“Mera.”

That was Kappa’s voice. Why was he whispering?

“Mera!”

Two small hands nudged my arm, causing me to rock in bed.

When the rocking stopped, something wet touched my nose. It was Kappa again. If I didn’t get out of bed soon, he’d lick me.

But I wasn’t in bed. Not even the motel bed was that hard. And the pillow was all wrong.

I opened my eyes to figure out where I was.

At first, all I saw was Kappa. We were nose to nose. His head, surrounded by a halo of pale-yellow light, eclipsed my view.

“It’s morning?” I grumbled.

Kappa hopped back and forth a few times, rejoicing that he’d finally managed to raise the dead.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to sit up, but I must have rolled over sometime during the night, and Conrad had rolled with me. He’d thrown his arm over me, turning me into a wolfman’s teddy bear.

Not a bad job if you can get it.

But his arm was heavy and I didn’t want to wake him up. I tried to squirm out from under it, but that was too much movement. Conrad rolled to his back, and the weight was gone. I sat up and scooted away from him.

It was morning. Sunlight streamed in from the windows and the holes in the walls. I’d slept through the whole night—no nightmares. It was both refreshing and extremely odd.

I scrubbed my face with my hands and took a deep breath. Kappa waited, standing at my feet, his hands on my raised knees.

After I lowered my hands, I whispered, “Okay, buddy. I’m awake. But if this is about the potty, Conrad and I have told you that you can go in the swamp.”

He patted my knees twice. “Come!”

Why was I as groggy after seven and a half hours of sleep as I was after two? That felt like bad management.

“Is it important?” I asked.

“Come!”

He scuttled off.

I dragged myself to my feet and followed him to the back of the cabin. He sat down in front of the middle of the rear wall and looked back and forth from me to a place near the ceiling. I followed his gaze and saw what had caught his attention.

It was a ladder.

The thing was built into the wall and extended out only a few inches, and it used the same wood as the rest of the cabin. The vertical rails ran parallel to the boards that made up the wall behind them, and the rungs were turned to be as thin as possible. Considering the bad light and how well it was camouflaged, it was no wonder we’d missed it last night.

A suspicious square was cut into the boards of the ceiling directly above the ladder.

“That’s a trapdoor,” I said, proving to the world that I was at least smart enough to pick up on that detail.

I looked at Kappa. He was bouncing with excitement.

“Have you heard the line about curiosity and what it does to cats?” I asked.

“Cat! Fluffy! Not a wolfman.”

I turned back to the ladder. “Yeah. I’m so going to die again.”

I had to go up first. I would’ve felt terrible if Kappa got hurt, and I didn’t know if he was strong enough to open the trapdoor. Each time I stepped onto a new rung, I grit my teeth, waiting for what I thought would be the inevitable fall. One broke under me, but I was able to catch myself. When I reached the top, I pushed on the trapdoor. It had no hinges, so the whole thing shifted. I shoved it out of the way, showering myself with fragments of wood and a millennium’s worth of dust. When the avalanche was over, I heaved myself into the attic.

There were no windows, but the edges of the boards were ragged with age, the same as they were downstairs. A crooked line of light poured through the gaps where the walls met the angled roof. It was enough for me to see everything.

I staggered away from the trapdoor, and turned in a slow circle, trying to take everything in, feeling my body growing numb with awe.

It was a shrine! A temple! A mausoleum! It stretched the entire length of the cabin, and it was crowded like any self-respecting attic should be, but the objects weren’t hidden away in boxes; they were laid out on podiums and tables. The ornate cloths covering the tables were so dusty that, whatever their original color and material had been, they looked like gray velvet, but the objects themselves were spotless.

There was a goblet, a censer, a cross, a dagger, a small shield—a dozen more things I didn’t have names for. A dusty beam of sunlight flashed off a silver sword. A small golden rod sat beside an oblong plate surrounded by candles. There was an empty cage with its door removed. Five books were held together on a custom shelf and preserved under glass. The same rune was etched or embossed on every item large enough to have it.

