I heard them making plans in the same distant, disconnected way I’d heard the voices in my head. A million miles away, people were talking. How could it matter to me?
They were going to take us into the swamp.
“Don’t destroy her phone until she’s in the dead zone. She has to disappear from there. Make sure you have everything she brought.”
Useless point.
Shine hadn’t removed my backpack when he zip-tied my hands. If they wanted to leave it here, they’d have to cut it off or release me.
“Why the swamp?”
“Because even if someone does search for her body,” Carver said, “they’ll never find her.”
I felt a spark of outrage blaze and die. How dare they ignore Conrad, like he was some pet that wouldn’t matter to anyone but me.
The group decided to split up. Shine and the two men who’d helped him catch us would take me and Conrad into the swamp. The other dozen or so accessories to murder would stay to clean up the church. The damage to the balcony could be blamed on vandals, but the blood needed to be removed.
Shine—may he rot in hell—taught them how to get rid of it.
Part of me, no bigger than a speck, kept waiting for someone from the neighborhood to come and investigate the noise, but no one came. They must have spent years ignoring the lights in the church when no one was supposed to be there. Or had they placed a call to the sheriff, who’d assured the dispatcher that he would head right over?
It didn’t matter.
Carver would go with Shine. She knew the swamp better than any of them.
“We have to be careful,” she said. “It’s easy to get lost there.”
I grit my teeth. Oh, sister, you have no idea.
It was getting late. The magic would be thick over the swamp. If it had influenced Conrad after only a few days, none of us stood a chance.
“And the holy relic?” Shine asked.
“It stays with me,” Carver said.
“But—”
She raised her voice, “It stays with me.”
Her hands tightened around the lamp, making her fingertips go pale.
No one argued.
Ah. So that’s your type of crazy. Obsession.
They wrapped Conrad in a tarp before throwing us both in the back of an old beige truck whose only decoration was its pattern of rust. Shine and Carver rode in the cab with the driver. The last man rode in the back with us. It still felt like “us,” despite the dull thunk Conrad’s body had made when they heaved it onto the truck bed.
The whole ride, I stared at the tarp covering Conrad, willing it to move.
They unloaded us at the same derelict dock that we’d had to wait at when we arrived at the Sauvage Preserve. The white mist was so thick that at first I didn’t recognize it. They sent one of the men ahead. He returned thirty minutes later, poling toward us in a decayed boat that I’d never seen before.
“Does the motor work?” Shine asked.
Carver cut him off before the man in the boat could answer. “It doesn’t matter. We don’t want anyone to hear us.”
They laid me face down in the bottom of the boat between the two benches and put Conrad in the back. The boat smelled of mold and some other putrid, organic scent. As faint as it was, it made my stomach heave.
Making our way through the swamp was slow. Shine had taken out an oversized flashlight from the truck—one of those powerful, heavy metal lights that were longer than a man’s forearm—but its beam could still only carve out a wedge of scenery from the surrounding darkness. Even if the motor did work, they couldn’t have used it for fear of coming up on an obstacle too fast. The man who’d brought the boat poled us forward as Shine and Carver argued in whispers over which way to go—what bit of water would be passable in a low-riding boat, and which would ground us. The man who’d been left to guard me had to get out and push us free twice.
By then the pain and the dizziness had faded. It was still there, lurking in the background with my grief, but it was dull enough that I could sense the small but furious spark that represented the totality of my will to live.
I couldn’t die yet. I had things to do.
The lamp was in the swamp. Lily Carver, bless her murderous, obsessive heart, had brought it home. If I could figure out a way to free my hands, if I could get the gun away from Shine without getting shot, if I could grab the lamp, if I could escape, if I could find my way to the lurkers or Vance without getting lost or eaten by an alligator, if they could take me to the hollow where I’d had my vision, then maybe—maybe—I could stop whatever was going to happen.
That was a lot of ifs.
I would have to come back for Conrad later.
Sorrow welled up from some fathomless abyss hidden in my body. I didn’t want to leave him. I told myself it was because I didn’t want him to be alone if he woke up, but the idea that I might have to leave him when he wasn’t going to wake up made me feel even worse.
But I had a near-impossible job to do.
One thing at a time, Emerra.
I tried to find out how much, if any, wiggle-room I had with the zip ties. My fingers felt cold and fat, and my hands throbbed whenever I moved them.
