I see with your eyes. Of course I can read this letter.

Great. I sighed and went back to reading.

aJust out of curiosity, I've been doing some research on the San people of the Kalahari. Their cave drawings are some of the oldest in the worlda"some even date back thirty-thousand years! It's fascinating stuff! Listen to thisatheir DNA is also some of the oldest, most preserved in the world. They've been an isolated culture until just recentlyawell, recently as in the last few hundred years, which really is recent when you think about how long the human race hasa"

And here's where she gave me a history lesson. Email was the way to go when Mamie went into lecture mode. I could skip to the end.

aAnyway, the San's religion mirrors the religions of other early civilizations, with its own creation story that involves light and dark. They believe that the dark is associated with the god of death. There's not much more than that online, though. I'll try the university library, but I'm studying for midterms, so it might be a week before I have anything concrete. Still, I believe that Africa might be more active during the eclipse than anyone thinks. Peru's not under totality this timeamaybe you should ask for additional backup. You might need it.

Love you!

Mamie, the world's greatest sister P.S. (The next time we're home together, you owe me a turn at doing dishes. That's my new fee structure for research projectsa.did I mention I'm taking economics this semester? Supply and demand.) I laughed. "No, sis, you didn't." But I'd do the dishes for her, assuming I was ever home at the same time she was.

Her idea about us needing more backup was interesting. There wasn't any way of knowing what would come slinking out of the dark when the eclipse happened, but better to over-prepare, right? I forwarded sections of Mamie's message to Aunt Julie, so she could do some extended research for us and ask General Richardson if he thought we needed more help, just in case.

I also let Aunt Julie know that Uncle Mike was doing okay. He hadn't mentioned her once since we arrived, like he was maintaining some distance, and that bothered me some. If he could grill me about my relationshipsa"or lack thereofa"I could return the favor. Baby Kate and Aunt Julie deserved a status even if Mike didn't check in like he should.

By now, camp was beginning to stir. I didn't know what we had planned for today, given my self-imposed exile last night, but Uncle Mike had said something about visiting the villages that had been attacked in the last few weeks. I didn't love detective worka"I preferred being the neighborhood exterminatora"but it was a place to start.

Johnson stuck his head inside the tent. "Breakfast. We roll in twenty." He glanced at my computer. "I can't believe it. You're actually studying. I'm gonna owe the major ten bucks."

"Why?" I asked, snapping the laptop shut and reaching for my boots.

"Because I told him it was a lost cause, making you study out here. He told me you had more discipline than that."

Now wasn't this a dilemma? I could tell Johnson the truth and make Mike cough up a ten, or I could keep up the ruse that I'd been working on homework instead of reading email.

When in doubt, avoid getting in trouble. "You know mea"Mr. Diligent."

"Uh huh," Johnson said. "Well, it's a two week bet. Let's see how you feel after we've been crawling the hills on a hunt."

I shrugged and made my way outside. Two Humvees were loaded with equipment and ready to go by the look of things. "Who's going on this little jaunt?"

Johnson glanced around. "Captain Brandt's leaving a couple of his guys here. That's ita"everyone else is rolling out. The major's team is headed south today, and Brandt's team is going east. We'll meet back here at nightfall. Major Tannen wants to visit at least two and maybe three villages. It'll be a long day."

I squinted up at the sun, already shining a brilliant white in the sky. "No doubt."

As the weeks wore on, the daylight hours grew longer and the days were brutally hot. But no matter how hard we ran or where we went, our team was always too late, always a step behind. As news of other strikes against nearby villages came in, Uncle Mike redoubled the searches. Brandt and I took rotating teams out into the desert, searching caves and barren stretches of the savannah. We didn't turn up so much as a track, let alone a den or any other sign.

The hunt seemed to go on forever, and even with the knife's prodding to stay on my guard, I found myself spending more and more time studying out of a sheer lack of anything useful to do.

Johnson paid Uncle Mike that ten dollars when I aced my online midterms.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I sat outside a straw hut in a village twenty miles from camp, listening to Twi translate the story of a young woman whose husband had gone into the bush to hunt and didn't return. It was the first lead we'd had in a while. Two other villages, nearly sixty miles away, were missing people as well.

The woman spoke quickly, gesturing with her hands. Her eyes were red and she touched her abdomen frequently. Based on the round stomach showing beneath the thin blanket she wore around her waist, I realized she was pregnant.

"She say they find part of his body yesterday." Twi scratched his head and looked at the sky. I'd learned this was his way of recalling the right English to explain. "Not like animals. Uh, not rummage? Like birds?"

Rummage? I racked my brain for a synonyms, then asked, "Scavenged?"

