Lilly woke up the next morning to a pink-orange sky radiant with rising sun. Summer morning chill whispered through the living room from an open window. The dew, sea, and boat motor oil turned the air in the living room thick with fragrance. 

Lilly sat up and pressed her back to the couch, her legs tangled in the sheets. Next to her, Melissa lay tucked beneath an old quilt, her dark cloud of twisted locks spilled across the pillow. Last night, Melissa suggested they sleep in the living room together, so they had rolled out blankets, pillows, and quilts to create a pallet on the floor. It was a fantastic idea...Lilly would not have been able to go to sleep if Melissa wasn't beside her, whispering stories about silly dragons and opera-singing walls until they both fell into an uneasy slumber.

Lilly sighed, working her hands through her curls. She blinked the sleep from her eyes and plucked at the fine stringy bandage around her hand. Maybe everything she learned last night was all a dream... whatever had come out of her hands at Khofie's, the giant killer slug with bat wings, Melissa crying in the kitchen.

"You might wanna brush your hair, Kettle Fire."

Lilly jerked her head around toward the open window across the room. There was a tired face poking through it, and it took Lilly a moment to recognize the features, but once she did, she sucked in an annoyed breath.

She was not in the mood this morning.

If anyone were to lurk around a house at five-thirty in the morning and wait for the occupants of that house to wake up so that he could speak with them at the crack of dawn, it was Jake Ecscent.

Lilly did not know him personally...he was Ghost-Guy, Shadow-Shy, the Melter. People called Jake names like one jabs shovels into the ground, vicious and determined. He had such a bad reputation because of his bizarre practices: Lilly would be walking by his house on the way to the co-op market and see him hanging upside-down off the edge of his roof. Every day for lunch, he drank a strange neon blue drink with candied bugs at the bottom. He skulked beneath the bleachers at Eldnac lacrosse games. He often wore his shirts inside out. 

Lilly got up and went to the window, careful not to wake Melissa.

"What do you want?" she whispered in the most irritated tone she could manage.

"You nearly burned my eyes off last night," Jake whispered back.

"How do you know where I live?"

"I did my science project on you last year. I followed you home."

He what?

Lilly reached up to pull the window down. Jake withdrew his head and added hastily, "I'm not a stalker, I promise."

"I'm about to wake my cousin up," Lilly hissed. "She keeps knives strapped to her arms."

"Please just come outside. I have to tell you something important. Mornings are the best times to share important information."

He was crazy.

"Jake, I barely know you." What important information could he possibly have for her since the only time she'd spoken with him was during an English project they were paired up for last semester?

"Trust me," Jake replied.

Lilly paused. She wasn't sure Jake knew the definition of normal, but she wanted to explode on him without waking Melissa up, so she shut the window, filled a mug with ice and water, and met Jake on her back porch. She was in shorts and a t-shirt, and the morning cold cut her to the bone. The wood beneath her bare feet felt like ice.

Jake shrugged his jacket off and offered it to her.

"Don't offer me your jacket," Lilly spat. She thrust the mug forward, tipping it so that its contents hit Jake square in the face.

"Lilly!" 

"The next time I find out you've been creeping around my house, I'll fill this mug with cat urine."

"H-how are you g-going to get a c-cat to pee in a mug for you?" Jake asked, dancing to get the ice out of his shirt.

"I set a thousand butterflies loose in school. I can make a cat pee in a mug if I want. I don't care what you want or what you're doing here, but there are these things called cell phones and Melissa and I share one, so you could have at least called like a normal person instead of lurking around here like a stalker." Lilly paused to take a breath, and Jake opened his mouth. Lilly threw up a hand. "I'm not done yet. You're a stalker. I don't know what you concluded on your science project, but I hope it was that I can come very close to making eyeball soup to the next person who acts even remotely out of the ordinary. I am so frustrated with people being weird!"