My guard was sitting on the front bench, facing me. He lifted his heavy boot from the bottom of the boat and placed it on my forearms on top of the zip ties. “Don’t struggle.”
Shine looked down at me.
I stopped struggling.
They were going to kill me—of that I had no doubt. Honestly, I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t done it already, and I didn’t want to draw their attention to the option.
Lily Carver suddenly gasped. Everyone in the boat turned to the front bench where she was sitting. I had to lift my head and crane to see.
“Look,” Carver said. The word was nothing more than a quiet, awestruck breath.
The poler swore. Shine and my guard stared.
The lamp on Carver’s lap had started burning.
The high, bright flame was mostly white with licks of yellow and orange flickering near the base. Mist poured into the cavity of the bowl from the air around us. It looked like vapor rolling off of dry ice. The mist was absorbed by the dark gray stone, making the quartz runes glow.
My eyes widened, and my chest went cold.
Something was wrong. In my vision, the runes had never glowed. Not like that. Not that piercing white. The flame had never been so high. Its brilliance was blinding, but the light didn’t reach as far as it would have if it had been a normal flame.
The pendant around Carver’s neck was giving off a similar light in green and white. The two colors shifted through each other, creating an aurora as bright as the lamp.
The necklace was magic. Of flippin’ course, the necklace was magic! Why would Gilles Bourdin have something as boring as a religious icon when he could have a magic amulet!
It wasn’t for protection. I couldn’t see those spells when they were working. But if it wasn’t for protection, then what was the necklace supposed to do?
The more pessimistic part of my mind added, And how bad is it going to screw everything up?
Lily Carver bent over the lamp. She didn’t react when her hair and forehead moved into the white flame. The only part that could burn her, or anything else, was the tiny wisps of normal fire at the base.
“This is it,” she whispered.
My eyes moved from the lamp to her face. There were huge tears rolling down her cheeks, one after the other, like cascading beads. Her expression of euphoria and enlightened grief was so profound that my heart ached when I saw it.
Her throat jogged as she tried to swallow, then she let out a sound that was part sigh, part laugh, and part sob.
“This is it,” she repeated.
The three men in the boat looked away while shifting their bodies and frowning. I knew how they felt. It was hard to watch her. Lily Carver had been emotionally stripped naked.
The man in the back drove the pole deep into the muddy floor of the swamp. The boat surged forward.
A few minutes later, Carver stood up, causing the boat to rock. Swamp water sloshed over the edge, soaking the front of my shirt and pants. The sudden chill raised goosebumps on my arms.
Shine spun around, his body tense. “What is it?”
“The flame,” Carver said. “It’s grown fainter.”
It hadn’t. It had grown whiter. The flame and the runes looked like a noon sun blazing off fresh snow, but she couldn’t see it.
She turned and stepped over me, then over the back bench.
“Where are you going?” Shine asked.
Carver didn’t answer. She stepped around the tarp hiding my best friend’s body, put her hand on the back of the boat, and jumped into the swamp.
“Lily!” Shine lurched toward her.
My guard stood up on my already injured leg. His foot slid off to the side, pinching my jeans to the bottom of the boat.
I couldn’t see past the back of the boat, but I heard Carver call, “I’m all right! Go on. I won’t be far away. If you come back here, you’ll find me.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Shine demanded.
“I think the power was stronger back there.”
“Does it matter?”
“It’ll matter later.”
“You don’t have a light!”
There was a sloshing sound. Carver’s voice came from further away. “I have all the light I need.”
Shine kicked the edge of the boat and swore under his breath.
“Brandon,” he grumbled, “keep an eye on Lily. Make sure she doesn’t do anything…crazy.”
“You won’t need me?” my guard asked.
“It’s a little girl and a dead body. We can handle it.”
As Brandon stepped over me, I glimpsed his expression of relief. Whatever his brand of insanity was, he hadn’t looked forward to killing me. He jumped out of the boat the same way Carver had.
We were at least five minutes deeper into the swamp before the poleman spoke.
“You sure you can find your way back?”
Shine kept his flashlight pointed ahead. He didn’t look around to answer. “If we keep to this channel, I can find our way.”
“Where are we going?”
“Straight ahead, Mike. As straight as the swamp allows. Find me the deepest bit of water you can.”
During my battle against the zip ties, the pain would sometimes become too intense for me to move. I had to stop and wait until it faded. In the lulls, I watched Mike and Shine, to see if they’d noticed what I was doing.
