I left the motel room unlocked. I wasn’t sure if Conrad had taken his key with him when he took Kappa outside, and I thought it’d be easier on both him and Ms. Durand if he didn’t have to go to her to get the spare.

An agitated feeling nagged at me as I headed toward the four-wheeler.

You need to tell Conrad where you’re going.

I tried to dismiss it. Too bad for me, my feelings could be really loud and I’d had recent bad experiences that they could use against me.

In October, me leaving a room unattended had resulted in evidence getting stolen.

Today, Conrad and I had a black plastic box of unknown importance sitting in our motel room.

In November, I had pissed off a vampire and a wolfman because I’d left them for hours without telling them where I was going when we were supposed to be working together.

Today, that very same wolfman was out playing with Kappa, happy in the assumption that I was laying around in bed, recovering.

All tallies were in—I was a cowardly idiot.

I grit my teeth, stomped my foot in the middle of the dirt road, and did an about-face.

I found Conrad at the bottom of the hill next to the swamp. Kappa was up in a tree, investigating a bird nest.

“Aren’t you supposed to be resting?” Conrad shouted up to me while I was still at the top of the incline.

I slid and tripped my way down to the edge of the swamp while doing my best to keep my distance from him.

When I reached the bottom of the hill, I blurted out, “I’m going into town. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but my phone is working, so you can text me if you’re worried. Do you have your key? If not, I can lock the door to the room and bring you mine.”

Conrad turned to face me. He’d been staring up at Kappa with his arms crossed, and he kept them crossed while he stared down at me.

It was weird that I could forget how tall he was.

“Mera!” Kappa cried.

Glad for the distraction, I waved up at the bog-monster. “Hey, buddy! Eaten any good snakes lately?”

“A rat bit me!”

He sounded more excited than offended, and I didn’t want to rain on his parade. “Good for you! Did you bite it back?”

“No,” Kappa moaned. “It got away.”

“That’s probably for the best. I don’t think you’d like coughing up hairballs.”

Kappa didn’t respond. He’d already returned to the all-absorbing task of harassing the wildlife.

I turned back to Conrad. He was still staring at me.

“What?” I grumbled.

“Why are you standing so far away?” Conrad asked.

I hoisted my shoulders in a twitchy shrug. “This is where I landed.”

“You’re getting better at that.”

“At what?”

“Lying.”

My face flushed. “Good! I’ve been practicing! Do you have your key?”

“Mera, am I your pack or not?”

My limbs jerked, and my guts froze. My heart stalled, then slammed against my ribs like a prisoner beating against cell bars. I licked my lips and looked down at my sneakers.

They were a muddy wreck. If I survived this conversation, I’d have to look up how to clean them.

I opened my mouth to speak, but I could feel a low ache in my chest tugging at my over-active tear ducts. I had to clench my teeth to keep from crying.

Conrad walked over to me. In a gentler tone, he repeated his question: “Am I your pack or not?”

I knew the answer. I’d been bragging about it to anyone who was a Torr initiate. I, Emerra Cole, was a member of a proud pack of two. Me and Conrad Bauer. Saying it always made me happy, and it was good for a laugh! Anyone who looked at me would know instantly that it was a joke. I loved it. My favorite joke.

What was wrong with me?

It’s the hysteria. You’re hysterical.

I might have been getting better at lying, but that line wasn’t good enough to fool me.

It wasn’t the hysteria. Thanks to a traumatic childhood, I’d been prone to random emotional outbursts long before I’d ever stepped foot in Sauvage Preserve. The only trick was trying to figure out what had triggered me that time, but—what a shame—I didn’t have time for introspection.

“You don’t have to be my pack if you don’t want to be,” I mumbled.

“I want to be,” Conrad insisted, “but if I’m your pack, why won’t you let me help you?”

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

“I’m going into town! You can’t help with that!”

“Something’s wrong. I can smell how upset you are.”

Ah. Yes. He’d gotten close enough to smell that. I should’ve mailed him his phone, then called to tell him I was leaving. Better yet, I should’ve texted him. No emojis.

He finished with, “Please stop trying to shut me out.”

Well…crap.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought the word “crap.” It would have been the other word, but after a few months of practice, my brain could usually be counted on to present a less profane substitute.

I thought about old Ms. Elstein, who couldn’t bear to hear me swear, whose hand I’d held when my cancer pain broke through the strongest drugs that modern medicine had to offer.

“I know you don’t like relying on other people.” She’d patted my cold, thin hand with her own cold, thin, more-gnarled hand and cackled. “Too bad you don’t have a choice with me!”

I smiled at the memory.

“Emerra?” Conrad said.

What the heck! As old Ms. Elstein used to say, it wasn’t the good times that made you good friends, it was the bad times.

I said, “I think the stone lamp is used to burn off excess magic.”

I waited to see if Conrad would ask me questions, but all he did was stand there, listening with those big triangle ears of his tuned to me like radar dishes.

I rushed to defend my idea from the nonexistent attack.

“That flame was all wrong! It was burning white, right? So that’s magic! But most people can’t see magic. Or maybe mundanes can only see the parts of the flame that aren’t magic. Either way, it wouldn’t be useful as a lamp, so what was it for?”

“You think it was used to burn off excess magic from the surrounding environment,” Conrad said.

I snapped my fingers and pointed at him. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. But the lamp’s been missing since January, and that means that all the magic it would normally burn off has been building up. I don’t know why the magic gets thicker at night, but I think it does, because—why else would I be seeing it in the air? And it’s white.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I! But Iset said something about it being some kind of miggledy-mush, wacko unformed active magic—but I don’t know what that means either!” I paused. “That miggledy-mush bit was mine, not hers.”

