JENNIFER SLEPT AND DREAMED AND WOKE AND SLEPT again. The demons had her locked away. Locked in their demon castle. She could hear them. Invisible. Gathering. Whispering. Planning . . .

Now we’re free.

Now she can’t stop us.

Now Sam Hopkins can’t stop us.

We can do what we want.

We can kill.

We can kill them all.

She lay curled on the bed in her room. She tried to stay awake to listen. She tried to stand. She tried to go to the door, to catch them out, the way she sometimes did at home. But here in the castle, the wizards had given her a potion. It made her sleepy. The sleepiness made the whispering demons sound far away. She had to listen very hard to hear them. But she could still make out their words.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we’ll kill them all.

Tomorrow, they’ll see our power.

Don’t tell Sam.

“Have to tell Sam,” Jennifer murmured into the mattress. But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t get off the bed. She couldn’t even keep her eyes open . . .

Her eyes came open wide suddenly. She had been asleep again. Lost in a terrible dream. Blood-soaked death. Bodies everywhere.

She rolled over onto her back. She stared up at the ceiling. She listened.

Nothing.

The whispers had stopped.

Quickly, Jennifer sat up. She shifted her legs over the side of the bed, sat gripping the edge of the mattress with her fingers. The drowsiness still sat heavily on her. She stretched her eyes wide. She shook away the sleep. She looked around.

She was in a new room. Not the room they’d put her in at first, when the police had caught her, when they’d carried her away from her magical friend and brought her back to the demon hospital. They had locked her up then. And given her their potions that made her sleep so she couldn’t stop sleeping.

“We’re going to give you medicine to make you feel better,” said Dr. Demon Fletcher with the nice-face rice cakes. “We’re going to make the demon whisperers go away. Don’t you want that?”

Jennifer did. She wanted it so much, more than anything.

All that was days ago now—she wasn’t sure how many. She wasn’t sure when they had taken her out of the locked room and brought her here. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked around. Her new room was small but pleasant. There was the bed and a desk and a chair. There was a notebook on the desk and a marker for her to write with. There was a small calendar. It was Friday.

Friday, Jennifer thought—and shivered. Now she knew.

This room was not as homey as her room at home, but it felt safer somehow. There weren’t all the animals and posters and princesses staring with eyes to see who lies, to see who dies . . .

And Jennifer noticed something else too. It was quiet here. Very quiet. The whispering had stopped. Maybe, she thought—hardly daring to hope—maybe the medicine had worked.

Jennifer stood up in the weird silence. It was hard to stand because the drowsiness sat on her shoulders like a stone gargoyle. It made her feel like a gargirl, heavy as stone.

There was a small window on the wall behind her. She moved to it, unsteady on her heavy gargirl legs. She pressed her face close to the glass, staring out.

It was dark. It was night. But there was a spotlight on and she could make out some things in its glow. She could see the courtyard of the hospital, one story below her. Grass. Paths. Benches. A tall tree in the middle. The hospital walls rising on every side of it in shadow. Dark walls like the dark battlements of a demon castle.

Did they think they were fooling her when they called it a hospital?

Jennifer scanned the courtyard. No one there except . . .

Except every time she looked in one direction, she caught a motion out of the corner of her eye in the other direction. But when she turned to look in that direction . . . nothing. No one.

Because they were moving in secret. That’s why. That’s why there were no whispers. They were keeping quiet. So she wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t see.

Jennifer turned. She had to blink a few times because the gargoyle sleepiness was hanging on her eyelids, trying to force them closed, just as the gargoyle was sitting on her gargirl shoulders, trying to drive her back down onto the bed.

All the same, pushing her heavy stone legs forward, she went to the door. She tried the knob. Was she locked in here too?

No! The doorknob turned. The door opened.

Jennifer stepped out into a hallway. Almost at once, a lady was there, walking toward her. The sight of the lady startled Jennifer and suddenly she felt less sleepy, more awake.

The lady had a brown face. She wore white clothes. Was she an angel? No, just a lady. She smiled.

“Hi, Jennifer,” she said. “How are you?”

Jennifer tried to smile, but her face felt stony too. Who was this white-brown angel lady? What did she want?

“Are you hungry?” the woman asked.

Jennifer realized that in fact she was hungry. She nodded.

The angel lady smiled. “It’s past dinnertime now, but I figured you might want something to eat when you woke up so I saved you a little something. Go into the common room and I’ll bring it to you there.”

She pointed down the hall at a door. Jennifer tried to smile again, did better this time. She was feeling more awake. She moved in the direction the woman pointed.

She listened carefully as she walked down the now-empty hall. There were no whispers. No noises. Maybe the demons had gone away as Dr. Fletcher said they would. As she walked, she turned her head, turned it quickly, this way and that, trying to spot them, trying to see if they were hiding in the shadows, bad-ohs in the shadows, but no, there was no one. Maybe it was safe here. Maybe the medicine had made them go away. Maybe . . .

