Dr. That, who hadn't said a word the whole meeting, finally spoke up. "A physics instructor, Dr. Burton-Hughes. She was here, doing research for a theoretical physics study on dark energy."

Dr. Longtree patted the man's arm. "I still think that's a coincidence, Bill."

Bill pounded a pasty fist on the table. "I know what I saw, Iris!"

"Whoa, let's calm down," Johnson said in that deep, quiet way of his, like an instant nerve soother. "What makes you think it's related, sir?"

Bill swallowed hard. "Because she wouldn't just leave me like that, not without saying something."

"What was your relationship with Dr. Burton-Hughes?" Parker asked.

"We wereatogether," Bill said. "I went to her office to pick her up for a late dinner a few weeks ago. The door was slightly open, so I peeked inside. There was this shadow on the wall, moving around, but Caroline, um, Dr. Burton-Hughes, was gone. There wasn't anything inside her office that could make a shadow like that."

Goose bumps rose on my arms. "Dr.auh, Bill, what did the shadow look like?"

"This will sound crazya""

"Doubtful," I said, thinking of my nightmares.

"It looked like a smeared man," he said. "Like something that had been a man before but was mutated, turned into aaaamonster. A smudgy, dark blob of a man."

Dr. Barnes picked at his fingernails, like he was dying to get out of here before his colleagues infected him with their insanity. Dr. Longtree was shaking her head. Only Bill looked sincere. And terrified. I thought he had good reason to be.

"Then what?" Parker asked.

"I contacted the police," Bill said. "Caroline's car was still in the parking lot, and she didn't appear on any of the security feeds leaving the building. No one has seen or heard from her since, but nothing was missing from her office. She just vanished."

There was this loaded silence. A buzz filled my ears, like five voices trying to talk at oncea"a blade-spirit conference call. We must've been on to something. My fingers twitched at my knife's handle; I didn't like how this room felt, not one bit.

"This Dr. Burton-Hughesa"was she descended from a native people?" Parker was asking.

Bill shook his head. "No. Caroline was here on a grant. From Australia. The University of Western Australia, in Perth, to be exact."

My stomach dropped right to the floor. "Um, wasn't Perth close to wherea""

Johnson shot me a warning glance, and that was enough to tell me I was right. Perth was the closest major city to the section of the Outback where the Australian monsters struck two years ago. The native people there, the Noongar, had helped us understand the terrain of the desert to the east of Perth. Our plan had been to eliminate the monsters before they made it across the desert, into the populated areas. We were successful, but we never figured out who they were targeting. We always suspected they were after one of the Noongar's leaders, just like the Gators chasing Jorge across Peru. But what if we were wrong?

I sat up straighter. What if they had been after this scientist and the kidnapped Iroquois were just collateral damage or being taken for some other purpose? If that was the case, then maybe the monsters here weren't after a Canadian shaman or tribal leader after all.

Maybe this Dr. Burton-Hughes had brought them with her.

I stood, hoping to cut this meeting short so I could discuss it with Parker and caught Dr. Longtree staring at me with blazing green eyes. A warning buzz ran down my arms and I drew my knife just as she sprung over the table with unnatural speed.

Dr. Longtree leapt across the room and slammed into me. Her fingers wrapped around my neck, squeezing tight enough to bruise. The room erupted into frantic motion, but I came to my own rescue. With a quick slice, I cut a tiny gash in her pinkie. I wasn't sure why I did that instead of taking her out, but sometimes the knife called the shots.

It worked, too. The weird light in her eyes went dark and she collapsed on top of me, completely limp. I rolled her to the floor, scrambling back when black mist oozed out of her nostrils, ears and mouth.

"What is that?" Bill squeaked. He and Dr. Barnes pressed themselves against the bookcases, as if all that old knowledge could protect them somehow.

"No idea." I watched the mist float to the ceiling and coalesce briefly into a ball before the sunlight coming in above the curtains touched it. With a screech, the ball disappeared.

Lieutenant Johnson whistled, and nodded at the professors. "Do you think you can get some kind of field research credit for this? You'll probably get published."

Dr. Barnes and Bill both gaped at him.

Academicsathey had no sense of humor.

Chapter Four.

Dr. Longtree, who was really nice once she wasn't possessed, decided to take the rest of the day off after the mist incident. She couldn't remember coming to the conference room at all and it freaked her out.

"I remember getting up at seven, then I was here, on the floor." She shivered. "My whole morning is a giant blank."

Will, always the optimist, knelt beside her and patted her shoulders, "I think you're probably safe now. Once we're gone, they won't need you anymore."

"I don't know about that," Dr. Longtree murmured, staring at the ceiling where the mist had evaporated. "My work has taken me to some strange places. Maybe I need to rethink my career."

I thought that was a pretty good idea, but decided it would be rude to say so.

