Excerpt: Darkness Falls

Skye learned long ago that a child talking to the empty air earned strange looks and no supper. A child talking to a stuffed animal, however, was considered a normal thing. When she spoke to the shadows she made sure to have her teddy bear close at hand. It was a black bear with a brown snout and button nose. Its arms had been torn off and sewn on so many times that it looked like a quilt at the seams. One eye had fallen off and been replaced with another stuffed animal’s eye so that the bear had a perpetual look of confusion on its face.