She reached the broad doorway into the common room. And stopped. And stood stock-still, gaping in horror.

Her dream had come true and death was everywhere. Bodies were everywhere, all over the common room. Murdered corpses, their flesh ripped by bullet wounds. They lay on the chairs, their blood staining the upholstery. They lay sprawled on the floor in red puddles of blood. Everywhere Jennifer looked . . . the dead, the dead!

She drew back, moving her hand to her mouth, about to scream, when all at once . . .

“Here we go!”

Startled, Jennifer let out a little cry and turned to see . . .

Just the angel lady, coming toward her with a tray. A sandwich. A glass of juice. A cookie. On a tray. Angel smiling.

“Go on in,” she said, nodding toward the common room.

Jennifer looked again. She let out her breath in a long sigh.

Everything was fine now. The dead were gone. The blood was gone. The common room was empty. Big comfortable chairs. Two sofas. A television set on the wall. Everything was normal except . . .

Except the clock. The round clock high on the wall. The hands of the clock were spinning, spinning quickly. Hours going by. Days.

Tomorrow, Jennifer thought. Tomorrow.

“Go on in,” said the lady again.

Jennifer stepped through the door into the common room. Everything was normal now, but she could smell gun smoke. She could smell blood. She could smell death.

“I’ll just put this right over here,” the woman said.

We’re going to kill them all, whispered a demon suddenly in Jennifer’s ear.

Jennifer put her hands on her ears to close out the whisper—but then quickly took them away again because she didn’t want the angel lady to see.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow.

She had to call Sam. She had to warn Sam.

“Is there a phone somewhere?” she asked—she spoke the words before she even thought them.

The lady set the tray down on a small table by one of the armchairs. She straightened and looked at Jennifer. “Well, there is,” she said, “but you’re only supposed to use it at certain times . . .”

“I . . .” Jennifer tried to think of an answer—and the answer came into her head as if out of nowhere. “I want to call my friend. He hasn’t heard from me in days. I want him to know I’m all right.”

The lady hesitated but then smiled, a white angel smile in her brown face, and said, “Well, since you just got out of the secure ward, I guess it’s only right to let you call a friend. You want to eat first or . . .?”

“No,” said Jennifer, the right words just coming to her. “I’m afraid it’ll get to be too late and he’ll be asleep.”

“Okay. Well, let’s see what we can do.”

The lady led her out of the common room. Down the hall. As Jennifer walked behind her, she heard whispers, whispers, whispers but couldn’t make out the words they said. She thought they were laughing.

“Here we are,” said the lady. “Just go back to the common room when you’re done and your sandwich will be waiting for you.”

The lady unlocked the door of a small room. Inside there were several desks with dividers on them—walls that rose out of the desktops, protecting them from the other desks. On each desk there was a telephone. No one else was in the room.

“No more than five minutes, all right?” said the lady in white. “That’s the rule.”

“All right,” said Jennifer.

The lady in white left her there alone. Jennifer sat down at one of the desks. She lowered her head low, low, low, almost pressing her cheek to the desktop so she was hidden away, so no one could see her over the dividers, and she couldn’t see anyone, couldn’t see the rest of the room.

She reached for the phone. Her hand was trembling. She was trying to stay calm. She dialed Sam Hopkins’s number. She knew it by heart.

“Hello?” Sam said.

Jennifer was so happy to hear his voice. She said his magic name. Said it twice.“Sam Hopkins. Sam Hopkins.”

“Jennifer?” said Sam.

“I have to tell you what’s going to happen next,” she said quickly. She had to talk quickly before the demons found her. “I can see. I can see with my eyes. Through the lies. I see who dies. I see what’s going to happen, Sam.”

There was a pause. Then Sam asked, “What do you see, Jennifer?”

She tried to tell him. About the bodies in the common room. About the moving clock. Tomorrow. It was going to happen tomorrow. She began to grow excited as she tried to make him understand. She lifted her head. Holding on to the phone, clutching the phone in her shaking, quaking, sweating hands, she stood up.

Her breath caught in her throat.

There it was again. Death. Everywhere. The bodies. Everywhere. The blood in pools. Bodies splayed over the desks and sprawled on the floor. And the clock on the wall, spinning.

Tomorrow.

Jennifer tried to cry out, but her voice would not rise higher than a whisper.

“So many dead, Sam!” she whispered. “So many dead!”

“Jennifer.” Sam’s frightened voice came back to her. “Who’s dead? What’s happening? Tell me what you see.”

“Tomorrow!” The words would barely come out of her. “Tomorrow! So many!”

“Jennifer, tell me what you see!”

She was about to try to explain it to him, but now the door to the telephone room opened. The lady in white, the angel lady, came in.

Jennifer looked at her and then looked around the room. All the dead were gone. Everything was back to normal. Jennifer could only stand, staring.

“Time to go,” the angel lady told her.

And she walked over to Jennifer, took the phone from her slack hand, and gently hung it up in the cradle.