Shivering hard enough that her teeth rattled, Kelley shed clothing in a trailing heap on the floor, tugged the afghan off the back of the couch, and wrapped it around herself asshe stumbled to the bathroom and turned the shower taps on, setting the temperature as hot as it would go. She knew that the only thing that was going to