After breakfast, Conrad, Kappa, and I headed out into the preserve. It was a nice day. The temperature was warmer than usual for mid-April, even in Louisiana, and while it was more humid than I was used to, it wasn’t muggy. Conrad wanted to get out of the motel room (an opinion that no one in their right mind could fault him for), and Kappa was getting restless.

We had no idea where we were going or what we were supposed to do, but I figured we could walk along the bank of the swamp while we talked about our options.

Kappa abandoned us in favor of the water the moment it came into sight. I barely managed to warn him to stay within calling range before he disappeared. I could only tell where he was by looking for the two black bubbles of his eyes and the glint of the sun off his blue skin. It looked like an oil slick in the water.

Conrad and I climbed down from the road into the Sauvage Preserve. When we passed by the neon-orange NO TRESPASSERS sign, I let out a sigh of relief. Now if anyone saw Conrad or Kappa who wasn’t supposed to, it was their own fault.

I had offered Conrad my hoodie, to hang over his head, but he’d refused. All five times. He said he hated how the hood squished his ears down.

“Why are you so worried about it?” he asked.

“I don’t want you to get in trouble!” I whined.

What I didn’t tell him was that I’d overheard Big Jacky telling him that he’d have to come home to report to the local Torr if anything went wrong. I was supposed to be strong and independent, but since I had my guardian around, I didn’t want to see him go.

We stayed as close to the water as we could without getting in it, which meant we were walking along a muddy, spongy, four-inch ledge that dropped off into the swamp. At any moment, my sneakers might slip, and I’d wind up knee-deep in muck. I wasted a few minutes wishing that I’d brought my boots instead of my sneakers; they would’ve been heavy, but at least they had more traction.

“We can talk to Gladwyn, Mrs. Carver, and the scholar,” I said, “if we can find her in all this.” I scanned the disorienting landscape. “You know how to get back to the motel, right?”

“I thought you were confident you wouldn’t get lost,” Conrad taunted me.

“That was on a road. There was only one way forward and one way back.”

“We haven’t left the bank. One way forward, one way back.”

“And if we do leave the bank?”

He put his hand on the top of my head. “Don’t worry, Mera, I can get us home.”

Everything in me rejected the idea of the motel being my home, even temporarily.

“You mean back to our room,” I said.

“That too.” He let his hand drop.

I forced my mind back to the question of what our next step should be. “I’ll call Iset. She’ll have Gladwyn’s number, and Gladwyn probably knows Mrs. Carver’s number. Oh! Mrs. Carver called Ms. Durand ‘Olene.’ If they’re friends, we might be able to get Carver’s contact information from her.”

“I thought you said Durand was creepy,” Conrad said.

My mind flashed back to the scene at the grocery store. “She’s…she’s not that bad.”

Conrad hummed, then said, “Who is Mrs. Carver, anyway?”

I scowled. That was a darn good question.

“I know she’s an initiate,” I said. “She has to be. She works in the preserve, and Gladwyn had her make our motel reservations, so she’s probably involved in this somehow.”

“But you don’t know how?” Conrad asked.

“No.”

Conrad put his hands in his pockets and raised his eyes to the sky. “I think we should add Vance to that list of people to talk to.”

I tried not to laugh. “Vance? The grave man?”

“He works in the preserve, and he’s worked with Kappa’s people.”

Deep in my chest, a chunk of anxiety rumbled around like baby thunder.

“What is it?” Conrad asked.

Whoever had said, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” never had to answer for every last speck of emotion they had around a wolfman. Forget hiding my feelings from others! What about the times I wanted to ignore them for myself? But no. I had to find an explanation for every immature reaction I had.

“I don’t know,” I huffed. “Vance is…I mean…Look, do you want to work with a man that held a gun on you?”

Conrad let out a chuff. “Is that what’s bothering you? He never pointed it at me, Mera. He only had it out. He saw a large predator standing next to a girl who couldn’t defend herself—”

“I can defend myself!”

Speaking of immature reactions, that one was ridiculous. I trained with Conrad; I knew I couldn’t beat him.

The wolfman had enough grace to ignore my idiocy.

He went on, “And when you told him I wasn’t dangerous, he put his gun away.” Conrad shrugged. “He seemed like a reasonable creature.”

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“You only like him because he’s all stoic and quiet like you,” I said, pointing at him.

The edge of Conrad’s lips lifted into a stoic and quiet smile, but he didn’t deny it. “He’s a lead. The more we have, the better.”

That was true.

I sighed. “Do you think that Gladwyn will have his number?”

When Conrad didn’t answer, I glanced over. His smile had changed into a frown.

“Does this situation seem weird to you?” Conrad asked.

The answer was a resounding yes, but I had a feeling that Conrad and I had different reasons for thinking so.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The way Gladwyn talked, I assumed that when we got here, they’d tell us what they wanted us to do, and we’d help Kappa. Instead, nothing. No instructions, no introductions to other people working on the problem—not even a file giving us the contact information of people we’d need to talk to.”

Okay. Yeah. Now that he mentioned it, that was pretty weird.

He added, “It almost feels like Gladwyn doesn’t care.”

“He seemed passionate enough back at the mansion.” My brows furrowed. “At least, he was frustrated.”

Conrad and I exchanged glances.

Before I could say something snarky about how the real Benjamin Gladwyn must have been abducted by aliens, Conrad turned his head toward the deeper part of the swamp.

“Kappa’s calling for you,” he said.

I strained my ears and faintly heard my bog-buddy’s voice, almost lost in all the noise the birds were making.

“How far out is he?” I asked.

“Pretty far.” Conrad turned to me. “It sounds urgent.”

I immediately stepped off the bank and sloshed out into the water while asking in a voice that also sounded a tad urgent, “He’s not hurt, is he?”

