And it was completely dark. She hadn't counted on this being a moonless night, but she took another shaky breath and began walking north into the meadow. She kept a slow and steady pace, but, as frightened and breathless as she was, leapt only slightly when she heard a sudden rush in the grass to her left. To her great relief, it was the boneheaded dog, who immediately and silently took up his place at her heel.

There was no question having him with her was cheating, but she had no intention of chasing the animal away. His quiet panting and his occasional clumsy bump against her leg was comforting. But dog or no, every step away from the light and comfort of her home was a step farther into an alien and unearthly terrain. By the time she reached the end of the pasture fence, she felt like she was on the dark side of the Moon.

A hundred or so paces farther on, she stopped and sat in the grass. It was partly to steady her nerves and to catch her breath, but it was more to allow her eyes and other senses to adjust to her surroundings.

The earth where she sat was still warm from the day's sunlight, yet she felt herself trembling. The hound, as if reading her thoughts, bumbled up and casually sprawled across her lap. His warmth and presence were a comfort that could not drive away the terror she felt, not all of it. She was so frightened sitting with him in the grass that she had a tough time even looking up, for fear of what might be peering back at her from the dark. The urge to turn and dash back to the house was almost overwhelming.

After ten minutes or so had passed, she shooed the dog from her lap and got up. The long, lean animal was heavier than he appeared, so it took a minute for her to wake a sleeping leg. There was another minute of steeling herself before she set off north again. When she did, it was with even more deliberation now that she was outside of the scant light cast by her home.

Her depth perception was poor while moving only by starlight, but that bare hint of light enabled her to pick her way through the grass of the meadow and along the creek toward her goal. The faithful hound never left her side, and she found herself reaching down from time to time and tapping the tip of his cool, clammy muzzle, an affair the hound seemed to like as much as it comforted her.

Through all this, she walked as if on eggshells, her heart in her throat and her lips trembling only somewhat more than her arms and legs. Instinct told her to stop from time to time and listen, but the farther she got from the house, and the thicker the brush grew around her, the more frequently she paused. Before long, there was more pausing than walking, and at one point she very nearly thought she couldn't go on.

By that time, Kate and her friend were not even halfway through a hike that ordinarily would have taken twenty minutes, and she spent nearly that much time trying to figure out what to do next. She already had passed beyond the meadow, and the section of the path on which she now walked, though broad by daylight, seemed nothing more than a dense warren of trees and bushes at night. She was too frightened to move forward but too afraid to turn her back on the ominous darkness before her in order to flee home. For a while, the idea of hunkering down where she was and waiting for morning came to mind, but doing that would have defeated the entire purpose of her journey. She couldn't let her fear of what might be out there dominate her.

"Okay, buddy. Let's go," she said to the hound at last. She had so far remained silent on her walk for fear of drawing the attention of ... well, she knew there was nothing out there. And though the sound of a voice, even her own, was oddly comforting, it was still a few minutes before she again began creeping along her path. Her knees were so weak as she continued that there were times that she thought they might fail her entirely.

But talking to the dog helped steady her, and, inch by inch and step by step, she made her way to her goal. It took nearly two hours, but she found herself on a slight rise that she was more than half convinced was her intended destination. The inky dark disguised things, but the sound of the springhead bubbling nearby confirmed she was at least close.

Every stray sound that she'd heard coming up the rise had caused her to jump or wince, and though looking too hard into the dark still intimidated her, a sense of accomplishment welled up from somewhere deep inside. Feeling around gingerly, she discovered a soft spot in the grass and sat down. It was still hours until midnight.

"Come here, muttonhead," she said aloud. There was a hollow moment of fear when she realized the beast wasn't at her side, and then a splashing of water sounded in the distance, and she could hear what she hoped and prayed was the brute pounding through the grass in her direction. A sloppy wet kiss to the neck was her answer when he arrived. She pulled a bottle of water from her coat. "I guess I need a drink, too."

The soggy beast twisted and wiggled and was soon draped again across her lap like a flea-bitten comforter. She lay the shotgun down and leaned back on the hillside. Leona, an amateur astronomer, had claimed the lack of light pollution made this area one of the best along the California coast to star gaze. Kate believed her. The sky above was an ocean of stars, one so clear and thick it seemed the scene must have been stolen from a picture book.

For an instant, the dread that had been stalking her from the moment she'd left her door—no, from the moment she'd even imagined taking this nighttime excursion—abandoned her, and she had a pale glimpse of clarity. It was just enough to show her what her life had become in recent months, both good and bad, and to sketch for her how ridiculous the petty fears and anxieties she sometimes felt were. Fear of the Flying Guy might be reasonable—she'd seen him, for chrissake—but she was a grown woman. She couldn't go wetting herself at every childhood boogieman. That would be a life not worth living.

She sat up after a brief time and enjoyed the comfort of having the hound in her lap. She'd never owned a dog. There'd been a few cats and dogs around her house growing up, but they'd always been more her mom or dad's pets. Of course, Otto hadn't wanted any sort of animal in the house.

"And I end up with this mangy rug," she said as she brutally squeezed the skin behind the smelly rascal's neck. The hound's only reply was to let out a long and contented groan. "You're getting a bath tomorrow."

A sudden flash of light and distant crackle assaulted her senses, and she nearly upended the dog when she leapt. It took her a moment to realize the uproar had come from the northwest. Vandenberg Air Force Base was testing some missile system or the other. Leona had warned her about such things, but it surprised her that they were testing anything at that hour, and it was the first time she'd seen such a thing, day or night.

