Pressure clamped down on my chest, as if someone were squeezing my heart and lungs with vise grips. he was gone, along with his sister and brother, and we were still here in this cabin. So many others of his kind, hundreds-if not thousands-of Luxen, had come to Earth, and Daemon. He hadn’t been able to control it, although if we’d known what it signaled, it probably wouldn’t have changed anything.

The night we’d fallen asleep on the couch seemed like ages ago, but it had only been forty-eight hours or so since I’d woken up, overheated, and nearly been blinded by Daemon’s true form. My gaze fixed on the woods, glued to the last place I’d seen Daemon. Everything was silent and still, soundless in a totally creeptastic kind of way. There wasn’t even the low hum of insects. Not one sign of any woodland creatures scurrying anywhere. No birds were chirping or fluttering from leafy branch to branch. There was no flickering, brilliant white light shining through the trees. I peered out, beyond the porch and the cleared yard, into the thick woods surrounding the cabin Luc had stashed in the forests of Coeur d’Alene, a city in Idaho I couldn’t even begin to pronounce or spell. Opening my eyes, I inched aside the flimsy white curtain. It was happening-everything about the world as we knew it was ending, and it sure as hell did not feel fine. It involved climbing up on my roof and blasting R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” as loud as humanly possible, but real life rarely turns out that cool. Back in the day, I had this plan for the off chance that I was around for the whole end-of-the-world thing.

Origin jennifer l armentrout pdf