Johnson, who was assigned to do interviews with me, nodded. "So, like he had been attacked and killed, but then other animals hadn't touched the body afterward?"

"Yes, yes!" Twi beamed at him. "Like it wasacursed? Curse, yes?"

Cursed? Well, stranger things had happened. If scavengers were scared of the remains, it sounded like we might be on the right path. "What did the people do with the body?"

Twi gave me a suspicious look. "Buried it. We do not like the dead." He gestured me close and whispered. "Gaunab will take us if we come too close."

"Gaunab?"

Twi put a finger to his lips. "Don't speak of him so loud." He looked over his shoulder. "Death will follow you."

I stared at the ground, thinking about the Shadow Man. "Death always follows me."

Twi didn't hear me; he'd turned back to the woman to ask more questions. Johnson had, though, and raised his eyebrows. "You all right?"

"Yeah, just trying to figure out what to do next." I stood up and stretched my aching back. "It'd be much easier if we could find these things. I prefer a straight up fight."

"Me, too," Johnson said. "This is what it was like in Afghanistan, though. Months of searching before we found the lair."

"And I was the divining rod that finally brought us there," I said, completely frustrated. "So why can't I find anything this time?"

Peace, the knife sighed in my head. Patience. The fight will come soon enough. Why don't you rest while we still have the time?

I made a face. "I could've rested at home."

When I heard how grouchy I sounded, I instantly felt like a complete jackass. People were dying out here, and I was complaining. Still, I missed home. I missed Mom and Mamie and Will. I even missed Brent, who'd be home for just two days over Thanksgiving before heading back to school to play the final game of the season. Another thing I'd missa"Washington State had an outside chance at playing in the Rose Bowl if they won, just like Brent had predicted last year, and I wasn't around to cheer him on.

And I missed Ella, but the mark she'd left on my heart didn't like me to admit it too often, so I kept that loneliness separate, buried.

Johnson watched me with a bemused expression. "Not so glamorous now that you see the real side of deployment, huh?"

I thought about something Mike always said about long deployments: "Weeks of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror." Yeah, I was beginning to get the picture, and the people here didn't care about my frustration. All they cared about was sleeping at night without worrying about monsters slipping from the shadows to steal their loved ones.

Twi touched my sleeve. "She ask if you would find theathing that killed her man."

I looked at the woman. Her face was empty of hope; all I saw was a glimmer of vengeance in her eyes. Now that I understood. "Tell her we'll find it, and I'll kill it so her baby will be safe."

Because, when you got right down to it, that's why I was here.

Chapter Thirteen.

Evening fell before we finished the last of the interviews. No one had gotten a glimpse of whatever was hunting the villagers, but we learned enough about the injuries to know they weren't being attacked by a rabid cheetah. The claw marks were spaced too wide for a big cat, and the puncture wounds, probably from teeth, didn't match up to natural wildlife, either.

"The San, they are the best hunters and trackers," Twi said as we walked to the Humvees. "They have not seen these kinds of marks from any animal and they could not follow the tracks. It's ghosts, they say." He shuddered. "Ghosts from the caves."

I knew the part about the San being excellent huntersa"Mamie had sent me a bunch of articles about the clans living in the Kalahari. Twi was right; these people spent their lives learning to track prey. They knew the difference between a wounded wildebeest and a healthy one based simply on the way the footprints looked in the sand. One of the people we interviewed had even told us he knew how old an antelope was based on the composition of its scat.

Seriously, if these people were telling us whatever killed their kin wasn't an animal, I was willing to believe it.

We drove back to camp mostly in silence. I was tired and ready for bed, but I had a date with Ulysses S. Grant, some nice Algebra II quiz problems, and an essay on Tom Sawyer for English. If I was going home to visit in a few weeks, I had to stay caught up or there'd be hell to pay with Mom and Mrs. Stevens both.

When we rolled into camp, we found that Brandt's team had returned ahead of us. From the way they gathered around the fire, chatting, it looked like they'd been back for a while. Brandt was telling some story, sitting on an overturned box, and had everyone cracking up.

"Didn't they have farther to go than we did?" I asked Johnson.

He shot a look at Uncle Mike. "Yes, yes they did."

Uncle Mike climbed out of the vehicle and strode over to Brandt, standing there glowering until the team noticed him. Everyone hopped to their feet and saluted.

"At ease," Uncle Mike said in a tone that suggested anything but. Most of Brandt's guys beat a quick path to their tents as soon as he uttered the words. Tyson, Lanningham and Dorland did too, seeming to realize they'd be safer inside even though they weren't in trouble.

Brandt watched all the activity with a nonplussed expression. "Find anything new out there, sir? *Cause we didn't."