The event was astonishing, and the sight of the departing missile was oddly beautiful. Still, though she knew what it was, it took a few minutes for her breathing to return to what it had been. It was an unexpected and thorough surprise, one of many she'd had in the last year.

In the last month, however, her life had returned to something approximating normal. To her delight, she'd spent much time with Eli in LA, the voice work was fun and exciting, and, on the weekends, she'd wet her feet on the convention circuit, where she'd begun to make professional connections. The affection of fans and other attendees had left her moved.

Everything had come together for filming their movie short, which she'd flogged shamelessly at the various Cons. Equipment and locations were scheduled, casting was complete, and the only hiccup was that their director had defected to another project. To everyone's glee, a friend of Kate's from her pre-Otto days, now a moderately successful television actress, had been captivated by the project when Kate had described it to her one day over lunch and had asked to direct. It was the woman's first venture at the helm of even a small movie, but the kids were excited having another professional onboard their otherwise novice production.

Kate had even begun perusing scripts she'd collected from various people along the way, hoping one or more might be the bedrock of a future project. The material she'd read so far had left her optimistic. Much of it was good, and some of it was splendid.

Through his lawyers, Eli had recovered a few more pieces of Otto's jewelry and some other items missing from her former home, and to her great relief, Clancy Cyril had accepted a plea agreement in exchange for lenient sentencing recommendations, as had Tate Villiers, the man who had invaded her property. That meant an end to two ugly episodes in her life, episodes in which she would not now be required to testify in court. For that, she was thankful.

Life otherwise had been mundane but indelibly happy.

Her memories of the Flying Guy seemed silly to her now ... well, not silly. She still believed, but also had spent a significant amount of time laughing at her reaction to the episode. During that time, she'd also passed a number of hours pondering whether what she'd seen that day just might've been the product of her own fertile imagination. It was an idea that never would've entered her head in the immediate aftermath of the event, but as time passed the notion had become more and more plausible.

As she leaned back in the grass a second time, gazing at the vast canopy of the heavens and scruffing the goofy dog, frightened but alive, her thoughts of the past months ran through her head, and she replayed her arguments and counter arguments and counter-counter argument about what she'd seen on that day and what she'd thought of it after.

She'd been under tremendous pressure when she'd seen the flying intruder, what with Otto's death, the tragicomic battle with her stepchildren over his paltry estate, and her own personal crises. Perhaps ... just maybe? What if she had just imagined the whole thing? Might her fantastical vision have been a single, errant loss of lucidity?

Such things weren't unheard of, but she'd researched the topic sufficiently to understand visual hallucinations generally aren't isolated events but come as a part of some other, wider syndrome, be it schizophrenia or dementia or ... well, a dozen others.

Kate had suffered no other symptoms and had even found the courage to broach the topic with Linda Tootsie, her GP, during a recent checkup. She'd only had the nerve to admit to seeing someone who wasn't there—the 'flying' part simply had been too embarrassing—but after subjecting Kate to a long battery of questions and a series of tests, Linda had pronounced her to be in near perfect health. Absent the manifestation of other symptoms or a recurrence of the hallucination, her doctor of nearly twenty years had told her not to fret about it and hadn't even offered a psych referral.

So, no. Despite what she now knew to be the limits of human observation and the pliancy and fuzziness of memory, she remained convinced of what she'd seen. The memory of the day was too keen and too clearly etched in her mind, and the notes she'd taken at Eli's bidding were equally clear and paralleled her memory in every way.

The idea those notes might somehow have altered her memory rather than reinforced it had skipped across her mind a time or two, but ultimately she'd dismissed that notion as well. Her imagination wasn't that vivid, and she was perfectly willing to accept that her memory might be shaded or in error on some tiny aspects, but there was no way she'd imagined the whole thing. A man had flown over her home, and there were no two ways about it.

What was she to do about that fact? Her eventual answer was a simple, 'nothing.' What could she do? Through home reading, library study, and online research, she'd examined the topic whenever there was a free moment and had found nothing definitive. Her sighting of a man flying over her home was a one-off, an event without precedent or explanation. She'd decided she would treat it as such.

But everything she'd conjured since then was simple and downright nonsense. That realization alone had taken weeks of thought and reflection to ferret out. Eli had blinded a studio executive? Inveigled a horse into kicking her neighbor to death? Jesus, what had she been thinking? True, they hadn't been fully formed thoughts, just mere flashes—that was the only word she could think to describe them. But, really?

There was no question. Four men with some connection to her had encountered something tragic in recent months. To a greater or lesser extent, all of them had been hostile or unpleasant with her prior to their respective tragedies.

So what? A lot of people had screwed with her in the last year. How many had received some grisly reward? That small few, and one of those, her erstwhile coworker, had done little more than cast a randy eye in her direction.

In fact, the longer she thought of those four men, the less their fates seemed a pattern and the more they seemed—she was loath to share the observation with Eli—a series of outrageous coincidences. More than a month had passed, and trespassing burglar Tate Villiers had not met any supernatural retribution. And Colin Bouchard, who'd delivered what she now thought of as the greatest insult of her life, still walked the Earth, testicles presumably intact. If two men needed the devil at their heels, it was those two.

Had something befallen them in the past month, might she have imagined that Eli or some other demonic agent had punished them? Maybe. But nothing had.

Her conviction remained: there was a larger world out there than the one in which she'd once dwelt, and not everything in that new world could be rationalized away. The Flying Guy was proof of that. But her friend was right. She needed to see proof, clear and cogent evidence of her own senses or the evidence of a trustworthy and verifiable source, before she accepted any paranormal explanations. Certainly, that standard demanded something more than 'flashes.'