Bill offered to drive Dr. Longtree home and the meeting was over. Two days in Ontario, and all we had to show for it was one star tattoo, a rock monster attack, a demon possession, and a story about a missing physicist. Not much to go on.

"It makes no sense," I said to Will on the ride back to the hotel. Parker drove, and Johnson called shotgun, so we were being chauffeured in the backseat like a pair of six-year-olds. My knees were practically up to my chin.

"What doesn't make sense?" Will asked.

I slumped, fighting off a headache. I didn't like failure, and this trip had been a huge waste of time. "Why would the demons or monsters or whatever else is lurking in Canada steal a handful of Iroquois leaders, then take this physicist?"

Will rolled down his window and leaned out far enough to let his hair blow in the wind. "No idea."

"What if she's the one they were after?" I asked. "Seriously, dude, think about it. There were monsters east of Perth a few years ago, and now Canada's being attacked for the first time."

"Or it might be a coincidence. Perth is hundreds of miles away from that part of the Outback, man," he said, yawning. "Plus, the monsters seem to go after people with a connection to a knifea"you and Jorgea"so it would be more logical for the monsters to chase other shamans who could create something powerful to stop them. But a physicist? What can they do except bore people at parties?"

I wracked my brain for a smart answer to Will's question and came up totally blank. There had to be more to this story. Maybe I should tell Mamie about ita"she always figured stuff out. And as luck with have it, she was home from college for the weekend.

I dragged myself through the garage late on Saturday afternoon. Will honked from the road, then took off for home in his BMW. He refused to be seen in my used Honda, so we rode in the Beemer as a regular course of action when we went anywhere together.

Now that my ops weren't secret, at least to my family, Mom had stopped meeting us at the airport unless one of us came back injured. A few bruises and sprains didn't counta"she reserved the chauffer service for broken bones and serious internal injuries. It was weird how quickly my job had switched from "Oh, my God, you're going to get my baby killed!" to "Be careful, sweetheart. See you in a week."

I shouldn't complain, though. Mom hadn't made me quit the team, even after I almost bought it during our last op in Afghanistan. True, Uncle Mike and I didn't tell her everything, especially not about me being poisoned, but she took my injured knee in stride. Well, sort ofawhich was why I remained stuck in school rather than hanging with Uncle Mike and Aunt Julie at the Pentagon.

After dumping my duffel bag on the washing machine, I followed the smell of pot roast into the kitchen. My stomach felt like a pocket that had been turned out for loose change; the first order of business was food. I had the cover off the crock pot, fork poised to grab a big hunk of meat, when I was very rudely interrupted.

"Stop right there, mister."

Mom stood in the doorway, hands on her hips.

I lowered the fork and said, "What, no *welcome home?'"

She chuckled and came to give me a hug. Mom wasn't a short woman, but the top of her head was even with my collarbone and her short, shaggy brown hair tickled my nose. "Welcome home. Dinner's almost ready, but Mamie and I actually want to eat, so I'm not about to turn you loose with an entire pot roast. We'd end up foraging for scraps."

Mom let me go, but before I could make excuses for my attempted food-burglary, my sister flew into the kitchen with a shriek. Mamie hugged me so hard, I nearly fell over, taking her with me.

"I missed you, too, sis," I said, trying to draw a breath. "Try not to suffocate me, okay?"

She let me go, her dark blue eyes shininga"Archer blue, the same color as mine and our brother'saa color we all inherited from our Dad. Wherever he was. I couldn't decide if it was easier or harder knowing that he was a spy for the CIA rather than a deadbeat, which was the story Mom told us for years before finally revealing the truth last fall. Either way, he left right after I was borna"at Mom's requesta"and I didn't know him at all.

"Anything new?" Mamie asked, quivering with excitement and derailing my bitter thought-train.

"Yes, Sherlock, a few things," I said. "But it might be nice for you and Mom to worry over my scrapes and bruises and ask how I am before worming details out of me or nagging me about stealing pot roast."

I was teasing, but my mother and sister took smothering me with concern very seriously. They dragged me into the living room, deposited me on the recliner in front of the fireplace and made a fuss over my injuries. Honestly, it was a game to all of us, considering I'd come home pretty much unscathed this time, but I knew if anything really serious happened to me, Mom would go all mother-dragon on Uncle Mike for enlisting me in the Army (even if it was the knife's fault). And my sister? Mamiea"whose brilliance and tenacity terrified nearly every man in my unita"would make Colonel Black rue the day he first heard the name Matt Archer.

Mamie twisted one of her pigtails around her finger over and over, her way of telling me that I better start talking soon or she'd carve a laser-hole in my forehead with her eyes. Now that she was a college girl, her one concession to becoming an adult was to stop wearing ribbons on the ends of her braids. Since the pigtails seemed like a good way to discourage frat guys from asking her out, I wholeheartedly approved her stubborn refusal to wear her hair down. She was also still wearing the sapphire earrings I gave her for graduationa"another thing she refused to change. I liked that, too.

