When Conrad and Kappa came back later that evening, I was already sitting up in bed. Kappa squawked and threw himself at me from the door. He hopped around me, letting out a stream of bubbly gibberish that the gift of understanding could do nothing with, and sniffed me all over three times.

Conrad was more subdued. He came over, sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped his huge arm around my shoulders, pulled me close, and laid his muzzle over my bald head. I heard the quiet sound of him breathing in my scent. That was all.

When he let me go and stood up, we started talking about his day in the swamp as if nothing weird had happened—I mean, anyone could lose five days. No big deal—but his ears kept doing this weird wiggle-waggle that looked like a combination of embarrassment and…something else. Some kind of energy. Instead of limboing between low and lower, they kept rising up and forward with a twitch or two.

I stared at his ears, trying to figure out where I’d seen that movement before.

“Thank god for the waders Darius brought,” Conrad was saying. “I thought my fur would never—” He stopped when he caught me staring. “What is it?”

“Conrad,” I said, “are you happy?”

Okay. Now, that was his embarrassed ear mode!

After a careful examination, Dr. Belliston had cleared me for everyday life and told me to try to do as much as I could for myself, as long as it didn’t exhaust me.

That shows you how much doctors know.

Keeping my eyes open was exhausting. I could only nibble at the dinner that Darius was kind enough to bring in. On my way back from a Herculean trip to the bathroom, I ran out of energy and collapsed on the small couch, so that was where Conrad and I watched anime on his phone. When Kappa decided it was bedtime, he dragged over his raincoat and started setting it up so he’d be laying half on my lap, half on Conrad’s lap.

“What’cha up to, buddy?” I asked.

“No bad dreams,” he said, still intent on his task.

I felt a twinge of sorrow. “Big Jacky told me you were having bad dreams.”

Kappa stopped and scowled at me, like he always does when he thinks I haven’t been listening. “No bad dreams. They’re scared of Conrad.”

When I looked up at the wolfman, he shrugged.

I laughed so hard that it robbed me of every last speck of energy I’d managed to save up. Poor Conrad had to put up with both of us sleeping on him until I had a dream bad enough that not even he could scare it away, and my tossing ruined the party.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

Two days later, I was sitting on the edge of the road, looking down the hill at the swamp. The idea of going outside alone, without a steadying arm there in case I got tired, had made me nervous, but that was nothing compared to my desperation. I needed to see the sky, the trees, the water—anything other than that room.

The swamp was more beautiful than I remembered. I watched the ropes of Spanish moss sway as the evening breeze rippled the surface of the water. I could only see pieces of the sunset through the trees, and its orange, red, pink reflection was broken up by thousands of tiny green plants that floated along without a care in the world. I wished I knew their name.

All the wildlife had returned, and with it, the noise. Owls, birds, crickets, frogs, and even one or two alligators that Conrad hadn’t managed to scare off.

Someone came up behind me.

“What are you doing out here?”

It was Brodie Kohler. I smiled when I heard his voice. He walked over, the heavy cast on his leg making an exaggerated thump, each time it landed.

I didn’t take my eyes off the swamp. “When do I get to see the fireflies?”

Brodie grunted as he sat down beside me. The cast made a dent in the mud when he hefted it in front of him and let it drop.

“You came too early,” he said. “Fireflies don’t come out until mid-May or June. Will you still be around?”

“Nope,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll even be here in another week.”

Kohler sounded resigned: “I’ll be sad to see you guys go.” He sniffed and rubbed the tip of his nose. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get out here, but everything’s been kind of crazy. I wanted to thank you, in person, for saving the preserve.”

I nudged him with my elbow. “You helped too. Conrad said you were the only reason he lasted as long as he did against the golem—” I stopped. “The golem? The go-lem. No. The thing? The colossus?” I nodded. “Colossus sounds better.”

“I think you’re right,” Brodie said with a smile. He put his arms behind him and leaned back on his wrists. “The colossus.” He shook his head. “It’ll take at least a year before I stop looking over my shoulder while I’m in the swamp.”

“Does that mean you get to stay?” I asked.

“You haven’t heard?” he said.

“No.”

“You are looking at the Torr’s new local coordinator for the Sauvage Preserve.”

He made his voice sound mockingly proud, but his smile was so genuine that it warmed my heart to see it.

He added, “They warned me that I’d have to do a few months of in-person training, but the rest can be done online. I get to stay here.”

“Now don’t take this the wrong way…” I started.

“I’ll try not to,” he assured me.

“Why you and not Vance?”

“Vance said he didn’t want the job. He said he was too close to retirement to do some ‘damn fool thing’ like training.”

I grinned. “I’m happy for you, Brodie. I think you’re the right kind of crazy for the job.”