Conrad hurried to catch up. “I don’t think so. There’s no distress, but whatever it is, he thinks it’s important.”

I slowed down. In the complex risk-assessment center of my cowardly heart, a Kappa who wasn’t in danger could only compete so much with the threat of what might be lurking in the swamp. I was willing to wade through snake-infested water to get to him—but I would be moving slow enough to keep my eyes open.

The water only came up to my mid-calf when we started, but it inched up my legs the further we went, and it was so murky, I could never tell how deep my next step would be. If the swamp swallowed me whole, I would go down with a gloop in the water, and an I knew it in my heart. At least the water was warmer than I thought it would be—cool, instead of cold. Since I was going to be soaking wet for a long time, that was something to be grateful for. The water churned around my legs, saturating my pants and socks, and washing in and out of my sneakers with every step. A faint smell rose from it, and when I looked down, a tint of dark purple trailed after the eddies in rolling swirls. The morning sun glinted off the surface in dazzling dashes of white.

It was beautiful, but it made it hard to see any alligators.

Kappa stopped calling as we got closer, but Conrad knew the direction the sound had come from. The water was almost to the top of my thighs by the time we found Kappa. He was treading water under the shade of one of the huge trees with a wavy trunk—a cypress tree, Vance had informed me. Beyond the tree, rising out of the water, was an area of high ground cluttered with plants and smaller trees. The grass at its edge was almost a neon-green color and seemed to wade into the swamp then round off, disappearing into the murk.

If it had been me, I would’ve made for the high ground, but Kappa didn’t have to worry about his clothes getting soaked (the lucky little nudist). He was content to stay in the deepest part of the water, leaving only his black eyes above the surface so that he could glare at the box that was floating in front of him.

“What the…” I muttered.

Conrad and I slogged up to his side to get a better look at the box.

It was made of opaque black plastic, and it was roughly the size of a child’s shoe box. Its lid was secured with a small metal padlock that I wouldn’t trust to guard my diary, and it was floating half in, half out of the water.

“What is it, Kappa?” I asked.

He rose until his mouth was out of the water. “Don’t know.” He immediately retreated to his former glare position.

“Where did you find it?”

Without raising his head, he lifted his arm and pointed to the ancient cypress towering in front of the patch of high ground. Seven feet above the water, sections of its broad trunk had split away from each other. The pieces surrounded a distinctive shape, but the space was empty, as if the tree had grown around a chunk of earth that had been washed away.

“It clunked-clunked,” Kappa explained.

“Is it a cache?” I reached for the box.

Conrad said, “I can’t imagine someone from the Torr using a box that flimsy for something official.”

I smiled when I heard his comment. I couldn’t decide if Conrad’s obsession with rugged materials was because he was born and raised in a small town on the border of the Alaskan wilderness, or because he was a giant wolfman who tore through most material like it was tissue paper. Both sounded probable.

When I picked up the box, I could feel the water that had seeped inside sloshing around. Whatever else was in there, it wasn’t heavy. I shook the mysterious swamp-box like a Christmas present and felt the contents shift. Every few shakes, it let out a soft clunk noise.

“There’s something in there,” I said.

“I think it’s paper,” Conrad said.

I looked up at him.

“I can hear it,” he explained. He pointed toward the hollow of the cypress trunk while looking at Kappa. “In here?”

Kappa nodded and opened his nostrils enough to blow a few bubbles.

Conrad sloshed toward the tree, then paused. With his next step, he rose higher in the water by several inches.

“The ground over here is uneven,” he said. “I think it’s rising in tiers.”

“In tears?” I said.

Beside me, Kappa burbled, “It’s sad.”

Conrad put his hand on the trunk. “Like cake tiers, Mera.”

“Oh! Right!” When Conrad glanced at me, I drew the image in the air with my free hand. “Like steps. Layers. Cake tiers.”

When Conrad turned back to the tree, I could see his smirk. “You just have to know how to talk to someone.”

Kappa looked at me. I shrugged. It wasn’t like Conrad was wrong. Sugar was my primary language.

The wolfman ducked inside the large opening. He couldn’t stand up inside the hollow, but he could fit. The front of his flannel shirt was soaked from him having to bend over the water.

“Kappa,” Conrad called, “was the box hidden in here or anything?”

The small V brow between Kappa’s eyes wrinkled.

I said, “Can you tell Conrad what the box looked like when you found it?”

“It was floating,” Kappa said. “It clunked.”

“You mean it was bumping up against the inside of the tree?”

“Yes!”

Conrad hummed to show he’d heard us.

“Smell anything?” I asked.

There was a short silence—or, rather, Conrad was silent. The birds still had lots of opinions. Then Conrad said, “There’s something else in here.”

He emerged carrying what I assumed was a glob of swamp-muck large enough to fill both arms. He grabbed two handfuls of the green stringy strips and whipped the rest of it out in front of him. It unrolled like a blanket.

Kappa went “oooooh,” and started swimming toward Conrad.

I stayed with the box. “What is it?” I asked.

“A ghillie suit,” Conrad said as he examined it. “It’s for sneaking around without being seen.”

I was suddenly far more interested in the mysterious contents of that box. It’s probably a character flaw, but I hate it when I don’t know things, and that frustration is exponentially increased whenever curious or bizarre elements are involved.

A water-logged locked box hidden beside a stealth suit in the hollow of an ancient tree deep in a forbidden swamp? You couldn’t have pried my fingers from it with a crowbar and the promise of a million-dollar check.

But every woman has her price, and I prize my friends very highly indeed—so when I saw the alligator, only a few feet away, gliding toward Kappa, I screamed his name, dropped the box, and lunged toward him.