“Look it up on the internet,” Amanda challenged. “Sometimes you can even find the original police photos of the circle of trees, but most of the sites that put them up get pressured by the families to take them down. They closed the park after it happened. Ten years later, they leveled the trees and installed a stone memorial. Families of the kids still bring flowers and candles there on Halloween. Totally spooky.”

“It’s supposed to be haunted,” Jupe added.

I rolled my eyes. “You know damn well there’s no such things as ghosts.”

“Are you sure?” Wary eyes slid toward Amanda. I could easily guess his thoughts—he was questioning the fact that she was the only person in the room without a halo.

“She’s not a savage,” I said. Savages are humans who don’t believe in the existence of Earthbounds, magick, or anything else supernatural. Most humans can’t see halos—with my preternatural sight, I was an exception—but some, like Amanda, take our word for it.

In Amanda’s case, she had an extra push from an early age. “Ugly Duckling,” she announced with a raised hand, using the Earthbound term for nondemonic offspring. Her mother is human, father Earthbound. And, like other kids born from an Earthbound-human couple, Amanda is 100 percent human: no halo, no knack.

“Oh, cool. Anyway, I still think ghosts exist,” Jupe said stubbornly. “My dog sees things that I can’t. None of the Earthbounds at my school have seen ghosts, but everyone says you get a weird feeling around that memorial stone in Sandpiper Park.”

Amanda nodded. “You need to be careful, Jupe. Don’t go anywhere alone. You could end up like Dustin—one minute you’re hauling out the garbage, the next you’re gone. Poof! Until Halloween’s over, you better make sure you’ve got someone with you at all times.”

“Damn. It’s not safe anywhere.” Under the bar lights, the faint smattering of freckles over Jupe’s nose and cheekbones seemed to darken against his pebble-brown skin.

“That is, if there’s a Halloween,” Amanda amended. “Some crazy civic watch group is trying to get Halloween festivities canceled. They’re gonna be on the morning news tomorrow, trying to scare the public into supporting them. And not just in La Sirena. Morella, too. They want to cancel the Morella Halloween Parade and ban trick-or-treating throughout the entire county.”

“What?” Jupe and Kar Yee said in chorus.

“No way! I’ve been wanting to go to the city parade for years and Cady promised to take me! They can’t do this! My birthday’s on Halloween!”

“I don’t give a damn bout the parade,” Kar Yee said, “except that it’s bad for business and I’ve just paid for three hundred mummy mugs!”

“Nobody’s canceling Halloween, for the love of Pete,” I said.

“They’d better not.” Kar Yee scowled at Amanda, as if it were her fault for bringing bad news into the bar. Still, she had a point. For demons, Halloween was like St. Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo. Last year we cleared almost $10,000 on Halloween night alone—not to mention the considerable upswing in profits the week before. And that was without the mummy mugs.

Amanda toyed with the braided hemp bracelets on her wrist. “Whether they cancel it or not, it’s still scary that kids are being taken. I wonder if it’s some copycat crime?”

Whatever it was, she needed to shut the hell up about it in front of Jupe. Tonight was the first time he’d be spending the night at my house, and I just wanted to have a normal, problem-free weekend with the boy while Lon was gone, but that was looking like a pipe dream at this point. Let’s see: nearly mugged in parking garage, check; minor in bar, check; underage lust kindled by best friend, check; scary child-snatcher rumors, kaboom.

Good job, Arcadia Bell.

I spent the rest of the day doing my best to keep Jupe’s mind off the Snatcher, which is probably why he was able to sucker me into hauling him to a downtown comic book shop, where he managed to drop his entire weekly allowance in five minutes. We spent the rest of the night at my place watching movies and playing with my pet hedgehog, Mr. Piggy. I finally got the two of them to conk out in my guest room sometime after three in the morning, and gladly succumbed to exhaustion myself shortly after.

But sleep didn’t last long.

I sat up in bed a few hours later, groggy and disoriented. Steamy light floated out from the cracked door to the master bath. Someone was in the shower. My momentary panic cleared when I noticed a suitcase on the floor and one of the drawers in my bureau standing open: Lon’s drawer. Our big commitment step. I cleaned it out for him a couple of weeks ago. Though he’d only stayed over once, it still felt satisfying that he kept a few things at my house. In turn, he generously gave me an entire side of his walk-in closet. Walk-in “room” was more like it—the closet was big enough to hold a dressing bench and built-in wooden island in the center with a thousand drawers. My closet had louvered doors circa 1975 that were covered in dust and constantly falling off the track.

I laid my head back down on the pillow and stretched my toes. Even without the suitcase and open-drawer evidence, Lon was the only other person with a key to my place, and the house wards hadn’t alerted me to an intruder. But why in the world was he home so early? I hadn’t expected him back until well after my shift started at the bar later in the afternoon, and the alarm clock read 9 a.m.