He groaned like the whole world was against him. It didn’t fool me for a second. “There’ll be so much to do! I’m going to have to learn to sign with the lurkers, set up studies, learn all the laws around the preserve, all the stories—”

“All the stories, huh?”

“Oh, you have to learn the stories. What would this swamp be without them?”

As I looked back out at the swamp, my grin changed to a smile. There was less laughter in the expression, but a world more depth.

What would the swamp be without all its stories?

Less magical.

It seemed odd that I would think that. There’d been so much magic in the swamp, it had turned the water purple and had hung around in the air like a gas—but that was magic-magic. As boring as a battery. Nothing special. Nothing that moved the heart.

Geez. You spend one week trapped in a hideous motel room and that’s the kind of nonsense you start thinking.

“Just promise me that you’ll learn…all the stories,” I said, “including the sad ones.”

I felt Brodie’s eyes on me.

When I glanced over, his face was solemn and serious. “I will.”

We both looked out over the water.

Brodie interrupted the racket that filled whatever might have passed as silence in the swamp: “Will you tell me about Lily Carver?”

“The Torr didn’t tell you what happened?” I asked.

“All I heard was what they told the press.”

It took me a few seconds to sort through my thoughts. There was some stuff in there about the importance of keeping secrets, and the fact that I wasn’t authorized to tell anyone anything, but those thoughts were easy to ignore. I was talking to the Sauvage Preserve’s local coordinator—if anyone needed to know the truth, it was him. How could he organize things if he didn’t know what was going on? And since I was so sure that the Torr would get around to telling him eventually, I decided to save them the time and trouble.

Besides, I hadn’t signed anything about keeping any secrets. There was no contract. Not even a pinky-promise.

Someday, Big Jacky or Count Vasil would notice that oversight—but they hadn’t yet.

Brodie listened carefully to the first of the sad stories. When I was done, he frowned and shook his head.

“I didn’t know her well,” Brodie said, “but I liked Mrs. Carver.”

I thought about the woman who’d helped bring my groceries back to the motel and sat beside me in the old church and called me “darling” in that lovely southern accent.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Me too,” I said.

“Murder?” Brodie muttered.

“The magic probably drove her mad.”

Brodie’s frown deepened. “She had to have been a part of that cult before she started searching the swamp.”

“Yeah, but that’s a different kind of madness.”

Why was I so determined to defend her?

I heard her voice in my head: “…To him, the dead were never far away…”

Oh. Right. Because I knew her.

Ayla’s casual selfishness and ability to lie was so foreign to me that I couldn’t connect with her. It wasn’t because I was a morally superior person; it was because I’d been left alone, a huddled mess of mental scars, because of someone else’s selfishness. My empathy wouldn’t allow me to be so thoughtless. Every hole that had been left in my heart would burn.

But loneliness? The craving for something stable? The longing to pull anything close that could comfort you? I found it easy to connect to that.

Lily Carver and I weren’t all that different.

Emerra Cole, I told myself, you are not allowed to kill people.

I chuckled. It was sound advice, and, god knew, I would do my best to follow it. But I hoped I was still one or two steps away from becoming a murderer.

“You’re laughing?” Brodie said.

“Yeah, but don’t worry about it. It’s probably the exhaustion. I should get back inside.”

“Need some help up?”

“I could use a hand. What about you? Do you need help up?”

Brodie used my shoulder as a brace to get to his feet, then he helped pull me up. We stood there, hands still clasped, my other hand on his shoulder, laughing and assuring each other that we weren’t about to fall over.

Then he said, “You look better, you know.”

I bit back my smile so it wouldn’t ruin my expression of mock confusion. “Did I look bad before?”

He blushed. “I mean your face.” He blushed harder and rushed to correct himself. “I mean, your injuries. They’re healing.”

“A week of rest will do that,” I said. “I wasn’t even awake when they were using the ear magnets on me.”

“Ear magnets?”

I pointed at him. “And that’s how I know you’re not a boxer.”

“Come back one of these summers, Emerra.” Brodie’s face glowed with a low-key joy. “It’ll be hot as hell and muggy like you wouldn’t believe, but I’ll get you some iced tea and show you the fireflies.”

“I can’t make any promises, but I’d like to.”

“Do you still have my number?”

I told him I did. My phone had been in my pocket when…well, when it all happened. It hadn’t survived the second encounter with the swamp, but Darius had promised me that I’d get a replacement, and all my information had been backed up on a secure server. Brodie’s cell phone number was CIA-level protected information. So were all the pictures of Kappa in his raincoat.

We said goodbye and limped our separate ways.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

The next day, Count Vasil offered to take me out for some “real coffee.” He claimed it would be good for me. I accepted because it would be good for him. A vampire can only survive on motel coffee for so long.

