A car pulled up to the edge of the long driveway. Ayla Davids got out of the passenger seat. She turned after closing the door and stood talking to the driver through the open window.

I stood up from the bench I’d been waiting on and moseyed over with my hands tucked in my jean pockets.

Gladwyn’s house was across the street from a park. The overgrown trees looked feral compared to the neatly trimmed lawns beneath them, but I found the contrast charming. Since the park was tucked away in a high-class neighborhood, it wasn’t busy, but I’d had the chance to wave to a few children who’d stared at me before their parents could shoo them away. All in all, it hadn’t been a bad wait. And it hadn’t been long either.

As I got closer to Ayla, I called out, “Who’s in the car?”

Ayla jumped around, saw it was me, then closed her eyes and put a hand to her chest.

By then, I was only a few feet away, but I didn’t bother lowering my voice. “Is it another man?” When Ayla didn’t answer, I added, “Does Ben know about him?”

Ayla eyed me for a second, then leaned back over the car. I heard her say, “I’ll see you later,” before the car drove away.

Ayla straightened up and turned to me. “Your face,” she said.

I had used the Night Owl’s restroom before leaving. While washing my hands, I took a good look at my injuries in the mirror. The bruises were livid with colors—eggplant, navy, crimson, coffee brown, and a sickly shade of lemon. If I’d wanted to paint my black eye, I would’ve reached for every color except black.

“Attractive, isn’t it?” I said. “Not as attractive as your face, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I thought of an interesting story. I wanted to run it past you.”

“Sorry, I don’t like stories.” She turned to go up the drive.

I followed her. “But you’re the main character!”

“Oh?” She didn’t stop walking, but she angled her body toward me.

I figured that was as much of an invitation as I was going to get, so I started talking.

“It all started when I asked myself, why would someone like Ayla Davids know Olene Durand? Easy answer. When you first got here, you had to live at the motel. But you wouldn’t want to stay there—certainly not for two years—and, frankly, I can’t blame you. We’ll call it our one point of mutual empathy.”

She offered me a watery smile laced with poison.

“You don’t like women much, do you?” I said.

“I don’t!” Ayla announced. “But that’s all right because they all hate me.”

It wasn’t like I could argue with that. I wondered if something had happened in her life to make her so jaded.

I went on, “But if you wanted to get away from the motel, where could you go? Another easy answer. Pick a guy, any guy. You tried to get friendly with all of them.”

Her perfect brows pulled together in mock confusion. “Do you not try to be friendly with them?”

My chest constricted, grinding in a fresh barb of anger.

I had tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but one of the many suspicions I had about Ayla was that she only liked guys because she found them useful.

I liked people because they could be fun, and interesting, and sweet, and sad, and every last one of them had a story. I was friendly to them because I liked them—not because I wanted them to like me. It galled me to think that Ayla might not understand there was a difference.

Ignoring her bait, I said, “You moved in with Gladwyn.”

We were halfway up the drive. Ayla stopped and turned to me. “Is that your big reveal, Emerra Cole? How smart of you. But you could’ve saved yourself the trouble and asked anyone in Fort Rive. They all know!”

“I said it was a story. And I haven’t started it yet. All that was the introduction. The story starts when you found the lamp while you were out wandering in the swamp. You picked it up for some god-unknown reason and took it back to Gladwyn’s place—breaking one of the two big rules of working in the Sauvage Preserve. But that didn’t matter to you because you don’t care about rules. The Torr hadn’t told you about the lamp, so you assumed that nobody knew it was there. If nobody knew it was there, who would notice that it was gone?” I paused. “Take nothing out, Ayla.”

I waited to see if she had anything to say. She didn’t.

I continued, “That’s why Gladwyn recognized my sketch. He’d seen the lamp in your room—or was it the room you share?” I raised my hand and shook it to erase the question. “You know what? Don’t answer that. That’s none of my business. But it makes sense that Gladwyn knew it was stone, even if I didn’t tell him, because he’d seen it in his house.”

