And Wraith, come out of the night like an express train exploding free of a mountain tunnel …

She was fourteen when she learned the truth about her father. And her family. And herself. Wraith had stayed as her protector afterward, a shadowy presence in the park, showing himself only occasionally as the next few years passed, but always when the feeders came too close. Now and then she would think that he seemed less substantive than she remembered, less solid when he loomed out of the darkness. But that seemed silly.

However, as she neared her eighteenth birthday, Wraith turned pale and then ethereal and finally disappeared completely. It happened quickly. One day he was just as he had always been, his thick body massive and bristling, his gray and black tiger-stripe facial markings wicked and menacing, and the next he was fading away. Like the ghost he had always seemed, but finally become.

The last time she saw him, she was walking the park at sunset, and he had appeared unexpectedly from the shadows. He was already so insubstantial she could see right through him. She stopped, and he walked right up to her, passing so close that she felt his rough coat brush against her. She blinked in surprise at the unexpected contact, and when she turned to follow him, he was already gone.

She hadn’t seen him since. Neither had Pick. That was almost a year and a half ago.

“Where do you think he’s gone?” she asked quietly. Pick, riding her shoulder in silence, shrugged. “Can’t say.”

“He was disappearing though, there at the end, wasn’t he?”

“It looked that way, sure enough.”

“So maybe he was all used up.”

“Maybe.”

“Except you told me magic never gets used up. You told me it works like energy; it becomes transformed. So if Wraith was transformed, what was he transformed into?”

“Criminy, Nest!”

“Have you noticed anything different about the park?” The sylvan tugged at his beard. “No, nothing.”

“So where did he go then?”

Pick wheeled on her. “You know what? If you spent a little more time helping me out around here, maybe you could answer the question for yourself instead of pestering me! Now turn down here and head for the riverbank and stop asking me stuff!”

She did as he asked, still pondering the mystery of Wraith, thinking that maybe because she was grown up and Wraith had served his purpose, he had reverted to whatever form he had occupied before he was created to be her protector. Yes, maybe that was it.

But her doubts lingered.

She reached the riverbank and stopped. The bayou spread out before her, a body of water dammed up behind the levy on which the railroad tracks had been built to carry the freight trains west out of Chicago. Reeds and cattails grew in thick clumps along the edges of the water, and shallow inlets that eroded the riverbank were filmed with stagnation and debris. There was little movement in the water, the swift current of the Rock River absent here.