"Alec might have had a good reason." Erica set her drink down on the nightstand and faced Claire crossed-legged on the bed. "Maybe the guy was an evil vampire. Or a dangerous double agent. Or both."

"So what are you saying? That Alec is a Slayer-or a telekinetic spy?"

"It's possible. Or he could be genetically engineered. Never discount the sci-fi angle."

"This is all insane." Leaning up on one elbow, she drew invisible circles on Erica's quilt with her fingertip. "It's too much, Erica. Everything that's been happening since Book Day-all these weird psychic episodes and danger warnings, and at the same time, I meet a guy with superpowers of his own-what am I supposed to make of all this? Is Alec the reason I'm in danger, or not?"

Erica shook her head, frowning. "I don't know-but you need an answer, and fast."

"No problem. I'll just call Merlin. Or Dumbledore. Get my phone. I have them both on speed-dial."

"Claire Bear." Erica met her gaze affectionately. "You already have a wise wizard to consult with: the person who's sending you that warning."

"a.s.suming it really is a person, and not just a voice in my head. But even if that's true, how am I supposed to consult with someone who sends random, incomplete messages?"

"Brian said it's probably the same message being broadcast over and over. We just have to figure out how to help you hear the whole thing."

"Great," Claire replied sarcastically. "Let's call 1-800-PSYCHIC, and ask them to patch me through to the sender."

"There are ways for you to get in touch with whoever's talking to you." Erica reached under her bed and withdrew a thick, oversize paperback book called So, You're a Psychic? "I bought this last week, and I've been reading a little every night, to see if I could learn something useful."

Claire glanced at it dubiously. "And...?"

"I know it sounds crazy, but there's all kinds of fascinating stuff in here. According to this, you need to try some combination of astral projection and channeling."

"I've read about that stuff online," Claire replied, still doubtful. "It said astral projection is about going somewhere with your mind, and channeling is about contacting spirits. How does either one help me?"

"Think big picture, Claire. Astral projection isn't just about finding some place; it can be used to find someone. Channeling is about listening to someone who's talking to you. Somebody is out there traveling the psychic moors, calling out your name. Your job is to either meet them on the moors, or to bring the moors to you."

Claire stared at her. "You've been reading Wuthering Heights again, haven't you?"

"Just go with the metaphor."

Claire sighed. "What do I have to do?"

Erica adopted her most sagelike tone, clasping her hands dramatically. "We have to put you in a trance."

Claire sat in the lotus position on the plush carpet, propped up against Erica's dresser with a large throw pillow as a backrest. It was after dinner now, and the sun was going down. The curtains were drawn, leaving the bedroom in near darkness. Erica sat across from her, methodically lighting a semicircle of candles around them.

"Love-you-too-Mom. Bye." Claire hung up the phone. "Miracle number one: Mom is fine with me staying over. Miracle number two: She's meeting that guy for a coffee date."

"Wow," Erica said. "She's really coming out of her sh.e.l.l fast. I mean that in a good way."

"Yeah. Now that she thinks I'm fine, she's easing up on me and starting to think about herself for a change."

"Which is rather ironic, since, for the first time ever, you're not really fine at all."

"Hey. I thought you were supposed to be helping me relax."

"Sorry! Forget I said that." Erica lit the last candle and then touched the match to some incense she'd placed between them. A strong herbal fragrance began to permeate the room. "Now, my child," Erica intoned as she picked up the psychic book and opened it to a particular page, "are you ready to begin?"

"As ready as I'll ever be." Claire leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes.

"Take several slow, deep breaths," Erica said calmly and quietly. "Choose an image that you a.s.sociate with the voice you've been hearing, and focus on it alone."

Claire nodded silently. She called to mind the silhouette she'd seen each time the voice had called to her: the amorphous, faceless figure, rimmed by glowing yellow light, against a backdrop of inky darkness. "Okay, I see it."

"Good. Now be silent. Concentrate on your breathing. Every time you exhale, try to release all your other everyday thoughts and emotions, including any anxieties or skepticism. Hold on to that image, and just ... be."

As Erica continued, Claire followed her instructions.

Claire kept the silhouetted image before her closed eyes, but despite her best efforts, she couldn't feel anything. The sounds around her were too distracting. She heard the tick of a clock. The swoosh of a car pa.s.sing on the road outside. The m.u.f.fled explosions of a video game from Erica's brother's room next door. She concentrated harder. See it, she commanded herself. Feel it. Suddenly-to her surprise-the silhouetted image seemed to grow a bit sharper, its edges more defined. Claire could now make out that the figure had a feminine frame. Her pulse quickened in excitement.