The rune was an open angle—a triangle without a bottom. Starting below it, a line ran parallel to its left side, disappearing when it reached the midpoint of the triangle, only to reappear again, continuing the same direction, off the right side. It reminded me of a spear piercing a two-dimensional mountain.

A white spell circle painted on the floor ran from wall to wall under all the tables and stands. Its rim was cluttered with runes that looked like they could’ve been stolen from one of Olivia’s notebooks. Painted on the center of each of the four attic walls were similar lines of runes, running down the boards, creating a script as long as my arm.

I heard scrabbling behind me and whipped around.

“Kappa!”

The bog-monster froze flat against the floor, his huge eyes glued to me.

I said each word slowly and firmly—I would’ve carved them into granite and slammed them in front of him if I could have—“Don’t touch anything.”

He kept staring. His fins eased back toward his head. My strict-mom voice must have been more impressive than I thought.

“This place is dangerous,” I explained.

“Why?” he whispered

Because “trap magic”—which, according to Olivia, wasn’t a real phrase, but, according to me, should have been—was dormant until triggered. That meant I couldn’t see it.

Of all the massive oversights in my seer abilities, I hated that one the most.

“There might be scary magic,” I said.

Kappa crawled across the floor, then stood in front of me with his arms raised. He probably thought the surest way to keep from touching anything would be if someone was holding him back.

Come to think of it, if my arms were full of bog-monster, I wouldn’t be able to touch anything either.

I picked him up and perched him on my hip. “You’re a brilliant bog-monster.”

“What is this place?” His head swiveled as he looked around.

“I think it’s some kind of magician’s storehouse.”

“Are they coming home?”

My eyes went to the dust piled around the sword. I’d been joking, but what did a millennium’s worth of dust look like? What about a century’s?

“I don’t think so, buddy,” I said.

A shiver ran through his small frame. “Blech.”

“I know what you mean.”

Outside, toward the front of the cabin, there was a faint noise, growing louder. Kappa and I turned.

It was the sound of a motor.

I picked my way through the podiums and tables to reach the front wall. If I stood on my toes, I could see out one of the cracks.

A shallow-bottomed boat was puttering toward the cabin. At the bow was a lurker with a brown patch over his left eye. At the stern, with one hand on the tiller, was Brodie Kohler. Between them was Old Man.

I let out a grunt when the double weight of too many thoughts and too many emotions hit me at once. I had choices to make and no time to make them in. That meant I’d have to talk fast and go with my gut.

I ran back to the trap door.

Conrad arrived under it as I got there. My tromping around must have woken him up.

“Oh, good!” I said. “You’re up.”

Conrad looked up at me. “What the—”

“Catch.”

After lowering Kappa enough to make sure that he wouldn’t hit his head on the edge of the trapdoor, I dropped him into Conrad’s waiting arms. Then I lowered myself onto the ladder and hurried to pull the trapdoor back into place. Conrad put a hand on my back to make sure I wouldn’t fall.

“Brodie’s coming,” I said.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Brodie?” Conrad repeated.

“I need you to get him away from the boat if you can. I want to talk to Old Man alone.”

“Old Man is out there?”

When the trapdoor was back in place, I jumped to the ground and turned to face my two friends.

“Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t mention the attic. Don’t even glance toward it. As far as Brodie is concerned, the attic doesn’t exist. Kappa, do you understand?”

Kappa nodded.

“Conrad?”

“I understand, but is there a reason you don’t want him to know?”

“Because I’m not completely sure that he’s innocent.”

I ran to my pack, threw it over my shoulder, and ran to the hole where the front door used to be. Two steps onto the porch, I realized that I was in socks with no shoes. I ripped off my socks and shoved them into my pockets. The boards felt cold under my feet. I jogged out onto the boardwalk, plastered my brightest smile onto my face, and waved to the approaching boat.

Like Vance, Brodie cut the motor early and let the boat drift closer. There was a broad smile on his face.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I tried to figure out what was going on while we were coming out here. Never once did I think it would be you.”

“I have to admit,” I said, “I’m surprised to see you too. How did you find us?”

