“Hey, bro,” Ivan called out, his tone relaxed and affable. “You lost?” He sounded for all the world like a sweet-natured stoner in the quiet corner of a party.

“No,” she answered with a nervous laugh. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen. A timid teenager, but not unfriendly. “Just out clearing my head.”

“Right on,” Ivan said. “We passed some campers a mile back and they’re waiting for their friend to show up. You seen anyone else out tonight, man?”

“No, nobody.”

Cam wasn’t sure what was happening; she kept her mouth shut and stayed behind Ivan, hoping the girl couldn’t see her very well.

“Alright. Thanks, and…” he gently extended an open hand. “You good? You alone out here?” Cam’s pulse picked up.

“I’m good. Thanks, bro.” She gave a teasing little smile when she imitated him. “I walk here all the time.”

“Good,” Ivan said, taking something out of an inner pocket in his jacket.

Cam stepped between the two, telling the girl sternly, “Go home. It’s not safe walking in a secluded place alone at night. You’re old enough to know that.”

Ivan put a hand on Cam’s shoulder and whispered, “This isn’t smart.”

She hissed back at him, “I’m your guide. Let me guide you.” He backed off.

Taking a brave but shakey step forward, the young woman asked, “Are… are you good?”

Cam put on the steadiest voice she could muster. “I’m fine,” she said evenly. “I just don’t want you to ever go through what I’ve been through.”

“Oh. What-”

“Just get home safe, okay?”

After looking Ivan and Cam over for a moment longer, she nodded and turned around to head back the way she came.The two of them stood in still silence until they could no longer hear her footsteps.

Ivan sighed, shaking his head at Cam. “Thought you wanted no witnesses.”

“I never said that,” she snapped.

“Didn’t have to. Been walking right along the highway most the night. We could’ve driven, easy. Only reason you’d be dragging us through the sticks like this is you didn’t want your car spotted, didn’t want us spotted. Yeah?”

Closing her eyes against the dizzying realization that he’d been paying closer attention than she hoped, Cam said, “There are more important things at stake.” She forced herself to take a better look at his hand, at the thing he’d taken from inside his jacket. A hunting knife. The blade alone might have been five or even six inches long. Its handle looked to be made from a deer’s antler.

He really was going to kill that girl.

“You good?” Ivan asked, eyes unnervingly fixed on her. Cam couldn’t be sure if she heard mocking in his tone, or if she imagined it.

“We’re in the balance phase of the ritual,” she asserted, fighting to regain some sense of control. “Taking a life at this time would have completely disrupted everything. You almost threw the entire ritual off the rails, and the spirits don’t always give second chances. It just wasn’t worth the risk. You have to trust me.”

They weren’t far now. Another hour, maybe, to reach the cabin. Cam couldn’t let it all fall apart so close to the end.

Putting his knife away, Ivan said, “Message received. Back to balance.”

They moved a little ways off the path and carried on. Cam wished she felt more certain he was still buying it. She asked herself what the hell she was even doing out here. That girl could have died- she very nearly did- and Cam knew it would have been her fault. She had thought she understood her situation. Seeing how quickly Ivan could go from friendly chatter to cold-blooded murder, it was all too clear she didn’t. He could turn on her in a matter of seconds.

Even if calling for help back in her apartment bathroom hadn’t saved her life, at the very least she would have been the only one in danger. And she had been in danger. The entire time. All that relief when Ivan had put down the knife, and he’d had another one in his jacket. Why take one of hers in the first place? Wrapping her arms around herself, Cam guessed that killing her with something that belonged to her must have been part of the whole thing for him. Ivan had rituals of his own.

On second thought, she’d never been the only one in danger. Ivan wouldn’t have stopped after he was done with her. Cam wasn’t just saving herself tonight; she was saving every woman he would have killed after her.

“Tell me about yourself, Ivan,” Cam broke their silence.

“This part of balancing?”

“It could be. If it helps you get centered. A little small talk on a pleasant evening- sure.”

“Not very pleasant.” He was back to teasing her, and it made her stomach churn.

“Depends on who you ask. I’m in my element.”

“I like the dark,” Ivan allowed. “Like it dry better.”

It had indeed grown properly dark by then. “Did you always prefer night to day?”

“Don’t know. Never thought about it. No, yeah, I guess I always liked night time. It was peaceful, everyone else being asleep.”

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A towering pine they’d just passed swayed in the wind, creaking loudly. Ivan halted.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You hear that? Sounded like a door. There a house nearby?”

“The creaking sound?” Cam watched him look around, waited to see if he would figure out what he’d heard.

“Yeah. Just like a door.”

She told him, “It was a door. You hear the spirits moving between our worlds. They’re watching you with great interest, Ivan. Let’s keep moving.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Cam gripped her flashlight, uncertain what he meant and uneasy about it. “Change my mind?”

“About spirits. You said you thought Doug was faking the seances.”

“Dennis,” she corrected him. “And he was faking them.”

“So then how’d you go from fake seances to real ones?”

Cam ducked under a tipped oak resting at an angle against the other trees as she placed where she’d left off in her story. “Dad didn’t want to stop after Mom went quiet. Dennis left it alone at first, and I thought the whole thing would blow over. Then he started telling Dad he knew some people who could help. Psychics. Mediums. But they wouldn’t work for free.”

“Promising,” Ivan chuckled.