They were getting twitchier. Mike’s head would whip around to stare into the darkness, as if he’d seen something, or heard something. Then he’d slowly face forward again. Occasionally, the beam of Shine’s flashlight would suddenly shift to the side or move back and forth, raking over the water.
Once, he peered so long into the swamp, Mike had to say something.
Stolen story; please report.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine,” Shine muttered.
Three more seconds passed before he pointed the flashlight ahead again.
The magic is getting to them.
A minute later, Shine snapped, “Did you hear that?”
I stopped my useless struggling. The constant pain and effort had clogged my senses, making them dull to everything. I didn’t know how much noise I’d been making.
“You heard something?” Mike asked.
“That!” Shine said. “Do you hear that?”
I strained my ears to listen.
“I don’t hear anything,” Mike said, “but my hearing ain’t much.”
A creeping thread of alarm wove its way through my nerves. Now that I was focused on the sounds around me, my ears felt wide open, but I couldn’t hear anything. The only noise in the whole swamp was the sound of the water lapping against the sides of the boat.
Didn’t they know how weird that was? What had happened to the racket of the swamp?
Shine slapped his flashlight down on the bench behind him. “Never mind. How deep is it here?”
Mike probed the ground with his pole. “Left side’s dry, but we’ve got three…maybe four feet on the right.”
“Good enough.” Shine walked across the boat and stepped out on the drier side. I heard a small splash.
“Good enough for what?” Mike asked.
Shine grabbed the boat and pulled it onto the bank. There was a bump and a scrunch that sounded loud in the silence. “We’re going to drown her.”
My heart stopped, then started a thundering drumroll on my ribcage. My breath came fast and shallow.
I couldn’t see Mike’s face without the light, but he sounded uncomfortable. “You can’t shoot her?”
My throat tightened, making it even harder to breathe. When I closed my eyes, a whimper escaped my nose.
“Pass me the dog,” Shine grumbled.
Mike put the pole down and bent over the motionless tarp. He hefted Conrad’s body, tarp and all, and stood up. Handing off that much weight, even on a grounded boat, took some care, but they managed it.
With Conrad in his arms, Shine took a step away from the boat. “Lily’s wrong. It’s not easy to find anything in this swamp, but it’s not impossible, and people are going to be looking for that girl. If they find her, I don’t want it to be obvious that—” He stopped himself, then said, “I don’t want what happened to be obvious.”
Say it! I screamed in my head. Go on, Sheriff! Say it’s murder! If you’re going to do it, you should at least be willing to talk about it.
The tightness spread to my chest.
What a nightmare. I was minutes away from dying. Again. In the movies, this was when the plucky heroine always managed to break free, beat up the bad guys, and save her comical male sidekick.
Whereas I had hurt myself while failing to get out of some stupid zip ties and hadn’t managed to save anyone!
I couldn’t even claim the honor of dying with dignity. Ever since the last time someone had tried to drown me, I panicked whenever I had to put my face in the water. The idea of someone holding my head under left me trembling and weeping with fear.
I guess I didn’t have enough pluck.
“Lily wasn’t wrong about everything,” Mike said. There was an edge to his voice.
Shine paused, then let Conrad’s body drop to the ground. The crinkle of the tarp blended with the muffled thud.
“She was wrong about this,” the sheriff said. “That girl is important.”
I wanted to let out a loud, hysterical laugh, but the gag stopped me. I was important? Where did he get that idea?
I let my head rest on the bottom of the boat. My tears blended with the swamp water.
At least Kappa—my beautiful, sweet little bog-buddy—was safe with Vance. And Shine had a point; Big Jacky and Darius Vasil would come, and they would find me and Conrad—A dog? Really?—and when they did, there wasn’t a god in the world that would be able to save them.
Mike reached down and took my arm. His grip was surprisingly gentle—you know, for a murderer.
Geez. You are really stuck on that, Emerra.
He pulled me up without a word, waiting patiently as I worked to get my weak legs to support me.
Shine reached over the side of the boat, grabbed the huge flashlight, then grabbed me, clamping his large hand around my arm like a vice. I felt the pressure all the way down to the part of my forearm that had gone numb.
I stumbled as Shine pulled me from the boat, but his grip stayed solid.
“Get up,” he ordered.
When I stood, I looked at his face. His eyes dropped before they could meet mine.
Oh, good. At least he feels bad about killing me.
