When I’d told Iset that I was going to Fort Rive despite her well-meaning and intelligent advice, she’d had enough grace to help me figure out what I should do there.

I was going to confront Brodie Kohler.

It seemed like the safest bet. We were pretty sure that he was hiding something, and if I could bribe, trick, or force him into telling me what that something was, then we might have a decent lead to follow. He was also a nice guy, and since he’d been wearing a protective charm because he worked in the swamp, there was less chance that he’d gone completely loony from exposure to excess magic.

As my nerves tightened, my thumb squeezed down on the throttle of the four-wheeler, giving me a boost of speed.

I took grim comfort from the fact that Brodie, Ayla, and Vance all had charms, and none of them showed any signs of paranoia or hysteria. That meant that, depending on whether or not they’d stolen the lamp, I had three potential allies who were sane. There were so few of us, I was even willing to welcome Ayla into the ranks with minimal bitterness.

So few of us…

Conrad had arrived recently, and he had his natural protection against undirected magic. It was true that he’d had unreliable sensory experiences, but that was only when some complete idiot (me) had dragged him into the heart of the swamp at night. Ayla had told us that all you had to do was get away from the magic and you’d feel better, and Conrad hadn’t seen, heard, or smelled anything weird since then, so that had to mean he was better!

…Right?

It was no good. The image of Conrad’s expression as I’d told him about the beating I took was projected on the front of my mind.

My worst fear—the one I’d buried so deep that I couldn’t bring it up with either Iset or Conrad—was that, somehow, Conrad was being affected by the magic.

I shoved the throttle down as far as it would go. The four-wheeler lurched forward.

When I got to Fort Rive, I went into the grocery store.

Jay wasn’t there.

I could’ve called her up since hers was one of the few numbers that I had, but I was feeling impatient and impulsive, and considering how much outside money I’d spent on groceries in the last three days, I figured the store owed me.

Geez. If I was being affected by the magic, would you even be able to tell?

The guy who had checked me out the night before was at the register again. At least I wouldn’t have to deal with any questions about my face. I knocked on the counter top to get his attention.

When he raised his eyes, a waft of nerves made the hairs on my arms stand on end. What was behind those eyes? What kind of crazy would he be?

Stop it, Emerra. You’re going to make yourself crazy with that kind of thinking.

“I’m looking for Brodie Kohler,” I said. “Have you seen him?”

The checkout guy stared at me for something like three eternities. Or a few seconds. It was hard to tell.

“If he’s in town,” the checker said, “he’ll be that way.” He nodded further down the main street…that we were almost at the end of.

Useful.

I thanked him anyway and left. As I walked in the direction of his nod, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and brought up Jay’s contact information. Six steps later, my finger was still hovering over the call button.

Jay had been nothing but good to me, and I didn’t know if getting her involved any further would cause problems.

Since I was plowing down the street with my eyes on my phone, I didn’t know I was on a collision course until I crashed into the guy. My phone went flying. My hand was crushed to my chest. There were two full oofs—one from each of us. The worst of my injuries throbbed, and a fog of beer breath rolled over me.

It was Dylan Ernst, the mad alcoholic historian.

He managed to make his eyes focus on me. “It’s you. The bald girl. The one who wanted to know about the Chitimacha.”

I stooped to pick up my phone. Thank god, it was unharmed. “Yeah. That’s me.”

“I almost didn’t recognize you. What happened to your face?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a conspiracy.”

I figured his caring level and attention span were too limited for him to press the issue, and I didn’t want to admit I’d gotten in a fight with Jessie and friends. I didn’t know whose side he’d be on.

“I heard that you went to the library after our interview,” he said.

Wow. Small towns were really something.

His blurry eyes narrowed, and he wagged a drifting finger in my general direction. “Have you found something out there? Something to do with the Chitimacha?”

“Not yet,” I grumbled.

But he was a shade too sober for me to joke like that. Interest and suspicion jumped into his eyes.

I rushed to cut off his next question. “Why aren’t you drinking at Night Owl? I thought you were a regular.”

Ernst waved away my question as if it was an annoying fly. “John kicked me out.”