"So how's school going?" I asked, just to mess with her.

My sister crossed her arms. "You're stalling."

"That's my cue to leave, I guess." Mom laughed and stood. "I'll let Mamie grill you, Matta"she's better at it. I should put dinner on the table before you decide to eat the table."

My stomach growled loudly. "Good idea."

Once Mom was out of earshot, Mamie gestured for me to sit with her on the couch. "Something happened, didn't it?"

"Yeah. It was supposed to be a research trip, but Will and I got ambushed by two fourteen-feet-tall rock monsters."

I proceeded to fill her in on everything: the minion's warning about the blood-red moon, Dr. Longtree's possession, and especially about the missing physicist. "I'm thinking the demons or monsters or whatever came for her, not the Iroquois. Maybe they needed the others for something else, but I think the primary objective was this Dr. Burton-Hughes."

Mamie had that faraway look in her eyes, the one that said, "data compile in progress." I leaned my head back on a couch cushion and watched the flames dance in the fireplace while she worked things out. Considering how accurate her research had been over the last two years, I trusted her more than anyone in the military. More even than Aunt Julie, and she worked in Military Intelligence. Mamie just had this ability to figure things out when no one else could.

"I think you're onto something, Matt," Mamie said, coming out of her data-crunch trance. "Maybe Dr. Burton-Hughes was close to making a very important discoverya"kind of like Jorge. Maybe she found a new connection between science and the occult like Jorge did and she needed to be eliminated."

"So what could it be?" I asked. "She was supposedly studyingauh, I think the guy said theoreticala" What was it that Bill had said again? "Umadark energy! Yeah, that's the thing."

"Dark Energy," Mamie said, emphasizing each word like it was capitalized. "So, I'm taking honors Physics this semestera""

I grunted out a laugh. "Only you would take honors anything in your first semester of school."

"Bite me, Matthew."

I laughed harder. "Listen to you, saying such crude thingsacollege is a bad influence."

Mamie's forehead furrowed, sending her glasses slipping down her nose. "Anyway, I learned a lot about light and dark. Dark isn't just the absence of light."

"Yeah," I said, "it's where the bogeyman lives."

"Maybe, but that's not what I mean." She pushed her glasses up and assumed her "I'm teaching you something" stance. "Dark has substance. It exists in the truest sense of the word. Dark matter and dark energy have power and gravity of their own."

I scrunched up my forehead. "But it'sadarkness. How can it have substance?"

"A black hole is dark, and it has substance. You wouldn't want to get too close to one, right?" she insisted. "Dark matter is very weak. It's almost impossible to catch, but it's there. I won't bore you with the details, but scientists estimate twenty-five percent of space is made up of the stuff."

"And the other seventy-five percent is regular matter?"

Mamie gave me an exasperated look. "When you look at the night sky, what fills up most of the space?"

It wasn't much fun looking stupid, but I'd tolerate it for Mamie. "Darkness."

"Right, only five percent of the observable universe is actually matter as we know it: stars, rocks, dust. With me so far?" I nodded, and she said, "That leaves us with seventy percent unaccounted for. It's not just empty space, so something has to be out there. Which leads us to dark energy. My professor believes dark energy is real, even if it's not understood or really provable yet." She paused, lips pursed, probably looking for words small enough for me to follow. "You know that the universe is expanding, right?"

I nodded. I wasn't that undereducated.

"Good. So if it's expanding, why do the galaxies themselves stay together in clusters?"

Shrugging, I said, "Stars? Gravitational pull?"

"Yes, somewhat, but the reason they're shaped like spirals and discs and stuff is because dark matter is imposing an additional weak gravity on them. Black holes probably are too, but that's a whole other topic, and they were stars once anyway."

My eyes were glazing over. "And the big deal isa?"

She chuckled. "If galaxies are held together by the gravity of the stars and super-massive black holes and dark matter, why is the universe expanding rather than contracting? And not only expanding, but expanding at an ever increasing rate." Mamie paused, as if she really thought I'd try to answer that questions. When I didn't, she said, "The only answer? Some other force is pulling everything apart."

Then it dawned on me, what she was trying to say. "Dark energy is trying to rip apart the universe?"

"Assuming the theories are correct, it's a possibility," she said, her eyes gleaming with the academic fervor that gripped her when she solved a new puzzle. "Dark matter tries to help hold light together, strangely enough. Dark energy pulls it apart. And it's incredibly strong, Matt. Much stronger than the stars and dark matter. In a way, it's at war with everything else in the universe."

A shiver ran down my back at the thought of sentient darkness. Like the Shadow Man: it was living, seething darkness, too. We had always talked about Good and Evil in abstract terms. But what if Mamie said was right and the Master of our enemies was universal, in the truest sense of the word? What chance did we stand in a war if we had to fight the forces of the cosmos itself?

Chapter Five.