“Maybe we should turn on the news,” I said meekly.
Immediately Trent’s irate expression eased, telling me how hard it had been for him to stand there and wait for me to come to the same conclusion he had. I couldn’t help a tiny little smile. He cared, not only that I was okay, but that I made my own decisions even if he felt they were the wrong ones.
“Why are you smiling?” he grumbled as he followed me down the stairs, hovering almost.
“Because I love you, too,” I said, and he chuckled, the last of his anger vanishing.
My balance shifted as I stepped down for the next step, and I froze, unable to move as a sudden uproar exploded in my mind. I cowered, hands over my head. It was the collective. Something had happened in the ever-after. Thoughts of revenge and joy were a slurry of contrasts. Trent’s hand touched me, and like a knob twisting the focus, it swamped me.
I woke up at the bottom of the stairs. My elbow hurt, and I stared up at Trent as he held my head to his chest. He looked scared. I was too.
“Trent, what’s going on?” I warbled, and his expression hardened.
“I don’t know.” His eyes looked deep into mine until he was sure I was okay. “I’m carrying you to the couch. Don’t try to stop me.”
Fear kept me silent. The memory of being helpless sifted to the topmost of my thoughts, scaring me even more as he lurched upright with me. I knew how to be passive. I knew how to be still to preserve my strength. That didn’t mean I liked doing it. This too will pass, I thought, pinning my fraying calm to it. Something had happened. I was okay. But it might happen again.
Trent set me gently into the cushions. It felt different from this morning, and I pulled my knees to my chin, making room for him as he pointed the remote and turned on the TV.
A sitcom blared out, the laugh track sounding trite. Trent began flipping through the channels. My tension wound tighter, fear growing as I put distance between myself and both the attack and the outcry from the demon collective. I couldn’t have been the only one who’d felt it.
Trent paused at a news station. The woman was professionally charming, and the man flirted harmlessly as they discussed the new school format being implemented. “Nothing on ICTV,” he said, arm extended to change the channel.
“Try the weather channel,” I said, eyes fixed on the screen.
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. “They don’t have to check the validity of their stories like the national news.”
Frowning, Trent looked at the back of the remote where Takata had taped a mini guide. “Okay. The weather channel.” Arm pointed, he clicked again.
“. . . strange phenomena in the sky observed over the Atlantic Ocean tonight,” an uncomfortable-looking woman on the beach was saying, the wind shifting her jacket even as her eyes kept darting to the surf. “Experts at the local marine study outpost are trying to link it to the sudden crab migration you see about me.”
She jerked, kicking at something outside of the camera’s lens. “The beaches are covered with the rarely seen but not uncommon tomato crab. Most mass migrations are tied to full moons and high or low tides, and it has local and international animal behaviorists stumped.”
And the woman standing there with them creeped out, I thought.
Trent’s arm lowered. “That’s . . . odd.”
My lip curled. Revenge and thoughts of punishment had searched my soul, tried to take me. There was usually a reason for the myths and symbols that dogged some animal species like flies, snakes, and . . . crabs. Crabs were the worst.
“The crabs are steadily moving inland,” the woman was saying, making an awkward jump as she almost stepped on something. “Apparently it’s happening up and down the coast as far north as Maine and as far south as lower Georgia.”
“Not Florida?” I wondered, stifling a shiver as Trent sat beside me.
“No one’s lived in Florida since the Turn. They probably haven’t checked yet.”
The newscaster handed it off to the station, which had somehow gotten an interview with a local marine biologist. “See what Inderland Entertainment Tonight is saying,” I asked, knowing their programming wouldn’t have to be cleared or verified either.
Trent turned the remote over to find the channel number. “IET isn’t on until six.”
“It’s six in Cincinnati,” I said, and he grunted, hesitated in thought, frowned, and clicked the right number. Yeah, I didn’t like that the sun was down on the East Coast either. Whatever was happening there would probably hit us in three hours.
“Inderland Entertainment Tonight,” he said, eyes fixed forward. “What do you think they will know that CNN doesn’t?”
“CNN is an hour late in breaking anything new,” I said, listening to the trendy, size 1 woman in six-inch zebra heels interviewing a beatnik college kid with wide eyes and too many friends in the background trying to get on TV. “Ghosts?” I said, turning to Trent. “Are they talking about ghosts?”
“I think we should try CNN,” he suggested.
“No, wait!” I said, grabbing for the remote, but he was too fast, jerking it away. “Go back!” I demanded, breathless until he did.
“He like came right at me!” the kid was saying. “Creepy as shit and ragged. I thought it was a joke until it grabbed me. I tried to get it off me, but I sort of went through it a little. My friends pulled it off me, and we got the hell out of there. I’ve never seen anything like it. It wasn’t even real except where it grabbed me!”
“It was a surface demon,” I said, pulse quickening.
Trent’s wandering attention snapped back. “No.”
But the skinny woman was talking, a still shot of an underground train platform behind her. “Reports of similar incidents have been coming in from all over Manhattan,” she said, and I wondered if she was going to change to more sinister makeup before the night was over. Maybe put a bat in her hair. “The first indications that this is a belowground-only assault seem untrue as the wraiths are beginning to venture above on the streets, causing havoc.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to grasp the concept of polite society when you’ve been out of it for a hundred years,” I said, grimacing as a blurry, shaky shot clearly taken from a phone showed a surface demon hissing at a car before diving behind the stone wall at Central Park.
“Those are surface demons!” Trent blurted out, sounding almost betrayed.