Chapter One

“My night light is too bright,” Lucy said, pointing a small finger towards the closet. Dad walked over and bent down to turn off the nightlight. When she heard the first click, Lucy stopped concentrating, and her powers faded. The light went back to the small glow she was used to.

Dad muttered something, turning the switch again. The light went off this time. He turned the switch again and the small glow appeared again. When he turned back to Lucy, he looked confused. She smiled.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

After giving her another kiss he walked to the door and said, “I love you,” before closing the door.

After she had counted to one hundred six times, Lucy crawled out of bed. She knelt next to the window, looking down at her garden in the moonlight. Dad had said that she wasn’t allowed to leave the yard, but he hadn’t said anything about leaving her bed when she was supposed to be sleeping.

That’s because he didn’t know when she was awake at night. She was sneaky that way. There was something exciting to her about being able to do something that her dad didn’t know about yet. She felt like she was going on an adventure any time she slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. Some of the other kids at school were jealous of her adventures. “My parents would never let me do that!” they said. “They’d be so mad if they found me.”

Lucy knew that her parents would be surprised if they ever found her, but never mad. They would realize they had never told her not to and then make a new rule so that she wouldn’t do it again. And then she wouldn’t. She knew that if her parents made a rule, they were serious about it. Like not going to the park by herself. They had made that rule after Owen got hurt.

But, for now, there were no rules about sitting at the window and turning on her ghost light down in the garden. She called it her ghost light because it reminded her of the little ghost friend she had found walking to the school bus stop the day after Owen went to the hospital. She had been walking past the park in the morning when she saw it, floating lazily along like a partially inflated balloon. It looked like one of those tubes with confetti and mirrors in them that you could turn. A call-eye-doe-scope.

When she had held up her hand next to it, it hadn’t felt any different than the rest of the air, and when she touched it, she felt like laughing. Not only did the feeling appear in her chest, but she thought she heard someone else laughing too.

She didn’t really know why she felt like laughing when she touched it, but she did know that she wanted to have it around. She was sad when the woman had come to take her ghost friend away. Laughing was fun. Laughing made her happy. She had tried not to laugh when Dad bent down to turn off her ghost light. She had been waiting to show him ever since she realized that she could make it. All it took was a little concentration, just like when she was trying to add two big numbers together.

Lucy pointed her fingers at the window and focused really hard, scrunching her nose as she did so. Scrunching her nose helped her concentrate for some reason. It made it feel like she was working with her brain.

Outside, the little cool light appeared right next to one of the plants in the garden box that she and Dad had made. Lucy smiled, but as soon as she stopped scrunching her nose, the light winked out. Still, she felt happy. That was the furthest away she had been able to make her ghost light!

Lucy focused on the window in front of her. There were little shadows of water vapor next to where her fingers pressed against the cool glass. She peeled her hand away and scrunched her nose, looking at the palm of her hand. The room filled with a glow as the ghost light appeared in her palm. Rather than smiling, she kept her nose scrunched and walked towards the door. She was careful not to focus on the door too much, though. She knew that if she did, the light would wink out and then she would have to start over. Those were the rules of the game she had made for her and her ghost light.

Last night, she had only made it to the end of her bed before the light went out. Tonight, she made it all the way to the door with the light. She let the ghost light fade away and turned the doorknob. Peeking out into the hallway, she saw that her parents’ door was closed and the light was off. That meant Dad was sleeping and Mom was at work.

The hallway itself was only lit by the night light in the bathroom reflecting off the mirror. Lucy stepped out into the hallway and clambered down the stairs as softly as she could. She stopped after each little creak in the stairs and listened to see if there was any movement from her parents’ room. After repeating the pattern for each of the eighteen steps, she scampered into the middle of the living room and to the room next to the front door. She briefly lit her light to find her shoes and then popped to the back door. Undoing the latch, she pulled it open and slipped out onto the concrete patio.

Now she was a princess, stealing away from the castle to have an adventure while the king slept and the queen was on a mission. Lucy ran down the stairs and across the yard to the garden box.

“Here you go little plant; I’ve brought you some sunlight!” Lucy whispered to the wilted tomato plant.

Her ghost light appeared in her hands and she held it close to the garden box, letting the light spill out over the leaves of all her plants. She had done this with her ghost friend several times before he went away.

Lucy, keeping her nose scrunched, shifted her gaze away from her hands to the plants around her. She willed the ghost light to keep shining and allowed herself a smile when it didn’t disappear. She tried turning her head in wider and wider arcs until the ghost light was a glowing, spiky orb in the corner of her eye as she looked down the street.

The street lamps were on now and it was hard to see the stars. Mom had told her that the stars looked dim because of all the other light in the sky. The time they had gone camping was the only time she had ever really seen the Milky Way. And it did look just like milk.

At the edge of her vision, one of the streetlights turned off.

Lucy’s ghost light died away when she saw the next one turn off and the first turn back on. She crept to the edge of the fence and looked down the street at the base of the streetlights, keeping most of her body behind the barrier. There was a pool of shadow beneath the lamp that was out. She could tell something was moving, something big, but she couldn’t make out a clear shape.

When the thing reached the edge of the light of the next street lamp, the bulb died an instant before the other one turned back on.

Only her right eye peeked beyond the edge of the fence, but Lucy still felt sticky warm air blowing down the street, and heard something wheezing. It reminded her of being sick. So sick that she couldn’t go to school.

Lucy crouched back behind the fence and rushed to the back of the house. She was about to run up the steps when a horrible thought seized her. What if the thing heard her? She stopped at the bottom of the steps and watched the winking of the lights on the fence as the thing came closer and closer. The plants shuddered as the sound of heavy breathing grew louder.

She expected whatever she saw to move past the house, but then the winking of the lights stopped. Lucy held her breath and stiffened, more like a statue than she had ever been before. She felt her heartbeat fluttering like a hummingbird in her chest and heard the monster breathing on the other side of the house. It knew she was back here. If the thing came in her direction, would she be able to get inside before it got her? Lucy kept her mouth shut, telling herself she couldn’t scream.

She was the princess, she reminded herself. The beast, a dragon maybe, was hunting her. But if she was quiet, she might be able to slip away. Lucy looked down at the first of the stairs and carefully stepped onto it. When the urge to run came flooding into her mind, she stopped, reminding herself that the dragon might hear her if she ran.

She climbed the steps one at a time, listening for the creaking of the wood. She rested her hand softly on the doorknob and looked over the backyard. The flickering hadn’t started again. The dragon was still waiting for her.

Slowly, she turned the knob. She held it tightly. If the doorknob slipped the noise might be enough to alert the dragon. As she pushed the door open, she snuck around the corner. She felt the rush of warm air from inside running into the night. She hoped the dragon was too far away to notice it.

Lucy pulled the door softly closed behind her and didn’t breathe until the latch had slipped back into place. Her breath came in gasps then.

She had gotten away. She had outwitted the dragon.

Was it still outside?

Lucy scampered to the front room and crawled to the small opening beside the window. She let one eye glance around the corner, just like she had with the fence.

The sidewalk was empty, and the street lamp was back on.