Call me spiteful, but I took a lot more comfort from the idea of Jacky’s and Darius’s justice.
“Come on, Mike,” Shine said. “I’ll need your help.”
Mike climbed out of the boat. He held me while Shine kicked a divot into the wet earth. He laid the massive flashlight into it to keep it from rolling around.
Mike’s head turned from me, his eyes following something I couldn’t see.
With a pounding heart, I set my legs and tried to launch myself away from him, but as soon as he felt me move, his hand clenched around my arm.
“Hey!” he cried.
Shine was beside me in an instant. He clamped one hand around my free arm and the other hand around the back of my neck.
“I don’t think so, little girl,” he said, his teeth bared.
My panic rose as they dragged me toward the bank. The closer we got, the more I struggled. I threw my weight around and tried to jerk free of their grips. Hyperventilation had cut my vision down to a narrow, blurry splotch, specked with white and tinged with a sense that none of this could be real. But I could smell the mud and the water. I could smell the plants. When Shine kicked my legs back, my knees hit the ground, jarring my whole body. There were three hot lines of agony on my wrists where I’d been yanking against the zip ties. This was no dream.
They changed their holds. Each of them grabbed my upper arm with one hand and put their other hand on my shoulder. They pressed my face toward the water. I could see lines of purple magic swirling through the eddies.
I craned my head back until my throat hurt from the tension, but it wasn’t enough. My head and shoulders went under.
Everything was cold.
I thrashed and flailed. I wouldn’t have stopped, even if I could. At the moment of death, my blind instinct was to fight like hell, even if I knew it was pointless.
The chill of the water moved into my bones as it sapped the energy away from me. It was the slow leeching of my life. The calmness of it had a weight, an inevitability, that made me despair. I could only fight for so long, but the water could be calm forever.
Then Mike let go.
The unexpected freedom gave me a stab of hope. I threw myself around, rolling toward Shine, pulling my arm away.
It worked! He lost his grip! I slid a few inches down the muddy bank, deeper into the swamp. I was still underwater, but no one was holding me there. I kicked and tried to sit up. There was air only a few inches above me! I could see the beam of the flashlight! All I had to do was…sit…up!
I saw the silhouettes of four small hands. The light of the flashlight shone through the translucent webbing, revealing dark lines of veins. They grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled.
My head was out of the water. I gasped in as much air as I could through my nose. Water came down with it. My chest jerked and spasmed as I tried to cough through my gag. I curled my legs under me, churning up more mud, and raised myself as high on my knees as I could. I sank into the muck, but most of my body was out of the water.
My heart sang with a ferocious joy. The lurkers had come! There were strangers in their swamp, they had seen me in trouble, and they had come!
I bit down on the gag, trying to stifle my wild, overflowing emotions.
There were at least a dozen of them. Two were with me. Four of them were fighting Mike. I saw spears. Those without spears used their teeth. Most of the other lurkers hovered around Shine. He’d drawn his gun, but the lurkers slid in and out of the shadows. Wherever Shine aimed, no matter how frantically he moved, the spot was suddenly empty.
I felt pain at the bottom of my skull, then the ends of the gag fell free. I spat it out.
“Turn off the flashlight!” I yelled. Would they understand that? “Bury the light!”
Lurkers had excellent night vision. If we could get rid of the flashlight, they would have an advantage.
One of them left my side and ran toward the flashlight. The other one used his stone knife to saw at the zip ties still binding my arms.
Frustration flooded me as I watched the lurkers fighting on my behalf. I wanted to launch myself into the battle—don’t you touch them!—but the seconds were years, and stone was only so sharp.
The zip tie highest on my arms snapped.
Mike landed a kick on one of his attackers. I reflexively tried to lunge toward him, and the stone knife ripped into my forearm. Three other lurkers swarmed Mike’s head. A fourth appeared from nowhere and jumped high onto his chest. Mike swayed. The lurker on the back of his head leapt free as Mike tumbled. His skull hit the trunk of a tree on the way down.
The second zip tie snapped.
The lurker who’d gone after the flashlight snatched it from its cradle.
I grit my teeth. Bury it, buddy! Take them down in the dark!
But Shine had heard me yelling. He ran toward the flashlight, stood over the lurker, and swept the muzzle of his gun toward the crouched figure.
Another lurker came from the side, fangs flashing in the light, then closing over Shine’s forearm. He screamed. There was a loud plop as the gun disappeared in the water.