Jake tugged his jacket back on, crossed his arms, and bit his lip, shivering. Then he giggled. He smiled, and a small bubble of laughter burst from his lips. That bubble became a river, and after a moment, he bent over laughing, gripping the porch railing for support.

Lilly made a mental note to look for a cat later on.

"You've made a lot of threats and it's only five-thirty in the morning," Jake gasped between his fits of laughter. Lilly crossed her arms, the mug dangling from her hooked index finger, and when he finally shut up, he shook his head. "And you call me the crazy one."

"Everyone calls you the crazy one. Why are you here?"

"It's a proven fact that people are more likely to agree to do something after they first wake up. Did you know that?"

"No." Actually, it was quite the opposite. Lilly knew from science class that people were less likely to agree to something after they first got up. She bit her tongue to keep from calling him a name Melissa would have grounded her for saying.

"Well, I want you to do something for me. Last night, Hailey left Khofie's in such a state of panic, she forgot to get your journal. That thing took a bad burn, but I managed to salvage most of it. A lot of the entries are still there. As a matter of fact, most of the entries that made it out alive are in English."

Lilly's stomach dropped.

Maybe...maybe she should not have been so quick to pour ice-cold water on him in forty-five-degree weather. Lilly had combed through that journal a hundred times—never once did she find an entry written in English! Then she remembered what Melissa said about elements turning all the entries in English, and realized that her magic must have effected the journal. 

"So," she said slowly, "obviously you need a favor. But I'm not going to be your science experiment."

"Not that." Jake winced. "Sorry, by the way. I promise I only followed you home four times. And I never looked inside your windows or anything perverted like that."

Lilly rolled her eyes. "What's the favor?"

"I don't know yet. But when I need something done, I'll come to you. I didn't bring the journal with me because you might...go crazy on me like you did in Khofie's last night. I'll drop the journal off later today. 

"And how do you know I won't back out of the favor after you give me the journal?"

Jake wrinkled his long, ugly nose. "You're crazy, not crooked."

Lilly tilted her head to the side in agreement. "Fine, I'll do whatever you want. Now would you please just get away from my house?"

Jake flashed a brilliantly crooked smile, stepped off the porch, and trudged around the back of her house. 

"My driveway is in the opposite direction," Lilly called.

"My dad left to go somewhere this morning. He thinks I'm still in bed. Can't risk running into him, so I'm taking the shortcut back to my house through your woods."

"You're so weird!"

"Don't be a hypocrite!"

Lilly heard the wild grin in Jake's voice and felt a slow smile of her own spread across her face. Who was she to judge? She was weird, too; setting a thousand butterflies free in Eldnac and stealing from space did not constitute as normal. She watched as Jake ducked into the woods behind her house.

"You're right," she muttered to herself, shivering in the cold. "We're both weird."

She went back inside and locked the door behind her before creeping quietly up the stairs to her bedroom. She grabbed her mp3 player, switched through the songs, and flopped down on her bed, where rectangles of gold flickered across the plaster surface. Her mind was syrup-thick with questions, information, and thoughts, all of which circled back to the wish that she could stop the flow of time. Did she even want her dad's journal back now that she knew about his drug addiction? Was she actually going to a whole other world today? Could she really train for war? Could she really steal things from space?

The doubts came in tidal waves...who was she, this gray-eyed, blond-haired monstrosity of a girl who hated exercise and had never known her parents were actually from another world? She wasn't muscular at all; she was one of the most unathletic people in P.E class and had never played a sport in her life unless running from the old ladies in big hats who swatted at her with brooms in Sunday school when she was seven counted.

A soldier? Her?

No way. Not possible. It could never, ever happen. 

Thunder roared outside.

The sound tore through the music thumping in her earbuds. Lilly tugged her earbuds out. It did not look as though a storm was coming...as a matter of fact, the morning was shaping up to be sunny.

The world shook with that same detonating-thunder sound again, like the sky's belly was rumbling with hunger. Lilly jumped from her bed and went to the window above her desk, a shudder jolting through her body.