A phone rang loudly. Claire's eyes snapped open, the spell broken.

"c.r.a.p!" Erica s.n.a.t.c.hed up her phone, glanced at the caller ID, and barked into it, "Brian! Not now! We're doing psychic stuff!" She quickly ended the call and turned to Claire. "Sorry, I should have shut it off before we started. Did it work? Did anything happen?"

Claire nodded eagerly. "I was just starting to see something when the phone rang. I think it was a woman."

"c.r.a.p!" Erica said again.

"It was really hard to focus. Maybe we should try this later, when it's quieter-after everyone goes to sleep."

Erica looked disappointed. "Okay." They blew out all the candles and the incense, leaving the room shrouded in murky darkness. "Let me dump the ash, and then we can go downstairs and have dessert. My mom got Mochi ice cream, two flavors."

"Yum."

Claire stood up, stretching, watching as Erica carefully carried the tray with the incense across the room. Erica paused in her bathroom doorway to flick on the light switch, and for a brief moment was backlit by the bathroom light-a moment which, Claire realized with a start, bore an eerie similarity to the blurry image Claire had just been trying to bring to focus in her mind. Erica disappeared inside.

Then something strange happened. All the distracting sounds around Claire went silent. She couldn't even hear her own breathing. Whoa, she thought, glancing around her. What's going on?

The room-the floor, the ceiling, everything-had disappeared. Claire was surrounded by black nothingness. Although she still felt her own body, she seemed to be floating in the void, as if in zero gravity. The only visual cues left, inexplicably, were the bathroom doorway hovering before her and the glow that emanated from within.

"Erica!" Claire whispered insistently. "Something's happening!"

"What?" Erica sounded like she was a million miles away.

The light inside the bathroom doorway began to shift and change. A faceless, silhouetted, female figure appeared-the same figure Claire had seen a few minutes earlier. The light was coming from her, a glow of shimmering golden flames that radiated around her body.

"I see it!" Claire said quietly. "It's definitely a woman, and she's glowing!"

"Oh my G.o.d!" came Erica's distant voice, filled with wonder.

Then Claire heard the same raspy British voice that had invaded her head twice before: "Claire. Your life is in danger."

The figure moved forward. Claire saw her more clearly now: She was a stunningly attractive woman in her early sixties, with gentle crinkles beside her kind, hazel eyes, and a small beauty mark on her right cheek just above her mouth. Her chin-length, stylishly coiffed hair was pale blond, almost white. She wore a chic, formfitting navy-blue dress and a delicate necklace sparkling with tiny, floating diamonds.

"Oh! She's beautiful!" Claire whispered in mingled awe and trepidation. "She's smiling at me." The woman seemed so real, Claire felt as if she could reach out and touch her. With a shiver, she reminded herself that the woman wasn't really there.

Claire felt a sound coming up through her chest and out of her mouth-but it wasn't her own voice. It was still raspy, but it was a perfect, cultured, British accent, as if the woman were now speaking directly through her: "Someone wants to kill you because of your special gift. You are one of the Nephilim."

I'm one of what? Claire thought, confused and alarmed.

"Only one person can protect and help you. Alec."

Oh my G.o.d, Claire thought. Alec? Alec's my protector?

"Alec is a Grigori, as am I. Come to Twin Palms. I will explain everything. My name is Helena."

The woman brought a finger up to her lips in a silencing gesture as she repeated the familiar, final phrase of the eerie message: "Don't tell anyone."

The light became so blinding that Claire had to close her eyes. When she reopened them, the woman was gone and she was back in Erica's room. Erica was standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at her in openmouthed amazement.

Claire had the oddest sensation, as if she were still floating. Glancing down, she gasped in astonishment. She hadn't just been floating in her mind. She was actually suspended in the air, about a foot above the floor. "Holy c.r.a.p!" Claire cried. With that exclamation she dropped straight down, landing on the carpet with a thud.

"Wow!" Erica cried. "Claire, are you all right?"

Claire nodded, touching her throat, which felt hoa.r.s.e and dry. "I need a gla.s.s of water."

Erica brought her a gla.s.s from the bathroom, rushing up to kneel beside her. As Claire drank it Erica enthused, "That was so cool! You rose up like some kind of divine being and were hovering the whole time!"

