Or perhaps the threat was already looking back at him.

“Yeah,” he said, turning quickly to the door. “Everything’s fine.”

As Emrys and Hazel made their way from school, he breathlessly recounted the strange experience in the bathroom, careful to keep his voice down whenever they passed teachers or clumps of other students heading home.

Hazel listened somberly, frowning at every gruesome detail.

“I’d say you were hallucinating,” she remarked as he finished, “if not for what we experienced last night.”

“Something happened to Brian,” Emrys insisted. “Something horrible. I just know it.”

He lifted his phone and was greeted by nearly a dozen text messages from Serena. The last one read: HELLO?? ARE YOU TWO STILL ALIVE? Emrys don’t ignore this! I know you’re off in HOO-HA HORROR LAND!!! Tell Hazel I NEED TO TALK.

He swiped the notification away with a spike of guilt. He’d get back to her soon, but right now, he needed answers. Serena was a popular kid at a fancy private school. She probably had a small army of friends and guidance counselors ready to talk her through any anxious spells. She could deal for a little while longer.

And Emrys had a mystery to solve.

He opened the New Rotterdam Wiki search page.

“Does red sand sound familiar?” he asked Hazel. “I swear I remember it from somewhere.”

Hazel thought about it for a moment, then her eyes brightened.

“Search for ‘Wandering Hour,’ ” she suggested.

Emrys keyed in the name and the article came right up. He held his phone up for Hazel and they scanned the page together. Both gasped at the same time.

“This has got to be it!” Emrys said.

“Oh wow …” Hazel rasped.

“What?” Van Stavern’s voice blurted from the tote. “What did you find?”

“Shhh!” Emrys hissed, pulling it close. “We’re still in public. We’ll tell you soon.”

He glanced at Hazel. “We need to regroup. Do some research and plan our next move.”

She nodded, pulling out her own phone. “I’ll text Serena.”

Emrys awkwardly cleared his throat. “Are you sure?” he asked. “Last night she seemed pretty upset. And her texts today … There were a lot of all-caps messages.”

Hazel shrugged, her eyes on her screen. “She’ll come around. Trust me, I’ve known her since we were toddlers. And it’s not like we can just drop her as a friend because she doesn’t want to join the Order. She can help with research.”

Emrys nodded reluctantly, though Hazel didn’t see it.

Not for the first time, he felt an uncomfortable itch of jealousy creeping in. When he’d first moved to New Rotterdam, it hadn’t really occurred to Emrys that Hazel would already have friends here, even best friends. It should have. And while he’d tried with Serena, he really had, last night only widened the gap that already existed between them. Instead of three friends on a mission, they were now two inverse sets—natural and supernatural—with Hazel linking them at the center. How long could such a strange Venn diagram really survive?

Emrys shook his head. He was being ridiculous. This was bigger than their middle-school drama. Much bigger.

He glanced toward the school entrance …

And gasped.

The two police officers from the morning were still there, but now they were looking right at Emrys and Hazel. There was the tall, reedy one—Emrys noticed his thin teeth were set far apart, almost like a child’s drawing of a mouth. The other, a man with brown skin and wide-set eyes, was as dense and silent as ooze. Neither moved—they simply watched.

A fly trap and a pitcher plant, Emrys thought. The two just seemed … carnivorous.

“Hazel,” Emrys whispered urgently. “Hazel … look.”

Hazel glanced up toward the police, then took a step back. “Why are they looking at us like that?” she whispered.

The invisible world doesn’t like being seen.

Like it or not, that world will only become more insistent with time.

Van Stavern’s warnings echoed in Emrys’s mind. The buzzing behind his right eye had returned, this time he was sure.

“Do you feel that?” he asked.

“… Yes,” Hazel said, absently touching a finger to her temple.

Was this the “double-edged sword” Van Stavern had mentioned? Could even the New Rotterdam police, the adults sworn to protect everyone, be part of the danger? Perhaps the Order’s mysterious second sight was already revealing things Emrys would rather not have known.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he said.

Hazel nodded. The two of them walked past the school entrance, trying to appear casual as they left the grounds.

But Emrys felt the officers’ eyes on him the whole way out.

The Wandering Hour

From the New Rotterdam Wiki Project

The Wandering Hour is the name given to a phenomenon that is little understood and all but impossible to document. Its survivors are few in number, whereas its victims are uncountable and unverifiable.

At the heart of the mystery is a strange object: an hourglass containing red sand. Witnesses have described the sand’s hue as being anywhere from a bright scarlet to a dark, purplish maroon. But all accounts agree that setting eyes on the hourglass is tantamount to a death sentence.

Its first documented appearance comes from a 1965 estate sale, where it was listed among the personal effects of sixty-two-year-old Edna Milton. Edna had opened her home to more than a dozen foster children between 1962 and 1964, and at least five of those children went missing under her care. Edna herself disappeared and was presumed dead in 1964. The strange red-sand hourglass found among her belongings vanished shortly before it could be put up for sale.

Although the missing children were assumed to have run away, it is possible that they may have been the earliest victims of the Wandering Hour, along with Edna Milton herself.

The hourglass resurfaced under tragic circumstances in 1968. Teenage sweethearts Biff Bentley and Betty Grimm were eating ice cream in Arcadia Park when Betty noticed the hourglass nearby. She called it to Biff’s attention, and as he took a closer look, something uncanny happened. The red sand, which had been gathered entirely in the top bulb of the hourglass, suddenly appeared in the bottom bulb instead. It was as if the hourglass had run its course in the time it took Biff to blink. Even more alarming, Betty was gone, with only a melted ice cream to indicate she’d ever been there. Betty was never seen again, and although there was no evidence to indict him, Biff lived under the suspicion that he had murdered the love of his life until he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-three.