Another rumble sounded and a flock of birds exploded from the trees.

Okay, she definitely did not imagine that.

Was Maine about to suffer from a giant earthquake? Was Belle Village going to be capsized by giant openings in the ground?

Lilly rubbed her eyes and looked out the window again, her nose fogging up the glass. There was a flash of yellow through the trees...not the beams of sun painting tree limbs gold, but a sort of mustard-colored haze that turned the sharp shapes of oaks and firs blurry. The mist turned black, a black so dark it was deeper than any ink or onyx jewel. Then it turned yellow...and back to black...the mist went on changing colors like this in two-second intervals.

Color-changing mist?

"Lilly!" Melissa called from downstairs. Lilly jumped again. "Could you please come—"

The rest of her voice was drowned out by the thunderous sound coming from the sky. Lilly's desk rattled. Pens and markers clattered to the floor. The yellow-and-then-black-and-then-yellow-again mist rushed forward to fill the empty space of her backyard.

She tried not to panic.

Her thoughts turned to butterflies, restlessly flying through the space of her head, each thought colored with theories. She replaced her shorts with jeans and pulled on a pair of old sneakers before bounding down the staircase. 

"Tell me you see the scary fog out—" Lilly stopped short on the last step. Melissa's back was to her, folding up the last of the quilts from their makeshift pallets. A man stood on the opposite side of the living room, his hands tucked into his pockets. He lifted his head when he saw Lilly and smiled a slightly familiar crooked little smile. Glasses slipped down the bridge of his dagger-cut nose.

Men were rarities in this household. Lilly couldn't remember Melissa ever going on a date, but it wasn't the fact that there was a man in a house where men were strictly nonexistent that made Lilly press the back of her hand to her mouth in shock. It was the fact that this particular man was her math teacher.

Jake Ecscent's father.

Lilly stared at him. Mr. Ecscent. Here. Standing in her living room. He stared back. Was that...concern on his face? In the sadness of that smile, deepened in the lines of his forehead, glittering in his eyes, fluttering in the way he brought his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms?

In the stunned silence that followed, Lilly blurted, "I...your son...I just dumped ice water on your son."

Melissa whirled around, a quilt half-folded in her arms, eyes narrowed. Mr. Ecscent tilted his head to the side.

"Did you have a good reason?" he asked.

"I—yes. What are you doing here?"

Before he could open his mouth, Melissa said, "The next time you dump something on someone's head, I'm going to ground you for a month."

"Understood. I ask again: What is my math teacher doing here?"

"Lilly." Mr. Ecscent held out his hand in a placating gesture. "I'm sorry you're finding this out now. Your cousin and I are...ah, coworkers. She called me last night explaining the issue about Lyd—"

"I did not ask him to come here this morning," Melissa interrupted. "I only asked him to watch out for the woman who came to you last night because she's dangerous."

Mr. Ecscent laughed joylessly before adding, "Yes. What she said. Anyway, I decided to come and help. There's a gate to Elliott Way through Eldnac Prep, and I think that's where the yellow and black mist is going, too."

"Coworkers for what?" Outside, the sky roared again. Lilly wrapped her arms around her torso and shivered. 

Melissa and Mr. Ecscent looked at each other.

In town, Lilly guessed people were already shuffling to their feet, yanking open curtains while trying to stifle yawns. Half of them would be wide awake when they saw the yellow-black fog creeping through the town. The other half would suppose they were dreaming and go back to bed. Both reactions would be extreme because practicalities trumped phantasms in Belle Village. People would try to make sense of something that made zero sense. 

"We trained together, your cousin and I," Mr. Ecscent said. "We were friends in the Shifter World. Melissa and I are going to work together to help you get to the gate without getting hurt by whatever the mist is."

Lilly felt her stomach turn over uneasily because of the way Mr. Ecscent said this last sentence...slow and shaky. Usually, he spoke quickly, confidently, and smoothly in class, babbling on about real-world applications of algebraic expressions and the mathematical wonders discovered during World War II. Lilly returned his gaze with stiff lips and slightly squinted eyes in hopes that her expression would show just as much seriousness as he did.