Claire was still in a daze. "Who is she?"

"I don't know, but I think she was talking through you! You sounded just like Helen Mirren."

"Did she actually say that someone wants to kill me?" Claire asked, her insides constricting in fear.

"She said they want to kill you because of your gift," Erica said solemnly. "Which I guess is this whole psychic thing."

"Who wants to kill me? How do they know what's been going on with me? And why do they care?"

"I have no idea. But at least we now know what's going on with Alec. He's not here to hurt you."

Claire nodded. "This is all so..." Weird. Scary. Mind-boggling. She shivered, unable to finish the sentence.

"I know, right? You were totally channeling that lady's spirit, Claire. It was like you were talking to someone beyond the grave!"

"That doesn't make sense. If she were dead, why would she say 'Come to Twin Palms, I'll explain everything.'"

"Oh. Okay," Erica agreed. "But if she's alive, why doesn't she come to you? Why is she doing all this psychically?"

"Maybe she lives really far away and can't travel right now," Claire mused as she set the empty water gla.s.s aside. "I still don't get who she is or why she's trying to help me. But whatever the reason, I say we try to find her."

Two hours later, Claire and Erica were still huddled over Erica's laptop, researching Twin Palms on the internet. There were over five hundred thousand hits on Google for Twin Palms-a whole cornucopia of places all over the world: the mall they'd visited, a former restaurant in Pasadena, a nail salon in Texas, a publishing house in New York, three hospitals, a stretch of condominiums in Florida, and mult.i.tudes of hotels and apartments from northern California and Arizona to the Caribbean and Thailand. It was even the name of Frank Sinatra's original estate in Palm Springs.

"There is no way we are ever going to find this woman," Erica complained. "Without her last name or some more identifying information, it's impossible to narrow this down."

"She said, 'Come to Twin Palms.' As if it were the name of a city. But it isn't." Claire sighed in frustration and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. "If someone is really trying to kill me, you'd think she would have given me a better way to find her! Like an address maybe?"

"If you're in danger, we can't keep searching for this mystery woman forever." Erica opened up a new tab in her web browser. "Let's attack this from a different angle. When she talked about your gift, she used a word I've never heard before, like you were special in some way. What did she call you? A Nefah-what?"

"I don't know exactly. But I remember what she said Alec was-a Grih-gore-ee."

"I've never heard that before, either." They searched a few alternate spellings of the term, beginning with Gregory and ultimately landing on Grigori.

Two million hits came up when they Googled Grigori. The very first t.i.tle listing contained two words that nearly made Claire's heart stop: Watcher.

Angel.

eighteen.

"Alec's an angel?" Brian stared in disbelief as he plopped into the corner chair in Erica's bedroom twenty minutes later.

"Apparently." Stunned, Claire paced back and forth at the foot of Erica's bed. They'd just filled him in on what had happened at Alec's apartment that morning and had given him the gist of Claire's vision.

"If that's true, why doesn't Alec have wings and a halo?" Brian asked.

Erica gestured at the computer on her lap. "Well, according to what we read on the web, the angels in the Bible never had wings or halos. Those are just visual symbols used in ill.u.s.trations to help the illiterate ma.s.ses identify the beings as superior to man."

"Oh." Brian shook his head in rising awe. "Wow, this is epic!"

"We're not sure how big it is," Erica retorted matter-offactly. "We don't even understand most of it yet."

"All we have to go by," Claire added, "is what the woman said in my vision. But just because she's supposedly an angel, too, that doesn't mean (a) she's a credible source, or (b) I wasn't hallucinating the whole thing."

"I seriously doubt you'd hallucinate words you've never heard of before," Brian pointed out. "She never actually said angel, right?"

"No," Claire admitted. "She said Grigori."

"Is that singular or plural?" Brian asked.

"Apparently it's both. Like fish or moose," Erica explained, glancing at her computer screen. "At least, according to Wikipedia."

"Another credible source," Claire added with a roll of her eyes.

"The Bible says that the Watchers, or Grigori, are a group of angels sent to watch over humanity," Erica continued, undaunted. "But before the great flood, they began to l.u.s.t for human women. It's all in Genesis, Chapter Six. Look."

Erica turned her laptop around, and Claire read aloud from the screen: Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of G.o.d saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves. ... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of G.o.d came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

"So Nephilim are hybrid angels and humans," Brian mused when Claire had finished reading.

"And supposedly, I'm descended from one of those 'hybrids,'" Claire said doubtfully.