Before we set out in his rental car, he needed to check in at the motel office. Cell phones still didn’t work in the dead zone, so people had taken to calling the motel’s landline, hoping to reach whichever Torr team-member they were trying to get a hold of.

I followed him inside.

Olene Durand was behind the front counter, talking to two men I didn’t know.

When I saw her, the shock made me stumble.

It was Ms. Durand. She had the same pale, long face and hooked nose, but there was life in her dark eyes. Her cheeks moved as she talked. As the two men said goodbye and walked away, she nodded, even though she didn’t have to. She heard my foot stutter over her carpet, and when she looked up, she smiled!

“Good morning, Miss Cole. It’s good to see you up.”

I wandered over in a disbelieving daze. “Thank you. How are you feeling, Ms. Durand?”

“Me?” Her voice wasn’t monotone anymore. “I’m managing. I’m sure I don’t know how—with every room full and no one to help with the housekeeping—but I manage.”

She looked out over her lobby. The couches were occupied, and the drone of several conversations rolled over us.

“It’s nice to have people around,” she noted.

People? Was that what she’d needed?

“Don’t forget you said that,” I blurted out, much louder than I intended. “Don’t ever forget!”

She looked at me as if she was worried for my sanity, but she turned away when Darius asked her if there were any messages for him.

Jasper jumped onto the counter beside Durand. His fluffy, grumpy, evil-minded pout convinced me that I wasn’t dreaming. A cat like him would become more grouchy the better he felt.

“You don’t get to glower at me like that,” I said to him. “You got fat off of my fish.”

He flicked his tail and turned his head away, putting maximum offense into his efforts to ignore me.

The whole town seemed more relaxed. I watched the people as we drove down the street. They still stared at all the outsiders, but there were more of us, so the effect had to be split several ways, and their looks were curious—not suspicious or hostile. I saw more people walking along the sidewalks, and more of them were smiling.

I mentioned it to Darius.

“A week of healing will do that,” he said.

Of course, Vasil had already found the best place in town for coffee. Dylan Ernst was there. Night Owl had refused to serve him alcohol that early in the morning, and Not-John hadn’t been too upset when Ernst threatened to take his business elsewhere.

“My health!” Ernst roared at me. “As if I had any health to worry about! Who can stand this world sober anyway?”

“So you came here for…beer?” I glanced over the chalkboard menu. Lots of coffee. No alcohol that I could see.

Ernst frowned and waved away my question. “Coffee’s all right. I thought I’d surprise my kidneys for a change.”

“If you really want to surprise them, you could try drinking water.”

Ernst’s lip curled at the idea.

Darius came up to my side. “Here you are, Emerra. The drinkable dessert you requested.” As he passed me the oversized coffee mug, he raised an eyebrow, as if to imply that I might not be qualified to be giving health advice.

The mug was brimming with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. His eyebrow might have had a point.

“Darius,” I said, motioning to the man at my side, “this is Dylan Ernst.”

“Dr. Ernst,” Darius nodded to him, “Emerra’s told me about you.”

Doctor?

The count must have done some research that I didn’t know about.

Ernst’s eyes narrowed. He raised a shaking finger to point at Darius’s face. “You. You were the one who gave the statement.”

“I am,” Darius said.

“You work for the government?”

“When I can’t avoid it.”

A slow smile spread over Ernst’s face. “Then you must be a part of the conspiracy.”

“Oh?” Darius said. “Which one?”

An hour into their conversation, I realized how silly it was for me to be surprised that Darius Vasil already knew all the conspiracy theories. The way he talked, you’d think he was behind half of them.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f011ZNa.jpg]

On Tuesday, I went into the swamp.

Conrad and Kappa had left earlier to act as guides. A half-hour later, Darius had stopped by to let me know that he’d arranged for the three of us to go home the next day.

“They’ll keep Kappa forever if we let them,” he grumbled. “Do you feel up to traveling?”

“No problem.”

He gazed at my fading black eye and hummed.

“Count Vasil,” I said, “I would walk home if it meant that I got to have Igor’s cooking again.”

Darius smiled one of his slight, closed-lipped smiles that never showed his fangs. “I think you would. But don’t.” He patted my arm as he stood up from the bed. “Rest for today.”

I knew it was good advice, but after Darius left, I felt restless.

I had already said my goodbyes to Vance, Brodie, and Jay. The deputy knew that I planned on leaving and didn’t seem to care. I’d visited the old church out of some morbid sense of nostalgia or curiosity. Or maybe because it was the only way I could think of to say goodbye to Lily Carver and Benjamin Gladwyn. What was left for me to do besides pack?

I knew the answer, of course. It was plaguing the back of my mind. But there’s a big difference between bragging about walking a thousand miles and actually walking.