I wondered if there really was someone named John who worked at that restaurant. I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance, but only because the name “John” was so common.

“It’s the Saturday lunch special,” Ernst said. “No room for old Dylan. No time for me either. He’s got half the town in there, so he doesn’t need me anymore.”

My focus locked on the drunk in front of me.

“Half the town?” I said.

“So much for loyalty!” Ernst lamented.

“Did you happen to see Brodie Kohler in there?”

Ernst pressed his lips together until they almost disappeared. His eyes narrowed again, and he swayed on his feet as half the attention he’d been using to stay upright was shifted to new speculation.

That was a yes. That had to be a yes.

I grinned. “Mr. Ernst, if I survive all this, I want to buy you another coffee.”

“And what will you ask me then, young lady?”

I was already walking down the street, but I turned around long enough to shout, “How to be a history nut!”

I was still a block away from Night Owl when I caught sight of the crowd of people outside the door. They were milling around, talking to each other, and casting glances through the front windows at the crowd inside the restaurant. Every table that I could see was occupied. It was one o’clock, but the lunch special looked like it was far from over.

My steps became slower and shorter. I stopped a building away. The idea of all those mute faces watching me made my heart hammer. Worse, there was a chance that Jessie, or one of the other two men I’d met last night, were in there.

But so was Brodie. And I had a lamp to find.

I clenched my trembling hands into sore fists and marched over. The group outside the restaurant went silent as I approached. I kept my eyes straight ahead, grabbed the handle on the door, threw it open, and stepped inside.

The hush was instantaneous, and everyone in the restaurant stared. My fists were trembling so bad, they probably looked like gyroscopic balls glued to the ends of my arms. The only upside to all that unwanted attention was that I got a good look at everyone’s faces. That made it easy to find Brodie. He was sitting at a round table near the far corner of the room. In the seat beside him was Jay. Brodie’s face was full of open and horrified shock.

It faded only a little as I crossed the room toward him.

I couldn’t get a word out before Brodie asked in an urgent whisper, “Emerra, what happened to you?”

I ignored his question. It takes courage to talk about scary things, and mine was being used to the last drop to stand there instead of fleeing the restaurant.

“I hope you don’t mind if I join you.” I sat down in the last chair at the table, putting my back to the crowd. I didn’t ask if I could join them because I didn’t want them to think that they had any choice in the matter. “Has a waiter been by yet?”

Jay’s chair squeaked over the floor when she scooted it back. “I can go—”

But Brodie put his hand on her arm. “It’s okay. You can stay. You just ordered.”

Jay’s eyes went from Brodie to me. An air of barely contained flight hung over her. All her muscles were tense, and her shoulders were curled over her chest. Seeing her like that made my heart murmur with sympathy. I wanted to exchange mutual hugs of assurance, but I didn’t know her well enough.

Conrad was right. We did have stupid rules about touching.

“It’s okay,” I said, echoing Brodie. “I don’t want to run you off.”

Jay looked skeptical.

“Is everyone still staring at me?” I asked.

Jay’s eyes darted around the room. “Not openly,” she said.

Brodie frowned and his gaze dropped to the tabletop. “Sorry about that,” he grumbled. “They’re probably curious about the black eye.”

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A smile crept onto my face as I shook my head. It seemed like half of Brodie’s life was devoted to making excuses for others.

“Look,” I said to Jay, “everyone’s watching. They’re already making up new rumors about me. If you leave now, they’ll have a lot more material to work with. You’d be doing us all a favor if you stayed.”

Jay hesitated, then moved her chair back toward the table. She tried to relax, but I noticed that her shoulders were still curled. She played with her fingers under the table, and her eyes never rose high enough to meet mine or Brodie’s.

Brodie sat forward in his chair and opened his mouth as if to say something, but then he closed it, sat back, and rubbed his lips with his thumb instead. The awkward silence congealed.

That was the moment that I realized I had invited myself to sit down between a young man and a young woman who’d met at a restaurant alone. And of course it would only occur to me after I was sitting down.

“Am I interrupting something?” I ticked my index finger side-to-side, pointing back and forth between them.