I didn't think Uncle Mike could look more frustrated if he tried. He opened his mouth, like he was about to give Brandt the dressing-down of the century, and I scooted to one side so I could watch it happen.

Instead, Mike let out a long, angry breath. "Hit your rack. We're going out again tomorrow. And I expect a more thorough report tomorrow."

"Sir, yes sir," Brandt said quietly. He headed toward his tent, but paused and turned back. "I am trying, sir. We all are."

After he disappeared into the gloom, Mike gave himself a shake, like he couldn't believe what he saw. "Okayawell, Matt, you go to bed, too."

Tired, dirty and sore, I gave him a quick salute and almost ran for my tent. I'd hardly kicked my boots off and rolled onto my bunk before I was asleep.

I don't know how long I was out, but it was pitch black outside when a scream jolted me into consciousness. I was shoving my feet into my boots and had my knife drawn before I even rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. When I came out of my tent, Johnson was ordering Lanningham to turn on the floodlights, and Dorland jogged past. His camo jacket was open and his boots were unlaced like mine, but he'd already snagged a grenade launcher. Ordinance staff, armed and ready.

Uncle Mike found me amidst all the activity. "Matt! Over here."

I followed him to the edge of camp by the casino tent. The canvas had been clawed through in a jagged slit. An overturned bunk lay on its side in the middle of the space. The guys who slept here were gone.

"Peters was on watch," Mike said. "Only sign of him is his rifle. We found it in the grass, fully loaded."

So Peters hadn't had time to get a shot off. "The thing grabbed him fast, then."

Mike nodded. "Azara was sleeping here. I think that's who screamed."

I fished inside my jacket pocket for my lucky flashlight. My fingers brushed against the St. Christopher medal nestled beside it. Somehow, I always seemed to find it when I needed protecting.

Uneasy, I said, "Show me where you found the rifle."

As Mike led me across camp, I murmured. "Tink, anything?"

Shhh. I'm listening.

I rolled my eyes and followed Mike to a clump of brush not far from the latrine. I turned on the flashlight and checked out the area. The grass was flattened in a few spots just outside the razor wire, but not enough to leave tracks. My light caught a discolored patch off to one side; a closer look proved it was blooda"a lot of it. The trail stretched out into the darkness.

Uncle Mike swore. "He's probably bled out by now."

Johnson came to join us. When he caught sight of the gore staining the grass, he swore too. "Peters?"

"Probably," Mike said. "Anybody see anything, Lieutenant?"

"No, sir." Johnson looked back at the men setting up more lights in the center of camp. "Nothing."

I walked right up to the barrier, sweeping the flashlight beam across the ground. "Just like the villages. We wouldn't have even missed them until morning if Azara hadn't screamed."

"But what are they?" Uncle Mike asked, sounding pissed. We all took it personally when we lost men on our watch, but this thing had walked into our camp and I knew that bothered him more than anything. How could you defend against something you couldn't see?

"No sign of breach on the far side, Major," Brandt said, appearing at Mike's side. He was grey-faced in the weird fluorescent glare of the floodlights. "They got away clean."

Of course they did. We were hunting ghosts.

I stayed up the rest of the night, on watch, to let Brandt sleep. I didn't know when I developed a nice-streak, but Brandt looked beaten down in a way I'd never seen. No cockiness, no witty comebacks, just one exhausted dude looking for a place to crash. Having lost guys in an ambush before, I empathized with him and volunteered to be wielder-on-duty. Besides, I could sleep in the morning, while Mike and Johnson planned our next step.

Sitting on the hood of one of the Humvees, watching the perimeter, I took out my knife and set it down next to me. It hummed, buzzing against the metal vehicle.

"Done *listening' yet?" I asked Tink.

Really? I mean, seriously, give me two minutes.

It gave me the creeps when she tried to sound like me. "You've had two hours. And what's up with the trash talk?"

I'm busy. Then Tink shut me out, like she'd slammed a spectral door in the back of my head.

"Well, excuse me," I muttered. Then I laughed; I was grumping because my imaginary friend wouldn't talk to me, while sitting on a Humvee in the middle of southern Africa with monsters prowling in the dark somewhere. How much more screwed up could a situation get?

Come to think of it, I'd been through worse, and I didn't need to invite trouble by asking too many questions.

The rest of the night passed quietly and at dawn, Brandt came out to relieve me. "Thanks, Archer. I was dead on my feet."

"No problem, Captain," I said, stunned that he actually thanked me. "Think I'll go sleep for a while."

I went to my tent and stretched out on my cot, groaning because my back was stiff, and closed my eyes. I had almost drifted off when Tink crashed my nap party.

I hear them.