As she was gliding into a slow right-hand drift toward the infected part of town, a drift that would take them on a wide turn into a main street, Naomi suddenly reached out and grabbed the wheel in a bone white hand, wrenching it back the other way. Holding it there.

Claire stomped on the brakes, suddenly and violently aware, and glared at her. From the back of the pickup she heard a metallic clang as Shane’s back hit the cab of the truck, and then an outraged, “Hey! Flamethrower!”

“I must adjust frequencies,” Naomi said, and twisted knobs on the device she’d taken out of her pocket again; suddenly the faint singing faded into a blessed white-noise silence. “You need to be careful, Claire. If you hear them, then they hear you—sense you, at any rate. Magnus has a taste of you now. He’s curious about your return. You don’t want to be in his hands again.”

Magnus. The head of the draug—their master, as Claire understood it. They all looked identical, but there was something about Magnus that was just more … there. A kind of density that pulled everyone around him into the dark.

In his hands again. She couldn’t help but remember the cold, damp feeling of his hands around her neck, and a violent shiver seized her, as if her whole body wanted to throw off that memory. Deep, calming breaths, and then she nodded at Naomi. “I’m okay,” she said. “I know what to listen for now.”

“The point is not to listen,” Naomi said, but she let go of the wheel. “I assume you may have read a classical text or two, in your education, or is that no longer done?”

Claire was a little bit ashamed to think that it wasn’t, but she only said, “One or two.”

“You remember Odysseus, lashed to the mast of his ship, screaming to be released while his men rowed on, with wax blocking their ears?”

She did. It had been one of the stories her dad liked, one he’d read to her and they’d discussed when she was still just a girl. All of the great Greek myths, especially the ones about Odysseus. She’d always liked him. He was clever and dangerous, and he didn’t have any special godlike powers, either. Just his mind, and his will.

Listening to the sirens’ singing had been his own test.

“Odysseus was rarely a fool,” Naomi said, “but he was a fool then. That was the draug, singing to him, though the Greeks had a different name for them. He wanted to hear their song, and he did; he was lucky to avoid madness.”

Shane slid the back window open and stuck his head in. “Ladies, I’m sure this a fascinating conversation about shoes or whatever, but could we maybe not sit out here like a big old piece of bait? And by we I mean mainly me.”

He was right; this probably wasn’t the best time to be holding a review of the classics. Claire cleared her throat and put the truck back into gear to ease it straight down the road, in the direction Naomi pointed.