It was stupid to ask. It wasn’t like I would leave without talking to Brodie, and the answer was probably only going to make things more awkward. What did I think I could do? Pull out a violin and serenade them?

Brodie and Jay looked at each other and grinned. The strained atmosphere broke and fell away.

“Jay and I were friends in high school,” Brodie said. “Now we’re Saturday lunch buddies. That’s all.”

“He’s not my type—” Jay added.

Brodie said, almost over the end of her sentence, “I’m not your type?”

“I know too much about him.”

Brodie’s head bounced in a small nod. “Yeah. That is true.”

I smiled.

You could hear the years of camaraderie in the easy way their words tumbled over each other’s. They were more than lunch buddies—they must have been best friends. Anything less wouldn’t have survived. Brodie was standing with one foot in the swamp and one hand cuffed by the Torr, being pulled further and further away from normalcy.

A drop of sadness hit my heart.

But maybe Jay didn’t care about ‘normalcy.’ Maybe they could stay friends because they shared the role of an outsider.

My eyes rested on them as my mind mulled over their connection.

It was dark. Blues and blacks, greens, spots of yellow. Yellow dancing dots.

“Shit!”—whispered.

“Quiet. Maybe he didn’t see us.”

The sound of a motor.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t blink or let my eyes move.

“Miss?”

“Dr. Pepper,” I muttered.

The hand went away.

The black shapes were trees and moss. The empty spaces between them were filled with the formless colors of the night. The yellow winking dots were fireflies.

I’d never seen fireflies. The swamp looked like an earth-bound nursery for infant stars who were playing around before they had to grow up and get serious. I wanted to laugh and cry for how beautiful they were.

Two figures ran crouched over. The one in front stopped. Short frizzy blond hair stood out in the darkness.

“What are you doing? Go!”

Jay turned. Her face was pale. “I saw something.”

“What?”

Jay licked her lips. Her eyes were wide. “There’s a child out here…”

The vision faded. How long had I been out? A few seconds? A minute?

Brodie and Jay were watching me. Brodie’s face showed concern and Jay’s blue eyes were wide.

I said, barely loud enough to be heard, “You were the friend who trespassed into Sauvage Preserve with Brodie.”

Jay’s eyes went wider. If I’d needed any confirmation, I would’ve had it then. The look of fear on her face was exactly the same as it had been in the vision.

Feeling like a total heel, I went on, “You know about the lost children.”

Neither of them spoke.

I pulled my chair closer and leaned in so I could lower my voice even more. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to get you in trouble, and frankly, I don’t care what you know or how much Brodie’s told you. I won’t tell a soul. In fact, you don’t have to tell me the truth. I’m getting used to people hiding stuff from me.”

Brodie had the decency to blush.

If there was a line between all the things that I was and wasn’t allowed to do, I had my big toe planted on one side of that line while I stretched the rest of my body as far as it would go across it, like a toddler straining to reach the forbidden cookie jar. But I was desperate, and—technically—Jay knew about the lurkers.

“Do you know anything about the lamp?” I asked her.

Her eyes moved back and forth between me and Brodie. “What lamp?”

“It’s—” I reached for my pocket but stopped halfway. I let out a grunt and put my hand to my forehead instead.

The photo of my sketch was on Conrad’s phone.

I really needed to get in the habit of carrying that sketchbook everywhere.

“It’s a bowl,” I said, “about this big.” I circled my hands around its imaginary circumference. “Made of stone—”

Brodie interrupted: “It’s made of stone?”

All brain functions fizzled into a boundless nothing. The sudden silence made me feel like I’d been swallowed by outer space in one big gulp. Sparks of thought tried to find purchase—wha-what? How…?

I finally came up with a complete sentence: “I showed you the sketch!”

“That doesn’t mean I could tell what it was made of,” Brodie said. “I thought it was some kind of metal. Those symbols on it—were they painted?”

The words dripped out of me: “No. They were inlaid.”

Brodie didn’t know it was stone? But I must have told him and Ayla! Gladwyn said that he had talked to Ayla about whether or not the lurkers could do stonework, and I knew, without an atom’s room for doubt, that I’d never told him what it was made of. I never had the chance. He’d glanced at the sketch and bolted.

