• The three of us are left alone, stunned, in the alleyway. My thoughts are buzzing around in the inside of my skull like a bee-hive. So many questions, so many things I want to ask the man in black, Cross. I turn to look at the corpse of the “Lighter” as he had called it. It's gone, nothing but a splotch of black ashy pavement remains where it's body had been. It just looks now like someone had lit a fire there. Felicity breaks her zombie-like trance of fear and runs to us, throwing her arms around Lloyd and burying her face in his chest. She's crying again. Scared to death. I can't blame her. Though inside I'm hurt a little that she didn't cry to me. But that doesn't matter right now.
    Lloyd looks up from her to me, a much more serious and somber tone on his face than I have ever seen. “What do we do now? We've got no proof that any of this happened...if we tell anyone, they'll call us crazy.” He was scared too. We all were.
    “I'm not sure...” I pause to reflect on what Cross had said. Millions of those things. All hungry. All coming our way. Starting tomorrow, you're going to need me. Those had been his words. I look with disdain up at the blood-red moon hung over our heads. The Festival. Somethings going to happen tomorrow at the festival.
    I turn back to Lloyd and Felicity. “There's not much we can do now...We just have to wait it all out, and see what happens tomorrow. We have to be prepared for anything.” I slowly pick up the bat laying at my feet. Some of my blood is splattered on it. But only a little. Mom can't see that. I'll have to clean it, and wash the clothes I'm wearing.
    Lloyd looks at me like he's seen a ghost, his jaw slack. “You're kidding me right? After this, you're just going to 'wait and see'?” He pushes Felicity off of him a bit and turns to me. “We're just kids, Sax. Not superheroes.” He places a hand on Felicity's back and nudges her toward the house. “Let's get some sleep,” his eyes rest on me again. “you've got some cleaning to do, pal.”
    Back home. I'm scrubbing blood out of my pants with soap and hot water. I've already washed the bat off and replaced it and the plunger in the closet exactly like they were found. Mom can't know that any of this happened. She wouldn't believe us anyway, and she'd just freak out and call the cops seeing the blood. She's very panicky sometimes. I have a feeling that come tomorrow she's going to have a reason to be.
    Lloyd and Felicity pass out quickly when we get home. Both exhausted from the shock of the entire event. Poor Felicity's face is red and her eyes are swollen a little from the crying. I begin to wonder if she'd been crying because she was scared, or because she thought something bad might happen to me. I play with this thought for a while as I scrub blood from my pants. Cross fixed the fabric too when he healed my leg. It's just blood-stained pretty bad. I'll be up all night trying to get this out.
    I am up clear through the night like I anticipated. I wake Lloyd and Felicity before my mom wakes up, so we can sneak Felicity out the window and she can run home. My mom doesn't know and doesn't need to know that I had a girl here overnight. Being the daughter of a cop, I'm surprised she was able to get out of her house, and begin to wonder if her dad knew where she had gone or that she was gone at all.
    The rest of the beginning of the day goes by quickly and monotonously. We eat breakfast, mom gets up, starts preparing food for the annual festival bake-off, the usual. Felicity got home okey, but we all agreed that we'd meet back up at the festival this evening. I know something big is going to happen, every fiber of my being is quaking. Both with anticipation, and extreme fear of the unknown.
    Lloyd hangs around my house the rest of the day. When my mom's not around, we talk in hushed voices about the “Lighter”, Cross, and his eerie last words to us. That man in black is on my mind constantly. He chills me right down to the core of my bones. I've never been so scared by another person as I am by him. With this fear though, I find my self having an immediate respect for him. He did help us out, after all. I probably would have died had he not showed up. But I still don't trust him.
    We're sitting on the couch, tossing a balled bit of paper back and forth, when I look up and see the clock. 6:46. The festival begins at seven o'clock. I peer out the window. It's starting to get a tiny bit dark, but not too much. The red moon hangs dimly, low in the sky. I tug lightly on the sleeve of Lloyd's shirt. “Come on, let's go. We're supposed to meet Felicity at the gate when the Festival begins.” Lloyd nods and we both get up to head for the door. Mom touches my shoulder to stop me, and s I turn she smiles sweetly.
    “I'll give you a ride hon, if you want. I'm going to head over with my special Triple-Layer Fudge Cake for the bake-off in just a moment.” She gestures towards the kitchen.
    “No, that's okay mom.” I chuckle nervously, raising a hand slightly as if to put some space between me and my mother. “Me and Lloyd are going to walk.” For a minute I forget about the eery message of what might await us at the festival and picture how embarrassing it would be to show up with my “mommy”. It makes me shutter a bit inside, but I quickly discard the thoughts. “Come on Lloyd, we'd better get going.” With that, we head out the door into the cool evening air.