Cadence and Jack walked off toward the side yard, out of earshot of most anyone who could possibly be attempting to listen. “I’m okay,” he said as he stopped near the fence. He was wearing a dark blue suit, and Cadence remembered how that color had always set his eyes off. Today, however, they didn’t seem quite as bright as what she remembered, and she wondered if he had, indeed, been crying after all.

“Good, good,” she said. “I wish I would have been able to spend more time with all of you this week. I just needed some time alone, you know?”

He nodded. “I understand. You went to your grandma’s house for a few days, your mom said?”

“I did. I just went up there and slept, a lot, and visited with my grandma and kind of wrapped my mind around what this would be like, you know, going on without our Drew.”

He continued to nod as she was talking. “And now, your mom says you’re not going to go back to school? She says you took some job in Kansas City or some place? Is that true?”

Cadence actually wasn’t aware that her mom was telling anyone anything at this point, so this was all brand new information, though it did seem to be quite accurate. She quickly decided she would go with that story. “Yes, yes, I’m going to be working in Kansas City. Did my mom tell you what I would be doing?” she asked, hoping not to contradict any story her mother had already concocted.

He shook his head. “Just something about the security field, something like that?”

“Okay, yes, I will be working in security. Yes, that’s what I will be doing.” Although what she would actually be doing was quite the opposite of security, at least from a Vampire’s perspective, she decided it would work. Many of her coworkers were in the security field. As a side note, she wondered if her mother actually understood what she would be doing or if she thought she would, in fact, be protecting someone. Although, technically, she would be protecting humans from Vampires, she tended to focus on the idea that she would be destroying Vampires. That sounded much more exciting to her.

“Well, that really surprises me,” he admitted. “I thought you were just dead set that you were going to be a teacher, and now I hear you’ve changed your mind. It’s really surprising.”

“No, it’s not that I changed my mind,” she clarified. “It’s just that I felt that I should take some time off, get my head back together, and then if I feel like returning to college to work on my education degree, I can do that, you know?”

He nodded, but she wasn’t sure he truly understood what she was trying to say. He rubbed his shoulder absently and stared at the ground. Clearly, he was not his usual self.

“Jack, you look tired. How have you been sleeping since all of this transpired?”

He seemed to think for a moment. He glanced at her, and then his eyes darted away. It was as if he wanted to tell her something, but he was hesitating. Finally, he said, “Listen, Cadence, I’ve been having some really bad nightmares. And maybe it’s because everything that happened that night was so unusual, or maybe I’m losing my mind, but I don’t think Drew really fell down a cliff and cut her neck on a rock.”

Cadence was stunned. She took a moment to collect her thoughts. She turned to her “old reliable” question and asked, “Can you tell me more about that?”

Again, Jack hesitated. It was almost as if he thought someone was spying on them, and if they found out he suspected someone had altered their memories of what happened, they would find him, drag him away, and no one would ever hear from him again. “Well, you see, Cadence, every night I have the same dream. We’re not out climbing hills outside of Villisca; we’re at some festival. I can’t always make all of it out, but I know Drew is missing, and we’re looking for her—but not all of us—just me and you and Kash, you see? And then we find her, and she’s dead. And there’s this mob chasing us. I know they’re not people, but I don’t know what they are. I just know I need to run as fast as I can. I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like we would be out climbing rocks in the middle of the night, you know? I don’t know.”

Cadence could neither confirm nor deny his suspicions, but she did want to make him feel better. “I do understand what you are saying, Jack. But my advice would be, just try to let it go. At the end of the day, the details of what happened to Drew don’t really matter. The important thing is that we remember her, that we honor her memory, and that we live our lives in a way that would make her proud. That’s really all that matters.”

He nodded as if he agreed, but then he leaned in closer to her ear and whispered, “I think they’re coming for me next.”

She felt a shiver go up and down her spine. “What?” she asked. “Who do you think is coming for your next, Jack?”

“Them… those people…whoever was chasing us… in my dream. I think they killed Drew, and they are going to come after me next.”

At this point, Cadence really wished she had an IAC so that she could contact Aaron for further instruction. She wanted to stick with the story Elliott had created, keep the Ternion a secret, but still find a way to relieve Jack’s fears. She knew the Guardians were watching the entire town, and there was very little chance that a Vampire could make it in to harm Jack without the entire Guardian Passel knowing. “Listen, Jack,” she began, “we’ve all just gone through an extremely traumatic event. I don’t blame you for feeling that way. We’re all sad and fearful. We’re all questioning our own mortality. But try not to think about things like that because, I assure you, you’re perfectly safe. And I work in security,” she said adding a little wink for effect.

He smiled at her, and Cadence thought, perhaps, she had eased his fears a bit. “All right then,” he said. “I guess you’re right. It’s just a silly dream.”

She was just about to excuse herself and start telling everyone goodbye when he added, “I just have one more question though. Why weren’t you at the hospital with us?”

She froze. She had no idea what the correct answer to that question was. She tried stalling. “What do you mean?” she asked, instinctively taking a step back toward the treehouse.

He followed her. “You know, that night, when the rest of us went to the hospital with Drew. You weren’t there. In fact, you never even talked to the police, did you?”

She hadn’t talked to the police. Elliott had taken care of that as well. But she didn’t know what to say in answer to his question. “Oh, don’t you remember why I wasn’t there?” she began, again trying to dig for information or at least buy some time, praying for a miracle. Just then, her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her sweater pocket, and though, she did not recognize the number, she knew she had to answer it. “Just a second,” she said to Jack. “I have to take this.”

“No, wait, Cadence. The phone can wait; just answer me,” he was saying, but she already had the phone up to her ear and had turned away from him. Jack seemed to be growing increasingly angry as each second passed, which seemed extremely unusual to Cadence.