Ayla still didn’t say anything. Her mask was on again. Blank and flawless.

“When you saw the sketch,” I said, “you knew you’d be in career-ending trouble for taking the lamp, so you decided to lie about it. Maybe you thought you could bluff your way through or get rid of it, but when I showed the sketch to Gladwyn, he came to confront you, and you fed him some line about how the lurkers must have stolen the lamp because there was no way they could’ve made it. Did you know that Gladwyn went through the trouble of hunting down and calling another expert?”

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Ayla stared at me, as motionless as an ice sculpture.

“Yeah,” I said. “It turns out that if you flirt with anyone and everyone who possesses a Y-chromosome, men have trouble trusting you.”

At last she broke her silence, and her voice dripped with rank sarcasm. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll bear it in mind.”

“What do you think of my story? Was it accurate?”

“Brodie didn’t send me that text, did he?”

“No. That was me. You weren’t answering our calls.”

“He let you use his phone.” Ayla let out a short laugh that had zero humor. “I wouldn’t have expected that. You must have your own kind of charm, Emerra.” Her eyes moved over my battered face. “Though it’s hard to see it right now.”

Unclenching my jaw almost called for a crowbar, but I had to do it to speak. “He didn’t do it for me. He did it because he loves the preserve.”

Ayla pulled out her phone and read off her screen: “Emerra says that she found the lamp and needs help figuring out where to return it to.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That was a lie. But I figured it might get you home faster.”

She motioned toward the front door. “Have you talked to Ben about any of this?”

I hadn’t. I couldn’t. Gladwyn may not have trusted Ayla, but the other expert had backed up her entirely-too-plausible story. I knew that Gladwyn didn’t want to listen to me, and I didn’t know how he’d react if I told him what I’d guessed. I’d watched him scream into the face of a man he was holding by the collar. If he decided he didn’t like what I had to say, it would only take one hand for him to rattle the life out of me.

When Ayla saw me hesitate, her lips peeled back into a perfect smile.

My face flushed. “Why did you take the lamp, Ayla?”

“I never said I did,” she said.

“I know you have it!”

Her head arched forward a half inch. “Prove it.”

I stepped up so we were less than a foot apart and stared right into her eyes. “Do I look like a cop to you? I don’t care about proof! I’m not trying to get you convicted in court—Torr or otherwise! I want that lamp.”

Still smiling that perfect smile, she said in a soft, sweet voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A sense of outraged justice flooded my body. It scorched my arteries, right to the ends of my fingers and toes—but the sensation was distant, as if I was experiencing it through a filter.

I kept my eyes locked on hers. “Ayla Davids—”

Her eyes widened. She swore and stumbled back.

“—if the bowl is not returned to the cradle it was intended for, hundreds will die and Fort Rive will be destroyed.”

Ayla raised one of her arms, as if to fend me off. Her face was white, and her voice was hoarse. “What the fuck are you?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know why I’d said what I had! Not thinking before I spoke was an Emerra specialty, but I didn’t want to open my mouth again. Who knew what might come out? Silence seemed wiser.

All I did was watch her.

She lowered her arm and licked her lips nervously. “I’ll help you, but—”

“No excuses,” I said. “No explanations. And I’ll ask you no questions. All I want is the lamp.”

We watched each other for another second, then Ayla nodded and turned toward the door. We walked up the driveway without exchanging a word, and I followed her into Gladwyn’s house.

The house was newer, but it had been built in a classic style with dark wood accents framing the light blue-gray walls. On the left of the generous entryway was an ornate staircase that led up to the second floor. Running beside it was a hallway that led back into the house. Only a few feet down the hallway was a wide opening that probably led into some kind of sitting room. I couldn’t tell what it looked like because Ayla had gasped and stopped right inside the door.

