Panic set into my bones, and I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I couldn't believe what was happening. I genuinely could not. I had heard what Anastasia had said, quite clearly, and still, I found myself turning the words around in the back of my mind, trying to figure out if there was some way that I could have been able to misunderstand what she had said, but the more that I thought about it, the more I was able to acknowledge the fact that there was no other way for me to interpret what she had said. There was only one way to understand it, one way to comprehend it. There were going to be other creatures, like this one, perhaps some that were even worse than this one, and they were all coming here. For me. "We need to leave. As soon as possible. Or else, we run the