The third zip tie snapped. I launched to my feet and ran toward Shine, trailing what felt like a gallon of water. My sneakers slid with every step.
Shine dismissed the lost gun with a glance and turned back to the lurker who was frantically heaping gobs of mud over the end of the flashlight. Shine backhanded the lurker’s face.
My legs burned from the effort of trying to move so fast through an environment determined to thwart me.
The lurker fell back while letting out a mew-ish cry of pain that broke my heart. Shine snatched the flashlight from the ground and raised it over his head, turning it into a fourteen-inch metal club.
I rushed under Shine’s strike and dived for the lurker, scooping him up and out of the way. The flashlight glanced off the angle of my low back and slid down to smash the back of my ankle.
Twisting as I fell so I wouldn’t crush the lurker I’d tried so hard to save, I landed with my butt on the ground, one knee up, my arms and head curled over the little guy in my arms. My eyes rose from Shine’s mud-soaked boots, up his towering form, past his outraged sneer, and along his raised arm to the flashlight.
My blood went cold. My soon-to-be-staved-in head was blank.
An immense furry arm reached out of the darkness, into the sphere of light, and grabbed the sheriff’s wrist, wrenching it down and back. The flashlight hit the mud, and I heard a terrifying popping, snapping sound that I just knew came from a human body and never, ever should. Shine’s scream was cut off when his chest slammed into the ground, driving the air from his body. The whole takedown was finished in under a second.
A deep voice snarled, “You god-damn son of a bitch! That hurt!”
Never had a string of profanity ever given rise to that much joy. It was the most beautiful sound in the whole world! My elated gasp carried my soring heart to the top of my chest.
The flashlight had spun so I could see most of what was happening.
Conrad, back in his wolfman form, was kneeling with one leg on the ground and one leg pressing into Shine’s back.
Conrad reached around to the other side of the sheriff’s belt and ripped the handcuffs from their holster. “I oughta fucking shoot you nine times—see how you like it.”
The wolfman was not gentle when he pressed the cuffs into the sheriff’s bloody wrists. Conrad had barely finished securing them before I slammed into his side at full charge. He grunted and swayed to catch his balance. I wrapped my arms around his fluffy neck and, in my enthusiasm, tried to squeeze his head off.
“Conrad!” I burbled through the lumpy sobs trying to erupt from my chest. “Conrad, you’re alive! Oh, god! Oh, god—you’re alive!”
He put his arm around me and held me while the laughter bubbled out. I rubbed my face in his fur whenever there was too much snot and tears.
“Emerra,” he grumbled when my outburst waned, “can I get my clothes?”
I jerked back. “Mike!”
“Who?”
“The other one!” I turned.
“He’s dead,” Conrad said.
I stopped and turned to face him. “How do you know?”
“There are lurkers by his body.” Conrad’s mellow statement sounded odd after all the chaos. “They aren’t fighting him. They’re watching us.”
My gaze drifted along the edge of the light. I could see a dozen pairs of black eyes, shining. One of the nearby lurkers put his hands into the mud and swung himself closer. The motion did nothing to dispel the eerie silence.
“My clothes?” Conrad said.
I winced when I grabbed the straps of my backpack. My swollen hands were clumsy, and they tingled painfully as circulation returned, but at least they worked.
When I held out the pack, Conrad stood up, took it with a brief “thanks,” and turned away.
“Do we need to worry about Shine?” I asked.
“No.” Conrad opened the pack. “I dislocated his shoulder—might have broken it—and it looks like someone tore open his forearm. He won’t be able to get out of those cuffs. If he tries, I’ll break his other arm.”
I looked down at Shine. What little I could see of his face was pale. His eyes were closed.
“What about you? Are you hurt?” Conrad asked. He dropped the bag and most of his clothes, then started pulling on his boxers.
Let’s see. My black eye was aching and probably swelling up again. My head felt like it’d been split open by a sledge hammer. My shoulders were burning sore. My wrists—oh, geez. I didn’t even want to think about my wrists. There was the cut from the stone knife, and I’d probably done some damage during my futile tug-of-war with the zip ties. My leg hurt, and I’d taken a flashlight to the low back and ankle.
“I’m fine,” I said with a smile.
Conrad gave me a look as he picked up his jeans. “Tell me what’s been happening.”
“You were unconscious?”
He jabbed an angry pointer finger toward Shine. “That guy shot me nine times, Emerra! That’d slow anyone down!”