A limp hand was laying palm down in the opening to the sitting room. I glimpsed a bit of pale blue cuff around the wrist.

I inched forward until I could see around the opening. Gladwyn was lying face down in the sitting room with his head staved in. Blood was splattered across the floor and part of the wall. It pooled around his head.

Ayla came up behind me. It’s possible she took my lack of reaction as a sign that nothing was wrong. Poor girl. Never take your horror cues from someone who has nightmares like mine.

She let out a shriek, then turned around, both hands to her mouth, and closed her eyes. She’d been pale before, but the last drop of blood drained from her face, leaving behind nothing but a pale, yellowish hue.

“I didn’t do this.” Her whisper slipped out through the sliver-opening of her lips and the cracks between her fingers.

“You weren’t here to do this,” I said. My stomach was twisting like I’d swallowed a thousand snakes, but my voice was steady enough. “Get the lamp, Ayla. Don’t touch anything else, but go get the lamp.”

She rushed up the stairs while I pulled out my phone.

Iset answered on the third ring.

“Emerra?”

“Iset, I am badly in need of some advice. I’m looking down at a dead body. What do I do?”

I heard Iset draw in a short breath. “I take it this is a fresh dead body?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know, for a fact, they’re dead?”

Gladwyn’s face was lying in the pool of gelatinous blood. His wide-open right eye was half covered by it. The blood was crusting up his lashes.

A full-body shiver shook my whole frame. “Yes.”

“Did you or Conrad kill them?”

“Wha—” I pulled the phone away so I could give it a confused look. Then I returned it to my ear. “No! I’m in—you think I’m a—” My brain finally isolated what it thought was the most important point: “It sounds like you’ve asked these kinds of questions before!”

“Is Conrad there, Emerra? I think you’re in shock.”

“I’m in Fort Rive! Conrad’s back at the motel. Ayla Davids has been living with Gladwyn, she’s the one who took the lamp, I came inside with her to get it, and we found Benjamin Gladwyn dead on the sitting room floor. He’s been hit on the head.”

“Have you touched the body?”

I took a step toward it. “Do you want me to?”

“No!”

“I might have a vision.”

“Emerra Cole, we do not contaminate a crime scene on the chance that you might have a vision! Visions can’t be used in court, and you might ruin evidence that can be.”

Ayla called from the top of the stairs, “The lamp is gone!”

Ever since I’d seen that hand lying in the doorway, I’d had a terrible premonition that would be the case, but it still hit like a punch to my already writhing stomach.

I turned away and said into my phone, “Ayla says the lamp’s gone.”

Iset’s voice took on a no-nonsense tone. “Emerra, listen to me. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to hang up in a moment. When I do, you’re going to immediately call the police. Between the time you hang up with them and the time they arrive, have Ayla search for the lamp. You can search as well, but you touch nothing.”

“Hands in pockets,” I said.

“If you find the lamp,” Iset said, “hide it. As far as the police are concerned, the lamp doesn’t exist. If they ask you why you’re there, tell them that you came to borrow something from Ayla.”

Ayla was halfway down the stairs. I informed her that I had come over to borrow an outfit. She nodded.

Iset went on, “If they ask you any other questions that have to do with Torr secrets, don’t answer. Do not lie to them, but don’t answer. Otherwise, tell them the truth. Repeat my instructions.”

I gave her the short version of her orders without missing a single one. Adrenaline was one heck of a brain boost. Ayla finished coming down the stairs and stood less than a yard away, listening to my recital.

“Good,” Iset said. “I’m sending you our lawyer. He’ll be there as soon as he can be. We’re hanging up now.”

“Okay. Thank you, Iset.”

I hung up. Ayla and I stood there for a moment, facing each other, both of us trembling, both of us breathing hard.

Ayla didn’t wait for me to finish calling the police before she started searching. As I dialed 9-1-1, she headed into the sitting room while giving a wide berth to Gladwyn’s body.