I eased myself into it the way I eased myself into most of my dubious plans—by taking it one step at a time and telling myself I could stop before I did anything really stupid.

First, I put on my waders. Next, I threw some snacks in my bag. I wrote a note, threw it away, sat on my bed for five minutes, then wrote it all over again. That done, I went out to the place where Brodie and I had sat and watched the swamp. By the time I got there, I knew I was committed to my foolhardy plan, and I didn’t hesitate to slide down the hill and wade into the water.

Ten minutes later, I was lost. I had some vague idea about the direction that the motel was in. But I didn’t want to go to the motel. Fatigue hung on me like an iron blanket.

I found an area of high ground and sat down to rest.

The birds got used to me. That’s how tired I was. I was motionless for so long that they weren’t afraid to land at my feet. They eyed me with a gentle kind of suspicion that almost made me giggle. I thought I saw the head of a deer through the trees, then all I saw was its white rump. A mouse skittered over the ground toward me, probably looking for something to eat.

I wondered how something like a mouse could survive in a swamp. Could they swim? Or was this as high as the water got in the Sauvage Preserve?

A fin, followed by a brown and green head, surfaced in the water nearby. The mouse disappeared.

There was a large brown patch over the lurker’s left eye.

“Hey, Scaredy,” I said.

He crawled out of the water and sat down beside me.

“Can you help me?” I asked.

He looked up at me without saying anything.

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

His scowl of disapproval was so cute I had to pause to wipe the smile from my face.

I went on, “Can I see the lamp before I go? I won’t touch it. I promise. I only want to see it.”

His face screwed down in thought for a few seconds. Then he stood up and tugged on my hand to get me to follow him.

As I waded through the swamp, more and more black eyes appeared around me, shining like dark bubbles on the surface of the water.

Since the mist and the purple in the water were gone, the only way I could tell we were getting closer to the hollow was by how thick the trees grew and how much they bent toward it. There, beyond the bowing congregation of trees, was the lamp. I could see its rim and the pale light of its flame distorting the shadows.

I laughed and ran ahead, but I only made it two steps before my body reminded me that I didn’t have enough energy for that kind of enthusiasm. When I turned to ask Scaredy if it was okay for me to get closer, he was gone. I looked behind me.

The lurkers had all stayed back where the water was deeper. I could see a dozen sets of eyes, all watching me. One by one, they started disappearing.

I felt sad seeing them go, so I turned back and picked my way over the tree roots to get closer to the lamp.

I put my hand on one of the three trees that made up its cradle and sat back on my heels to get a better look.

In the center of the hollow, the tangled roots of the trees created an indentation that looked like a toddler’s clumsy attempt at a basket. The bottom of the lamp rested inside it without any gaps or wobbling. Of course it did. The flame that only I could see burned steadily, pointing toward the space in the branches that revealed the open sky.

This was right. This was how it should be.

I let out a content sigh and turned to go.

Old Man was sitting on a jutting tree root only three feet away. His back was to me, and he was looking over the swamp, as if he’d been wandering along and had just so happened to get tired, right there, and decided to take a break. A god-object, you say? A human? He hadn’t noticed.

I walked over and sat down on the ground beside him with my butt in the water. It took me a second to find the most comfortable bit of mud and root. We looked over the swamp together. It seemed to be a popular local pastime.

“I’m grateful you guys were willing to help,” I said.

“We’re the guards,” Old Man reminded me. “We’re grateful to you.”

Of course. Heaven forbid I should forget who were the guards and who were the helpers.

I didn’t think he’d know “you’re welcome,” but he seemed to understand “I was happy to help.”

“You’re leaving?” Old Man asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Did Scaredy tell you that?”

Old Man’s brow pulled down into confused wrinkles. “Scaredy?”

“He’s a lurker.” I made the sign they used for themselves. “A fighter.” I put a hand over my left eye. “Brown patch here.”

“Scaredy?” Old Man repeated.

I smiled. “You guys really need to learn the concept of names. Kappa?”

Old Man nodded.

“Brodie?” I made the sign for “big eyes.”

Old Man nodded again.

I put my hand over my left eye. “Scaredy-stone. Scaredy.”

Old Man gave me a weird look and shook his head. I laughed.

Names, in general, he could handle, but the idea that we might have names for them hadn’t occurred to him.

I taught him Conrad’s name and that you could call the bracelet man “Vance.” When he pointed to me, I put a hand on my chest and said, “Mera.”

“Mera.”

I reached out and put a hand on his chest. “Old Man.”

But that translated. I grinned when he looked at me sideways. He turned his eyes to the swamp, and his nose twitched side-to-side.

“Old Man,” he conceded.

We sat there, talking to each other, exploring the gaps in their language and laughing, until it was time for me to head back to the motel.