Brodie nodded toward the lurkers he was sharing his boat with. “When I got to the yurt this morning, these two were waiting for me on the stairs.” He pointed to the lurker at the front of the boat. It was Scaredy-stone. “That one took my hand and dragged me over to the boat. From the way he was acting, I understood I was supposed to follow them. Then it was a whole lot of pointing and screeching.” Brodie’s attention shifted from me to the cabin behind me. “What is this place?”

His comment dumped another truckload of thoughts onto a mind already crammed with them.

“You don’t know?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen it before.” Brodie stood up in his boat to get a better view. “Did the lurkers tell you about this place?”

“No. We got lost. While we were trying to get out of the swamp, we ran across the cabin and decided it’d be safer to stay here than trudge along in the dark.”

Brodie picked up a rope to hitch his boat to the boardwalk while still giving half his attention to the cabin behind me. “Was that—lycanthrope? Is that the word?—not with you?”

“Conrad was with me. He got lost too.”

Brodie gave me a sympathetic smile. “This swamp is awful, isn’t it? Not even GPS can save you around here.”

I remembered Vance telling me that he’d found Brodie wandering around the area I’d come to think of as “the Forbidden Zone.”

“…they never told me it was dangerous…”

Had the lurkers warned Vance away not because it was dangerous (in the alligator kind of way), but because everyone who went there got lost? Or had they warned him away because it was where they kept the lamp? And did they put the lamp in the hollow because everyone would get lost trying to find it? Or did the lamp cause whatever ridiculous effect could throw off standard GPS and a lycanthrope’s nose?

It can’t be that one, Emerra. The lamp isn’t there.

I looked at Scaredy-stone, but said to Brodie, “These guys didn’t seem to have any trouble bringing you here.”

Brodie finished tying up the boat and jumped onto the boardwalk. “Oh, no, these guys are amazing. Did you know they have a multilevel sensory system that helps them keep track of where they are in their territory, as well as reverse point-to-point recall that lasts for over a month?”

My brain took the whole whirling mess of my thoughts and threw them out the window.

“Come again?” I said.

“They have this sensory system—”

“No, no—the second part. Point-to-point…?”

“The reverse point-to-point recall. That’s what the scholars call it. The lurkers can’t figure out shortcuts, but if they have to trace their path backwards from one point to another, they can do it weeks after they made the trip. The theory is that this helps them if they ever have to go exploring outside of their territory.”

An eternal second passed as the information pinged around my empty skull. I turned to the cabin.

With iron patience, I used my Calm Voice to call out, “Kappa?”

Kappa stuck his head out the doorway. He must have been hiding right beside it.

“Can I see you for a moment, buddy?”

Despite my good intentions, he sensed my mood. He slunk out of the cabin and crept down the boardwalk toward me, looking like a toddler called over to a broken cookie jar.

While Kappa was creeping, Brodie said, “You didn’t walk all the way out to this cabin barefoot, did you?”

“No,” I said, “I left my waders in the cabin.”

“I can go get them for you.”

I heard the repressed excitement in Brodie’s voice and looked up. He was bouncing with curiosity but too polite to walk away in the middle of our conversation.

“That’d be great,” I said. “You can take your time while you’re up there. Just be careful. It’s not a bad place to spend the night, but it’s falling apart.”

Brodie stayed long enough to acknowledge my warning, then he was off. Kappa arrived at my feet. He glanced at Old Man and Scaredy before granting me his attention.

I was also aware that Scaredy and Old Man would be listening and that they would be able to understand at least part of what I said, but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

I squatted down so Kappa and I would be closer to level.

“Kappa, if I asked you to take me back to the place we found yesterday, could you do it?”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“And if I asked you to take me from that place back to the motel, could you do it?”

“Yes,” he admitted in the same, cautious tone.

“Is there a reason that you didn’t tell us that last night?”

Kappa tilted his head and gazed at me with those big, oh-so-cute black eyes of his. Most of my irritation melted away.

“Huh?” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell us that you could do that last night, when we told you we were lost?”