She worried that if she seemed too worried about the mist, then Mr. Ecscent and Melissa would worry she wouldn't be able to handle the whole truth...whatever the whole truth was.

There were a lot of worries to worry about.

"So you're a Shifter?" Lilly asked.

"Yes," Mr. Ecscent replied. "And the mist is possibly a monster. Probably from the Shifter World."

"I have two ideas," Melissa replied, stuffing the half-folded quilt into a basket beside the sofa. In the wake of her words, the sky rumbled again, and shadows drew out from their places against the walls as the mist turned from yellow to black. She walked into the hallway closet they kept their cleaning supplies in, took out the vacuum cleaner, and examined it. Lilly and Mr. Ecscent followed close behind shared a curious glance as she continued. "Bizarre weather phenomenon or monster. Monster's more likely. Gates to worlds are like magnets to supernatural creatures. The problem is that the gate opens to a field right outside of Elliott Way, which means there will be two hundred children milling around in tents as fairies get them ready to enter the facility."

Melissa gestured for Lilly to step back, raised the vacuum over her shoulder like a baseball bat, and swung it into the wall beside the closet.

There was a great crackling sound as the wall smashed inwards. White plaster belled out in a dusty cloud and littered the floor.

Lilly blinked as Melissa set the vacuum down. "Well then."

Melissa reached into the hole she'd created and pulled out an ax. She liked weapons; it was one of the rare topics she actually had a strong opinion on. Lilly, who couldn't care less about weapons but loved that Melissa talked about them so passionately, often got caught in being schooled in different types of swords, spears, and axes.

Lilly recognized that the ax was a tomahawk with a spike of fear.

Melissa handed Lilly the ax, then planted her hands on her hips, squinting at the smashed wall. "We'll fix that later," she said.

"How many concealed items do you have stashed around our house?" Lilly asked, dumbfounded. First The Storybook of Seconds, and now this?

"Twenty-two."

"And you're trusting me with an ax?"

"I'm trusting you to do what I say with the ax."

Melissa turned and slid Lilly's hands into a secure position on the ax's handle and commanded her to hold it tightly against her chest until she was told otherwise. Then she shouldered past Mr. Ecscent, crossed to the coat rack by the door, and slipped on her leather jacket. She yanked her shirtsleeves over her knuckles and flicked her wrists. Daggers slid into both her hands, small enough to conceal, sharp enough to tear through sinew and tissue. 

At Lilly's open-mouthed expression, Melissa explained, "We might have to slay some monsters."

Mr. Ecscent whispered softly to Lilly, "She terrifies me."

Lilly quietly agreed.

"Come on," Melissa replied by the door. "We have a lot to talk about on our way over to Eldnac, starting with the beasts that invaded the Shifter World. If you're really going to train in the Shifter World, then no more lies."

***

It was blatantly obvious that Melissa and Mr. Ecscent hated each other.

There was an uneasy tension between them that threatened to snap and release at any moment, like a rubber band stretched tight. On the way to the school, the two of them hardly shared a look. They didn't acknowledge each other. Melissa's knuckles were white on the hilts of her knives, and Mr. Ecscent's long fingers were tangled together in front of him. Periodically, he would shove his spectacles up his nose even if the bridge between the lenses was already right between his eyes.

The morning was crisp and plagued by fishermen taking their boats out for an early morning ride. Birdsong lit up the skies; thin shells of frost coated patches of grass on the side of the road. Everything felt normal save for the mist and Melissa and Mr. Ecscent's tension, which made Lilly worry more. She felt like she was in an alternate reality or some surreal version of Belle Village.

She was still arrantly astonished that her math teacher knew about magic.

As they crossed Barker Bridge, swallowing the stink of old water, fresh lobster, and salt, Lilly said, "I'm assuming this monster is not just a giant cloud of color-changing mist."

