Spoiler: an excerpt from Chasing Shadows

Daniel waited in the darkness. The rough bark of the oak scratched at his skin through his thin jacket, but he didn’t dare move. The witches were out there; maybe close. The Reverend would be furious if he accidentally warned them. He tried to exhale silently. His breath hung like clouds in the cold air.

The almanac said the frost would be early this year – near the middle of November – but it was only the end of October and already he could smell the snow in the air. Daniel smiled; Aunt Ruth had been right.

He looked out over the newly harvested fields to the river; his eyes followed its silver ribbon south. In the moonlit distance, the Arch rose up over the landscape.

Great-grandpa had said that when he was a little boy St. Louis was a magnificent city. Then the terrorists had set off their bombs, killing all the machines. You used to be able to take a small train to the top of the Arch and look out over miles of country. People had been trapped at the top of the Arch when the bombs went off. The way great-grandpa had said it, Daniel had never got up the courage to ask if they had been rescued.

And the cars. Great-grandpa always came back to them. All the colors you could imagine and they could go hundreds of miles without stopping. His father had driven the 2057 Ford truck. It had never started after the bombs fried the electronics. Great-grandpa would gaze at the rusted out shell behind the barn every day as they came in from the fields and each time he would put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and sigh, “This was gonna be mine the day I turned sixteen.” Every time the same.

But the part that amazed Daniel, the thing he wished he had seen, was the airplanes. Great-grandpa said they could take you all over the world in just hours. When he was younger, Daniel would beg great-grandpa to tell him about the planes. He would close his eyes as great-grandpa described looking through the small window and seeing the ground spread out below like a green and brown quilt; or the cities, how when you flew over them at night they seemed like magical kingdoms full of twinkling lights. There was no sleep those nights. Instead he would spend the dark hours trying to imagine what it would have been like to fly.

But great-grandpa had died two winters ago and Daniel was too old for stories. The closest he would ever come to the grandeur of the old man’s cities was the sunset reflecting off the broken glass of the distant high rises.

The muddy smell of the river broke through the warm cloud of memories. This was not the time to get lost in the past; this was a time to be sharp, alert. His soul depended on it.