“It was a parade of con artists. It’s hard to say even now, and he’d never admit it, but I think Dad knew long before he ran out of money. The worst part came when one of the psychics contacted Dad directly to offer another session, and the price tag wasn’t half what we’d been paying. Dennis had been arranging everything up to then and taking most of the money for himself.”

“You get any of it back?”

“Dad was too proud. He broke things off with Dennis, who just disappeared.” As honest as she was being, Cam skipped the part where she’d been more hurt by Dennis leaving without saying goodbye to her than any of the rest of it. She’d still believed that some part of him had genuinely cared about their family. Self-disgust tinged her words as she went on, “We never went back to normal. Dad still believed. He sought out others. Found a group of genuinely faithful. They were nothing like the frauds- they were dedicated, intense… scary. And they dealt with darker things than human spirits.”

“Am I understanding this right? You joined a cult?”

“Joined or started. The lines were blurry. Dad kind of solidified the whole thing, took charge of it. And as I got older, his priorities changed. He turned his thoughts from what he’d lost to what he wanted to protect. Me.” Taking a deep breath, Cam turned to face him. “Ivan. The ritual we’re performing tonight was meant for me. My father taught it to me because he couldn’t bear the thought of losing anyone else. For my part, I tried for years to show him that it was all fake.”

It was time to divert from the truth. He’d asked her how she came to be performing real seances, and she’d given him nothing but disbelief thus far. In reality, Cam had spent her last two years at home studying how to disprove paranormal phenomena. She’d sharpened her logic, polished her arguments, practiced her speeches down to the breaths she would take while giving them. None of it mattered.

The final straw came when Cam demonstrated the ideomotor effect, the unconscious movements that drove so much of their supposed contact with the other side, using her purple quartz pendant. Her father had simply snatched it from her and thrown it in the garbage disposal. She knew then that no proof would ever be enough.

Cam painted a different picture for Ivan. “You can’t prove false what is true. The spirits made themselves known to me. They told me what I already knew: that I wasn’t destined for the ritual, that they had other plans for me. My father couldn’t accept this, so I ran away from him, his cohort, and their demon-worship.”

They stepped carefully across a shallow stream with the help of a fallen maple tree, Cam wondering if she’d laid it on too thick at the end there. She tried to focus on her footing; on the rare occasion she spoke about her past, it always left her shaking for a few minutes afterwards.

At last, Ivan responded, “Sounds like your dad really loved you.”

She stretched her fingers wide, balled up her fists, stretched again. Cam was never quite sure it actually helped with the shaking, but it was something to do. What could she even say? Certainly, her father had felt something like love for her- a demented, selfish love that didn’t care what its subject wanted or needed. And of course a man like Ivan wouldn’t recognize the problem with that.

A red fox saved her from having to answer. They must have stepped into its territory, causing it to let out a long, sharp scream of warning that echoed in the dark. Ivan bolted in front of her, knife out and at the ready, looking every which way for the source of the unnerving sound. She wanted to quip that he must have been used to it. Fox cries were often confused for a woman screaming.

Instead, she put a hand softly on his shoulder and asked, “You heard that?”

“Yeah? What do you mean? ‘Course I heard that.”

“This is an excellent sign,” she said, leading him onward. “That was a cry from beyond the veil. The fact that you were able to hear it speaks to your progress. How do you feel?”

“Was thinking about my dad.” He looked around them still, but kept his flashlight aimed ahead. “Son of a bitch hated me. Mom died giving birth. Dad beat me stupid.”

He spoke without emotion, a rote retelling that led Cam to wonder whether he was numb to it all, or simply lying in a bid to garner sympathy. Ivan went on:

“I understand the significance of John now.”

Surprised to hear it come up again, Cam only said, “Oh?” She’d thought that particular play had failed.

“It’s a different version of the name Ivan. A…” He snapped his fingers, trying to remember a word. “A variant. Of Ivan. ‘John’ is the lives I could've had. If Mom lived, if Dad wasn't a piece of shit, if I did things different. Other people I might've been. It’s the idea that I could've been anything, and the choice I've got now to become something else. And I knew it, too, always knew it. Like you said. I’m different, I’m something more than other people.“ He nodded to himself, satisfied with his musings. "Am I close?"

"You've done it," Cam seized on the opportunity. “This epiphany reflects a state of self-awareness and clarity. You've achieved balance, Ivan. All that remains of our preparations now is transgression."

"Got something in mind? That where we've been walking all night?"

"Yes. So, Ivan, how does a serial killer transgress?"

He didn’t answer, perhaps surprised to hear her say it out loud. Cam forged ahead, “I’m right, aren’t I? Surely I wasn’t going to be your first victim?”

“No,” he confirmed.

“Alright. Why me? You said you saw me on the train and followed me home. What was it about me?”

“Well, I got a thing for brunettes.” His chuckle made her skin crawl. “Why ask? It was the spirits that brought us together.”

Cam hardly had time to register frustration with herself for not taking greater care with her questions before full disgust overcame her. Her hair? Her fake hair that she’d bought on a whim and planned to ditch in a week or two? That was the difference between life and death?

“I was wondering,” Cam said slowly, “if there was anything that made me different from the other women you’ve killed.”

“Can’t think of anything.”

”This must be why the spirits chose me.”

She left it at that, not wanting to push any further after confirming for herself what she’d suspected: it was always women for him. As though there were any way out now, as though turning back hadn’t fallen away as an option hours ago, Cam tended her hatred of Ivan like an engine she needed to keep herself running. There was simply no choice but to keep running, though.