Chapter One

He’d been dreaming of hands. Of his own hands. The right one with the four slashes across its back, still livid, purple, barely scabbed over. His left, the very tip of the forefinger gone, sliced off. Sacrificed. Both of them stretched out before him, reaching, reaching . . .

For what? Mist obscured it, terrifying him as he continued to push into the gray, into whatever was within.

His fingertips slipped into softness. It felt like . . . fur. Then something growled.

A hand grabbed him. Sound came, but not from an animal. A man was shouting, unintelligible things.

Sky woke gasping, his hands instinctively grappling with the one that held him. His eyes shot open, and at first he thought he did see fur, a thick pelt of it right above him. Then he focused, realized that the fur was a beard, that the hand he clutched belonged to a man, and that both stank of cigarettes.

The bus driver jerked his hand free. “Descendez! Descendez! Nous sommes arrivés!”

“Sartène?”

“Oui. Oui. Sartène. ’Ow you say? ‘Zee end of zee line.’ ” The driver grunted this last in English, then jerked his thumb. “Allez-y!”

Sky’s backpack was already on the ground beside the bus. The driver followed him out, began slamming the luggage holds shut.

“Uh, monsieur, s’il vous plait? Ou est le . . . ’ostel?” Sky’s French, which he’d been trying to improve all summer with language tapes at the library, seemed to fail him at two-thirty a.m. But he’d found that as long as you dropped the “h” and looked like you were sulking w