“But you said we were lost!”

I took a deep breath and put a hand to my forehead.

I had told him we were lost, and he didn’t know what that meant, so he’d put his trust in me and Conrad, like he always did, and neither of us had thought to ask him if he knew how to get back to the motel. I had enough irritation left to get nice and mad at myself. Why hadn’t I read all those notes that Iset gave me!

I put out my arms. “Come here, buddy.”

Kappa walked into my hug. I scooped him up and rose to my feet.

“That’s a cool trick,” I said. “I’ll remember it for next time. Now, I have to talk to Old Man here. Would you like to stay with me, or would you like to go back with Conrad?”

“Breakfast?”

My stomach growled with painful sympathy. “Sure, but you’ll have to find it in the swamp.”

“Kay!”

I clenched my arms around him before he could slip away. “What are the rules?”

He tried to squirm free as he recited, “Stay nearby. Come when you call. Don’t bother the alligators.” He made a rawr, rawr noise and gnashed his teeth. Maybe that was his impression of an alligator.

“Good job.” I eased my grip.

Kappa hit the boards with a thunk, then slipped into the water.

I turned to the boat. “Now,” I said to Old Man, “we have to talk.”

Scaredy walked back to stand beside his elder as I maneuvered my way onto the boat. I sat on the bench across from them and put my pack down at my feet. I started out with a thank you, but then I realized that might not translate. As I pulled out my sketchbook, I tried again.

“I’m grateful that you brought Brodie to pick us up.”

Old Man’s and Scaredy-stone’s heads tilted when they heard Brodie’s name.

“Brodie,” I repeated. I used my sketchbook to motion over my shoulder to the cabin. “The human who had this boat. What do you call him?”

Scaredy signed as he spoke. The sign was his hand, held up in front of his eye in a loose fist, expanding out to a circle, and then a C shape. “Big eyes.”

After a moment of processing, I laughed. “That’s a good name. I see why you think it would fit him.”

“Brodie.”

My eyes flew to Old Man. He peered back at me, looking almost as serious as Daniel Vance.

He repeated, “Brodie,” then nodded to the cabin. “You call him.”

“Yes,” I said.

He pointed into the swamp. “Kappa.”

“Yes.”

My mind shifted into wary mode. Old Man was smart, and he was working overtime to try to understand us. That could be a good sign, but the difference between clever and calculating was too small to measure.

Old Man lowered his arm. “Why do you keep Kappa?”

“Kappa is precious to us,” I reminded him with a slight edge to my voice. It was time to change the subject. “This morning, why didn’t you ask the bracelet man for help?”

“He wasn’t there,” Scaredy-stone explained.

He wasn’t there, I thought, and you didn’t want to wait, so you went and got Brodie.

I wondered if they would’ve asked Ayla for help if she’d been the one to show up at the yurt.

“Why did you bring Brodie?” I signed his name as I said it.

“You were wandering. You didn’t go home,” Scaredy said.

“Wandering” was tough. It came out as concepts—walk in circles, walk in distress, broken walking. To a lurker, walking around without knowing where you were would seem broken.

“But you could’ve come and taken us home without Brodie,” I pointed out.

Scaredy-stone’s eyes darted over to Old Man.

Old Man said, “We don’t go in there.”

He meant the cabin. The whole time we’d been there, he’d avoided glancing in its direction.

“Why?” I asked.

He said one word, and I had no trouble at all with the interpretation: “Dangerous.”

There were hundreds—no, gajillions—of things I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t know how long I had before Brodie came out, and for a gajillion reasons, I couldn’t talk in front of him. I had to focus on what mattered.

I flipped back the pages of my sketchbook, revealing my sketch of the lamp, and held it up for Old Man and Scaredy to see. The younger lurker let out an audible gasp and a noise that might have been a screech if he hadn’t cut it off. Old Man’s eyes widened.

“Is this what you’re searching for?” I asked.

“Did you find it?” Old Man demanded.

I repeated, louder, “Is this what you’re searching for?”