You also know that Ayla and Gladwyn are hiding something from you.

That was true. But so was Brodie.

“Brodie,” I said in what I hoped was a kind yet firm voice, “I think it’s time for you to tell me the truth.” I ignored his sputtering and added, “In about thirty minutes, I think it’s going to be really important that I trust you.”

The time limit was a nice touch. I’d pulled it out of the air, but it was good to have someone else feeling a nameless urgency breathing down their necks.

His jaw tightened. “I’ve never lied to you.”

“Good. Don’t start now.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to leave?” Jay asked.

“It’s fine,” Brodie said. He tried to glare at me, but with his cute face, he wasn’t good at it. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

Oh, I was going to make him eat that line. And if he thought that having Jay there was going to hold me back, he was in trouble. A reporter with a video camera wouldn’t have slowed me down.

The waiter returned to the table. Brodie and Jay got hamburgers and fries while I got my Dr. Pepper and a weird look.

When the waiter left, I returned my attention to Brodie. “Why were you so uncomfortable when Conrad and I first came to the yurt?”

Brodie forced a laugh. It sounded uneasy. “What?”

“When we first came to the yurt, you were uncomfortable.”

His head tilted as he said, “No, I don’t think—”

“Conrad told me.”

Brodie’s mouth snapped shut.

“Trust me,” I added. “He’s obnoxiously good at knowing things like that.”

Brodie bought himself some time by taking a drink of his soda. Mid sip, his eyes widened and a faint color came into his cheeks. I didn’t have any money to bet with, but if I had, I would’ve put it all on “he remembers.”

He put his glass down again but kept his eyes fixed on the curve where the bottom of his cup met the table. The edges of his mouth inched downward, and the tips of his large ears went red.

“It was probably Ayla,” Jay said.

Brodie and I looked at her. One arm was across her chest. The other arm was stretched out to play with the straw in her drink.

“This Conrad guy,” Jay said, “is he kind of handsome?”

I hesitated. “In his own way.”

Jay shrugged. “I don’t know if that would even matter. Ayla seems to flirt with anyone who’s male. If you’ve been a victim, it can be hard to watch.” She gave Brodie a pitying look. “You’ve always had the worst taste in women.”

A twisted smile forced Brodie’s face into a pained smirk. “Yeah. That was part of it.”

“What was the rest of it?” I asked.

Brodie looked me in the eyes. “Fifty percent of a studied population wearing trackers isn’t just high, Emerra. It’s ridiculous.”

My brow furrowed. “Okay, but wouldn’t that be better for the studies?”

“Sure,” Brodie said, “and a hundred percent would’ve been ideal, but we had to stop because she figured that someone would get suspicious.”

“She being Ayla Davids?”

“She tried for a month to trap even one of them, but they weren’t falling for it. One morning we found a water moccasin in the trap.”

“Water moc—you mean a snake?”

He nodded.

“Was it an accident?” I asked.

“It was put there.”

I should have felt ashamed of myself for grinning when I heard that, but I didn’t. I was too busy feeling delighted. The lurkers hadn’t liked the traps, so they’d left Ayla Davids a polite message.

My grin changed to a laugh. I used a hand to smother it.

“What is it?” Jay asked with a nervous smile.

I waved away the question. “Nothing.”

But I thought it was interesting that the townsfolk of Fort Rive—the uneducated, superstitious townsfolk that Ayla had thought so little of—had managed to trap a lurker when she couldn’t. The world was full of wonders.

“What happened after she found the snake?” I asked.

Jay said, “She assigned Brodie to get the trackers on them while she sat in the yurt and played on her laptop.”

Brodie started to object: “It wasn’t—”

All Jay had to do was give him a look. Brodie’s face went red, and he shut his mouth.

Connections were forming between the facts in my head.

“But you weren’t a scientist,” I said. “You didn’t know how to trap them, so you went to Daniel Vance.”

“Vance said he’d take care of it,” Brodie said.

“Vance isn’t supposed to be interacting with them. He doesn’t care”—I peered at the stubborn red patches that refused to leave Brodie’s cheeks—“but I think you do.”

