The creek was low for June. Bob could hear the water picking its way over stones before he saw it, a thin silver murmur through the cottonwoods. Petunia had been restless all afternoon — pacing, whining at the back door, refusing her dinner. She didn't bark. She never barked when something was wrong. She just stood there, ears pinned, watching the direction she wanted him to go. So he followed. The trail behind the Whitfield house was overgrown, blackberry vines snagging at his jeans. Petunia moved ahead with purpose, her big head swinging low to the ground. She stopped at the bank where the creek widened into a shallow pool, the water dark with silt and sky. Bob caught up, breathing hard. “What is it, girl?” She nudged something with her nose. A rock the size of his fist, half-buried in the mud. But it wasn't mud-colored. It was pulsing a soft, deep blue, like a heart beating under glass. Bob crouched. The air around it felt wrong — colder, thicker, like walking into a room where someone had just stopped talking. He should have thought twice. He should have called Johnny. But Petunia was watching him with those steady brown eyes, and she had never led him into anything that wasn't real. He touched it. The light didn't flare — it swallowed. Bob felt his body go slack, his vision tunneling to a single point. Then nothing. Not darkness. Not silence. Just an absence where he had been. Three seconds. Maybe four. He came back on his knees in the creek, water soaking through his sneakers, Petunia's wet nose pressed hard against his cheek. She was making a sound he had never heard from her before — a low, worried keen. Bob blinked. His hand was empty. The rock was gone. “Hey, girl,” he whispered. His voice sounded far away. “I'm okay.” But he wasn't sure. And the way Petunia kept looking past him, into the dark trees on the far side of the creek, made him think she knew something he didn't.