It was good to know I wasn’t the only person who got unreasonable when someone tried to kill me.
Conrad did up his jeans and grabbed his T-shirt. “When a lycanthrope gets hurt too badly, they go under for a while to do some fast healing.”
“What happened to your rune wrap?”
“I tore it off. It landed in the swamp somewhere. Doesn’t matter. I fight better in this form.”
“So some jerk empties an entire magazine into you, you go unconscious for an hour or so, then wake up swinging?” I couldn’t keep the awe out of my voice.
“If you go down fighting, you better come up fighting.” Conrad sat down and started pulling on his boots. “What’s been happening?”
I told him how Lily Carver and the others had brought us into the swamp to dispose of the bodies. The lurkers snuck closer to listen.
“Where is she now?” Conrad asked.
“She and the other guy—Brandon—they got out of the boat early.”
“Why?”
“Conrad, she has…” I hesitated, wanting to pick a term that would translate. “She has what the lurkers are looking for.”
A dozen pairs of black eyes widened.
Conrad barked out, “What?”
“She has—”
“Why would she bring it here?” Conrad stood up.
“I don’t know! She’s a complete loony. You heard what she did to Gladwyn! Who murders a guy in cold blood, decides to do away with a few witnesses, then gets out of the boat early because all she can think about is her stupid religion!” I swallowed. “Conrad, we have to get the lamp back from her.”
“You’re injured,” Conrad said.
“That doesn’t matter! We have to get it back before something bad happens.”
A lurker beside me said, “Bad. Dangerous.”
I looked down. It was Scaredy-stone.
He nodded when our eyes met. “The dangerous.”
“The” dangerous?
“What did he say?” Conrad asked.
“They’re worried too,” I said.
“What are they worried about? With their immunity, the lamp could be destroyed—it wouldn’t affect them.”
I glared at him. “I’m going to get it back.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
Conrad sighed, crossed over to Shine, lowered himself into a squat, and started removing Shine’s equipment belt. Shine’s face was so white, he looked like a ghost. Sweat glistened on his forehead and cheeks.
“What are you going to do to me?” he whispered.
Conrad said, “First I’m going to take your belt and empty your pockets. Maybe you’re tougher than I give you credit for. I don’t want to make it easy for you to get out of those handcuffs.”
“And then?” Shine asked.
“Then, nothing. My friend over there”—Conrad motioned to me with his head—“has that look in her eyes again. Nothing I can do about it. We’re going to be too busy to babysit you.” Conrad threw the heavy belt over his shoulder. “If we remember, we’ll send someone out to get you in a day or two.”
“What about those things?”
“What things?”
Shine raised his voice. “Those little shits that killed Mike.”
“The lurkers? It’s not my business what they do or don’t do. We’re only guests here. And you’re nothing but a trespasser.”
As Conrad emptied Shine’s pockets, I walked over to Mike’s body. There wasn’t much light cast that way, but there was enough. I could see a dark, messy line across his throat. It wasn’t the blow to the head that had killed him.
I shivered.
Scaredy-stone put his hand on my leg. When I looked down, he said, “We’ll help.”
I felt torn. Having the lurkers as guides would be amazing, but they had killed Mike without a second thought. How could I explain to them that these humans weren’t in their right minds and that, somehow, that meant that you weren’t supposed to kill them? Were the cultists crazy enough to deserve leniency? Could the lurkers afford to offer it if they were fighting people who were so much bigger and stronger than they were?
And could I afford to reject their offer of help?
I have Conrad now. The gun is gone. It’s only Lily and Brandon.
But if I told the lurkers no, they’d follow us anyway.
I squatted down. “Send someone back to your nest. Tell Old Man—”
Scaredy-stone’s face scrunched up in confusion.
“The oldest one of you,” I explained.
Scaredy nodded.
“Tell him what’s happening.”
The lurkers held a muttered conference to decide who would go. One set out while the others turned back to me. Conrad came up to my side.
“Neither of us know how to use a boat,” he said. “Walking will be faster. Especially if you can talk one of our new friends into taking the lead.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said.
“Do you want the flashlight?”
Conrad didn’t need it. His night vision wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for the swamp. The lurkers definitely didn’t need it, and they had already proven there were advantages to moving in the dark.
“Go ahead and turn it off.” I looked out at the shadowy swamp. “I don’t want them to see us coming.”