Brodie didn’t say anything.

Jay did! I was so glad she’d stayed.

“Brodie didn’t want to get himself or Vance in trouble. When he found out what Vance was doing, he ran it past Ayla.”

I looked at Brodie. “What did she say?”

“She said it was fine,” he muttered.

“Even though it broke one of the two biggest rules of Sauvage Preserve?”

He repeated in an even quieter mutter, “She said it was fine.”

He was slumped over, leaning his elbows on the table, his hands held together by the slight friction of his intertwined fingers. His face was slack with shame and something that looked a lot like misery.

I sighed and shook my head. Traces of sadness and frustration lurked in the back of my mind, adding a tang to my thoughts.

Brodie was a good guy. If he was ashamed to admit that he didn’t like watching his crush flirt with other people, and that he felt guilty about breaking the rules, that made him a stupidly good guy. He might have stolen the lamp if he didn’t know how important it was, but his conscience would’ve forced him to come forward when he knew that Conrad and I were asking about it.

Then why did he feel uneasy when Conrad and I were showing him the sketch?

I didn’t think he’d lied to us. Brodie didn’t like lying to people…

But he doesn’t tell us everything. And he lies to himself so that he can think the best of others.

“Brodie,” I said, “I want to tell you what I believe.”

When Brodie looked up, I wondered if he saw any emotion in my battered face.

My voice came out gentler than I intended. “I believe that you were telling us the truth when you said that you had never seen the lamp.”

His expression morphed into one of relief and gratitude.

I went on, “But I also believe that you know something else, or you think you know something—something important—and you chose not to share it with us. I believe you did it to protect Ayla—”

I remembered his reluctance to tell her that the lurkers had come to him, and the flashes of sorrow or frustration I’d seen on his face as she had talked to us.

“—and I believe that, in your heart-of-hearts, you know she isn’t worth protecting. Not like that. Not if doing it could hurt the swamp.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know anything.”

“Then what do you think? When we showed you that sketch, you were uneasy.”

Brodie rubbed his bottom lip, then said, “Did Conrad tell you that too?”

“He did.”

Brodie let out a one-breath laugh.

I glanced at Jay, hoping that she might be able to help somehow, but my attention was drawn back to Brodie when he spoke.

“I think that Ayla might have lied to you. You know when you pulled out the map and pointed to that area in the center?”

“Yeah.”

“She said she’d never been there…”

“But she has?” I prompted.

“I think so. But I don’t know. I came into the yurt one morning, and Ayla was gearing up to go out into the swamp. She said she wanted to check on something, but she didn’t say what. When she was gone, I went over to the computer to add in some data. She’d left the tracking app open, and she’d filtered out all but two or three trails. Most of the…subjects…move in regular patterns, but there are always a few of them that strike out on their own. We think they’re going out hunting. That would explain why they always go to new places. The trails Ayla was looking at were weird because they showed one lurker going out at a time, but they always went to the same place.”

No prizes for guessing which place that was, I thought.

I said, “You think she went out there to see what they were up to?”

“That’s what I thought at the time. She didn’t come back until late. I remember because I was about to try to get Vance on the radio to help me look for her. When I asked Ayla if she’d found what she was searching for, she laughed and said she’d gotten lost. Then she changed the subject—started asking me to tell her about the feu follet.”

Muted excitement lit up my mind.

“Did she ask about any feu follet in particular?” I said. “Like, oh, say, the eternal one?”

The edge of Brodie’s mouth twitched down, but he nodded.

The muted excitement erupted into a full rave with lights, loud music, and a whole crowd screaming—heeey yo!

I must have done a decent job hiding my reaction; Brodie didn’t seem to notice.

He went on, “I thought it was weird. The next day was a Saturday, so I went out after lunch, but I got lost too. I have no idea if I even got close to where I was supposed to be going.”

“And when did this all happen?” I asked.

Brodie rubbed his bottom lip again, then muttered, “The end of December.”

For a moment, I didn’t move. Then I let my head drop back as I laughed loud enough to earn the stares of everyone in the restaurant. Even the cook glared at me through the rectangular opening in the wall.

I had finally picked the right person to hate.