“Yeah, I figured that out.”

I clamped my mouth shut and nodded.

“You’ve talked to Iset about this?” Conrad asked.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“What did she say?”

I jammed my hands in my pockets and grumbled, “She said it’s possible.”

“If she said it’s possible, why are you upset?”

“We kind of had a disagreement,” I mumbled.

When Conrad didn’t answer, I glanced up from my muddy sneakers. He looked suspicious.

“You had a fight?” he asked.

“No!” I pushed my fists down until they were straining the seams of my pockets. “Iset doesn’t fight. She uses that lovely voice of hers to very kindly tell you her concerns, and then she lets you stew in it.” I swallowed, but the lump of fear that had been growing in my chest since I’d ended my call with Iset was too big to be dislodged. “She wanted me to stay at the motel and be careful.”

My whole body clenched into one solid nerve, waiting for Conrad’s response.

“Emerra,” he said quietly, “what are you scared of?”

Whap! Slam! I’d been knocked off of my mental perch and swatted to the ground at ninety miles an hour. If you’d peeled me up, you could’ve seen the imprint of my body in the dirt, and even my inverted expression would’ve looked baffled.

I’d been bracing for another disagreement. The adrenaline was circulating nicely through my system, and I had my arguments all lined up and ready to go—but how was I supposed to fight a question?

And why, of all the questions in the whole world, did Conrad have to ask me that one?

My mouth opened and closed a few times before I managed to say, “Are you sure you don’t want to try to talk me into staying here?”

“I’m sure I do,” Conrad said, “but right now I want to know why you won’t answer my question.”

I took my hands out of my pockets and crossed my arms—tough girl stance. Tough twig stance, since I was standing in front of Conrad.

“There’s a lot to be scared of!” I said.

The wolfman (who’d probably never been scared a day in his life) stood there, waiting.

I rambled on, “I’m worried about the lurkers. It’s getting dangerous, but they won’t listen to me. The townspeople scare the crap out of me. The place I’m supposed to be helping is full of snakes and alligators and weird magic that no one understands, and no one can tell me if I’m seeing things because I’m supposed to be seeing things! And I can’t get rid of this stupid feeling that if I don’t do something right now then the whole world is going to blow up in one of those big mushroom clouds with a ring around it!”

Conrad still didn’t say anything.

“You know!” I cried. “Boom!”

Nothing. You’d think he’d never seen a cartoon mushroom cloud.

I lowered my head and studied the ground at my feet as I ransacked my brain for anything else I could say to help Conrad understand—or at least prompt him to say something—but all I could find were the embarrassing dredges I would’ve been happy to leave unspoken.

“I was afraid that you’d think I was being silly or stupid,” I admitted, “and that you’d tell me not to go.”

I lost a lot of volume with that line, and the rest of it was going fast.

“I don’t…I don’t have a lot of confidence. I already feel awful that I’m not listening to Iset, and I was afraid that you’d try to fight me when what I really need is for someone to give me a push and tell me to go for it”—by now I was speaking in a microscopic mumble—“‘cause it’s already scary enough that I don’t want to do it.”

It was midday. All you could hear from the swamp were a few birds and the breeze whispering as it broke over the branches and set the hanging moss swaying.

I felt a touch on my leg. Conrad and I both looked down. Kappa had snuck out of the tree and come over to me, unseen and unheard. He was standing behind me on his hind legs, one hand resting on the back of my knee and his big eyes staring up at me.

For a moment, we stayed like that.

Kappa pushed on the back of my knee. I wasn’t expecting him to do that. I had to sway to catch my balance.

“Gopher!” Kappa cried.

Some big, happy part of my heart jumped. It knew what was going on before my brain could catch on.

“What?” I said with a laugh.

“Gopher it!”

I laughed again, picked him up, and perched him on my hip. “Are you trying to say ‘go for it?’”

He put his hand on the cheek under my good eye and gave it a gentle push. It still hurt. But only a little bit.

I took his hand in mine. “Say it with me now—go…for…it.”

“Gopher it!”

I grinned. “Buddy, I don’t think you even know what a gopher is.”

“Is what you need,” Kappa said, scowling. How dare I contradict myself.

My heart was glowing so much I thought I would burst into a new sun.

“You know, you’re right. That’s exactly what I need. A gopher.” I stuck my nose against his and ignored the soreness that shot through my face. “Thank you, Kappa.”

No wonder I was willing to go so far for those little guys.

I looked up at Conrad. “Sorry, Conrad, but I have to go into town to buy a gopher.”

He turned his head, giving me a perfect view of his long wolfish profile. When he sighed, a quiet growl came out with it.

“I won’t fight you.” He looked back at me. “If you bring back a gopher, I’m eating the damn thing. Finally get some real meat.”

“How about I order you a take-out steak instead?” I offered.

“I would appreciate that. Don’t worry about locking the door. We’ll head back for lunch now.” He stepped forward to take Kappa. When we were as close as we were going to get, he locked eyes with me and said, “Be careful, Emerra.”

“I will be,” I said. “I promise.”

I stepped back and waved goodbye with both hands. One for Conrad. One for Kappa.

As I turned to leave, Conrad shouted at my back. “And stay out of trouble!”

Still walking, I turned around and put on a bewildered face of theatrical proportions. “What are you talking about? I always do!”

My heel struck a root, and I had to catch myself before I fell backward and knocked my head on the bank.