"Correct," Mr. Ecscent replied, speaking as if she'd solved a math problem correctly. It was the first thing he'd said since they started their trek to Eldnac. He tucked his hands into his back pockets. "Gates are intense tears in time and space. They have strong magnetic fields that attract the supernatural. The cloud of mist isn't the monster's actual form, either. I'm not quite sure what it is."

"Shapeshifter," Melissa said tersely. 

"She knows a lot about monsters," Mr. Ecscent explained.

"I studied while you—" Melissa caught herself, shook her head, and started over. "I studied. And it was a deduction. If the mist isn't poisonous and this is the first time a monster has entered Belle Village, then I bet it'll transfigure itself into some sort of beast. Possibly one of the eleven monsters plaguing the Shifter World."

"Maybe whoever sent it into Belle Village knows that there's a Shifter going to Elliott Way here," Mr. Ecscent speculated. "Maybe Lydia had something to with it."

"I'm lost," Lilly interjected. "Who's Lydia?"

"No one," the adults said at the same time.

There was an uncomfortable pause as they reached Eldnac Street. Mr. Ecscent blushed. He looked to his left at the canal and the array of fishing boats bobbing lazily on top of the water's murky flaxen surface. As the mist transfigured from yellow to black, the waters turned into a miserable abyss of darkness.

While he didn't think Lilly was listening, Mr. Escent whispered to Melissa, "I'm confident I would have never bothered you again after last night if there was not a monster trying to get through a gate and kill children at Elliott Way. I didn't want to have to scrub your blood off the school walls."

Lilly shuddered, chilled against his words and Maine's wind. Maine winds were a thing entirely of their own, an entity that cut right through the pores and into the blood, turning organs to ice. The mist turned yellow and the three of them turned a corner into the school's parking lot, which was mostly empty. Cars were scarce in Belle Village. Everything was usually so condensed, and the vast amount of woods provided shortcuts to most places, so everyone walked everywhere. Sometimes, teachers and upperclassmen who lived outside of Belle Village parked in this lot, but mostly, students just loitered here before school started. The school didn't even pay to have the lot kept up; it was dreary, pockmarked, and cracked, a shocking contrast against the extravagant expensive granite school building. Today, the lot was totally deserted, a gray desert of faded drawn lines and cigarette butts in the cracks between the asphalt.

Ignoring Nathan, Melissa said, "The goal is to drive the monster away from the gate and get Lilly to Elliott Way as safely and quietly as possible."

The sentence had barely finished coming from her mouth before a rumble boomed deep within the sky, the loudest one yet. Lilly was so shaken by this sudden noise that she slapped a hand to her chest, forgetting to keep both her hands on the tomahawk. A flock of crows burst from their perches on a telephone line. Squirrels ran in the opposite direction of Eldnac Prep, darting across the pitiful gravel lot into the street. The sound of screen doors and the squeak of opening windows across the street blossomed to fill the sleepy quiet.

The mist descended over Eldnac's white gables, then squeezed through every crack and small opening in the building...beneath the entrance doors, through the minute cracks in closed windows, inside skylights. The sky cleared and was smeared orange with sunrise again.

"Lilly, you and I are going to the gate. It should be in the gym. Nathan is going to kill the monster." Melissa gestured with one of her knives towards Eldnac's entrance doors. "It's in there, but if we're fast, he'll get to the monster before it gets to the gate."

In the months to come, Lilly would find out that Belle Village would pin this mist as a phenomenon, and conspiracy theories would leap from town to town. For the first time, Belle Village would be mentioned in other parts of Maine. It would make the newspapers. The town would finally show up on Google Maps, and state scientists would pull out every beaker and chemical known to man to try and explain this bizarre occurrence.

But as for now, the first adventure of the day began in a mostly-empty school building with its security cameras cut out by the magnetic force coming from the gate in the gym and a vast cloud of metamorphic mist waiting inside.