Summer’s Never Over

Prologue

While the woods burn around her, she runs.

She flies down the trail, afraid to slow for even a moment. Distant screams carry through the wind, the voices of her friends muddled and distorted. She hopes they are running, too.

The campers are gone—buses took them home just this morning. But the staff is still here. People she cares about. And somewhere in her stomach, there is a single cord of guilt that snakes out behind her, toward them.

She knows she shouldn’t be heading north, where the lakeshore grows rocky and too high to jump from. If she’s not fast, she’ll find herself trapped out here. She’ll find herself dead. All of it will have been for nothing.

The fire licks at the trees behind her, and she keeps running, because she knows there is no time to waste. No time at all.

Had it really been only minutes ago that everyone had been at the beach together?

Sad, yes, but safe. Knocking together Solo cups of cheap wine, drinking to the dregs of summer, saying their goodbyes a week too early.

Whispering stories about the Phantom, who’d been slinking through the shadows for months.

Sowing doubt and distrust and a festering, contagious fear.

A monster from that old campfire story, the kids all claimed. A monster who was waiting in the trees, scarier than any nightmare. It’s not true, but it doesn’t matter anymore. The damage has been done.

Everything is her fault, of course. She has been stupid. Reckless. If only she’d told someone what she’d found, if only she’d—

No. She does not have the luxury of guilt right now. The fire rages and crackles in the trees behind her, but the trail in front of her is, for the moment, clear. That must be a sign from the universe that she has to keep going.

Her muscles burn as she propels herself forward, one quick stride turning into another. Lightning bursts up ahead, and, moments later, an explosion of thunder thrums through her very heart.

The sky is on fire. Everything is on fire now.

Still, her feet move. Between the trees ahead of her, the lake sneaks into view again. But, wait—it should be on her left, not her right—

She’s completely turned around; the woods feel like another planet, a place she doesn’t know at all.

She has to stop for a moment, just to get her bearings.

Has she gone the wrong way, or is the darkness playing tricks on her?

In the depths of her brain, she gropes for the memory of what to do next, but it’s growing hazier by the second, jumbled around from the smoke and the heat and all that awful wine she’d slugged at the beach.

She can do this. It’s not over yet. For ten more seconds, she will allow herself to catch her breath. She rests her forehead on the tree in front of her, bark snagging her hair, and starts to count down. Ten, nine, eight—

That’s when the branch snaps behind her.