Scaredy stared at his elder until I thought his eyes would pop out of his head. Old Man’s face twisted up; reluctance and temptation seemed to be battling it out in his head.

At last, he said, “Yes.”

“What is it?”

He clamped his mouth shut. If they bit their lips hard enough, would those sharp fangs go clean through?

I didn’t want to find out. With a sigh, I closed my sketchbook and returned it to my pack.

“I haven’t found it yet—”

Old Man broke in: “How do you know it?”

“I saw it in…” I thought for a moment. “In a kind of a dream.”

The old lurker hesitated the same way I had. It was comforting to know I wasn’t the only one struggling.

“Are you other?” Old Man asked.

Wow. We were struggling worse than I thought.

“Um…”

He said, “Brodie.” Then made the sign for human—tall-one. “Bracelet man.” He repeated the sign. “Are you other?”

He was using the same word he’d used for Kappa being a Kappa-them versus a them-them. Was I an “other” to humans?

The dead chick asks herself.

I wasn’t comfortable answering, but I thought there might be a different way I could help him understand.

“Magic?” I said.

Old Man nodded. He understood—or, at least, we thought we understood each other.

“I see magic,” I said.

I saw magic, I had “seeing” magic, my eyes were magic—wait. Were they magic? And who in the unholy name of some forgotten god knew?

Big Jacky. Maybe.

“Use magic?” Old Man asked.

Since Big Jacky wasn’t there, I decided to simplify. “No. I only see magic.”

I scooted off the edge of the bench and sat on the bottom of the boat so I’d be closer to Old Man. If there was any chance that he could read the sincerity in my face, I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t have to squint to do it.

“We haven’t found the lamp yet,” I said, “but we’ll try to find it, and if we do, we’ll bring it back to you. Until then, could you please keep your people out of the town? It’s dangerous.”

There was an emotion in his eyes. I could almost see it. The sense of it teased the fringes of my mind—then it was gone. Old Man had locked his reaction away. He still didn’t trust me.

I swallowed my disappointment. “Fine. Do you think the lamp was taken?”

He nodded.

“Do you know who took it?”

He shook his head.

“What is the lamp?”

His face went stony. I knew it’d be useless to ask him questions, but I had to try. I could hear Brodie and Conrad. They were still in the cabin, but they were coming closer.

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

No answer.

There I was, trying to be helpful, and all I got was stonewalled. My rising temper dragged my volume up with it. “Did you steal it?”

That got a reaction. I felt a spiteful spark of gratification. Both Old Man and Scaredy-stone understood the concept of stealing, and they were furious that I would accuse them of it.

“We’re the guard,” Old Man said.

Guard was another hard one. There was so much in the images and emotions that came to me. There were eyes. And time. There was a boldness. A sense of self. They watched. They were the watchers. And they would keep watching as time passed.

“Who asked you to guard it?” I asked.

Old Man’s brow furrowed.

I tried again: “Who gave it to you? Who had it first?”

“A friend,” Scaredy-stone said.

Old Man shot a brief glare his direction.

“Will you tell me about him?” I asked.

Scaredy-stone was careful not to look at his elder. “He was precious to us.”

I let out a grunt. Conrad and Brodie were on the porch. Conrad was already calling for Kappa to come back to the boat.

I lowered my voice. “If I come to the gathering place later, will you tell me about your friend?”

Old Man shook his head.

“Will you tell me about the lamp?”

Another headshake.

“Why not?” I demanded the best I could in a whisper.

Old Man pointed at me, then drew his finger down his throat.

I threw myself back onto the bench behind me and resisted the urge to teach him a human gesture.

Our conversation was over. Brodie jumped in the boat first. Kappa flopped over the side with half a raw fish in his mouth. Old Man and Scaredy ignored his offer to share. Conrad handed me my waders when he got in, but I was too grumpy to do anything as nice for myself as put them on. Instead, I pouted as my toes went numb from sitting in the cold puddle that seemed to be a standard feature on all swamp boats. I took some solace from the idea that, if I was being excluded because I had the same intrinsic trait as Daniel Vance, at least I was in good company.