blue sky. The last shriek of the winter gale died in the air, and a warm breeze took its place. Then, like the grand finale of some fantastic play, the heavy layer of snow melted into lush, green grass—grass that should have died months ago and shouldn’t now sprout a blanket of wildflowers.
Within seconds I’d gone from the Arctic Circle to some prairie paradise.
I lifted one foot and marveled at the daisy that had just popped up beneath it. “What the …?” I murmured aloud.
“More like ‘where the,’ actually,” a pleasant voice chirped from somewhere behind me.
I spun around, sending an impossibly thick cluster of dandelion seeds into the air. For a moment I didn’t see anything but their wispy cotton strands. Only when they drifted up, toward the clear sky, could I see her.
She stood only a few feet from me, with her hands clasped in front of her. Her feet were bare like mine, and she rocked back and forth on her heels as if she had news she couldn’t wait to share. Her green eyes seemed to sparkle with that same exciting secret. She ran one hand through her wild auburn hair and then, unbelievably, waved at me.
“Hi, Am—a.”
Her voice crackled like radio static in the middle of my name. The weird noise obviously didn’t bother her, though, because she broke into a warm smile.
Too baffled to do much else, I smiled back.
“Um … hi,” I said. “And you are? And I’m where?”
Her smile turned dimpled, and mischievous. “Not—lat—someone wants—talk to you.”
Again her words crackled, as if she were trying to speak over a broken connection. She shook her head, auburn curls bouncing against her shoulders. Then, without so much as another staticky word, she vanished.
I stared openmouthed at the empty space she’d left. There was no evidence that she’d been there at all except maybe the wildflowers now seemed a little thicker, a little wilder where she’d stood.
“No, really.” I spoke to the vacant field, feeling dizzy from all this weirdness. “Where am I?”
“Don’t you know?” another unfamiliar voice teased, not much louder than the breeze.
I spun around again, searching for the new speaker. This time, however, I found no one watching me. Nothing surrounded me but the flowers, the ankle-high grass, the cloudless blue sky.
“Who’s there?” I called out, still spinning, still finding nothing.
“Me,” the voice whispered again.
“Me, who?” I demanded, my own voice sharp and impatient. Another second of this eerie place, these cryptic visitors, and I’d have to reevaluate my sanity.
“You know who, darlin’.”
My mouth twitched and then pulled itself down into a disbelieving frown.
Darlin’.
The way the disembodied voice dropped its g and drawled out the word with affection … only one person in the world had called me darlin’, and had said it in that way.
My father.
The voice sounded like it had in all my nightmares about him. But here, in this beautiful place, it also sounded richer. Clearer. Which shouldn’t be the case since my father was trapped in the dark netherworld.
I felt the muscles in my neck tense. “No, really,” I almost growled, defensive for reasons I didn’t fully understand. “Who are you?”
“There’s not much time,” the voice cautioned. “I need you to listen. I need you to uncross your eyes, darlin’.”
I froze. No part of my body moved, except perhaps for the frown, which released its hold on my mouth.
The image sprung into my mind before I had time to think. A flash of memory. I hadn’t had one in months, not since the struggle this fall on High Bridge. But suddenly, without warning, I could picture my hands clasped around a math textbook. Calculus, judging by all the letters and numbers dancing impossibly around one another on the page.
“Ugh,” the flash-me groaned. “This stuff is making my eyes cross.”
I heard my father speak from somewhere to my right: “Then you’ve gotta uncross them, darlin’.”
He’d said that at least a thousand times before, and who knows how many times after. This was our routine, our own goofy comedy bit. Whenever a problem bothered me, I’d say it made my eyes cross; and every time, my father would suggest I uncross them, as if the problem was that simple to solve.
Just uncross your eyes, darlin’. Nothing to it.
Silly. Meaningless, really. But it always made me laugh, even helped me to focus, because the phrase was ours.
Besides than my mother and me, only one other person knew that phrase, knew what it meant to me.
“Dad?”
I breathed the word like a prayer. I received one quiet word in acknowledgment:
“Amelia.”
Maybe I should have been more skeptical, demanded more proof. Instead, I started to cry. Because I knew how my father’s voice sounded when he spoke the name he’d helped give me.
“Dad,” I called again, frantic. “Dad, where are you? I’ve been trying to find you. I’ve been trying to—”
“There’s no time, Amelia,” he interrupted. “You have to listen to me. They’re coming.”
Immediately I knew whom he meant. And the warning chilled me just as much as when Eli delivered it last night. But this time I steeled myself against the fear and drew my head up so my father would see—if he could see me at all right now—that his daughter’s backbone had survived her death.
“I know, Dad. That’s why I’m leaving Oklahoma.”
“That’s not enough,” he said. “You have to—but not without—”
The same static interference that had broken up the girl’s voice now distorted my father’s. Like the two of them were speaking on the same radio frequency.
“They want—but it’s hard to—the rivers—mustn’t rise.”
“What? Dad, I can’t hear you. ‘The rivers mustn’t rise’?”
I moved to the right and then the left as I’d seen Joshua do when he wanted to get better cell phone reception. Then I craned my neck up, my face pointed to the sky as if my father’s face might appear there.
No such luck. My father continued to speak, but infuriatingly, I could only catch a few words at a time. Worse, his voice began to fade, the volume lowering until I could barely hear him at all.
“Darlin’, you need to—please—not soon eno—”
His last word faded entirely and, after a long silence, I realized he was gone.
I stood perfectly still, staring at the field of wildflowers without seeing them. My father had tried to warn me about something, that much I knew. Something to do with the demons of High Bridge. Something urgent.
A thin shiver of fear ran through my heart. I’d wanted to contact my father so badly, for so long. But his visit—if that’s what just happened—brought me no comfort. Still, I wanted it to, very much. So for a brief moment, before I tried to analyze what few words he’d given me, I closed my eyes. In the quiet of my own mind, I replayed his warning, if just to hear his voice.
When I opened my eyes, I had the second shock of my already-strange day.
Without any effort on my part, I’d moved again. Instead of a flowering prairie, the window of the SUV faced me. Through it I could see other cars, so close to the SUV that I could touch them if someone