“My friend wants to know if there is anything amiss to the north—” Giselle only got as far as the direction, when the sylph’s expression of bliss turned to one of terror.

“No! No! No! We do not go there! It is death! It is death!” she shrilled.

And vanished.

Rosa and Giselle exchanged a look of alarm. Finally it was Giselle who cleared her throat and spoke first. “And I thought you were being overly nervous because nothing has happened for several weeks. . . .”

“Not nerves. Instincts,” Rosa replied, her jaw set. “Once you’ve been in the Brotherhood a while, you get them, very keen, very accurate. The only question I have is if you are game to go with me to find out what this ‘death’ is.”

Giselle bristled a little. “Of course I am. Should we get Cody or Fox?”

But Rosa shook her head. “Not just yet. We two are natives here, this has nothing to do with them. In any event, Cody doesn’t have all that much in the way of power, and I don’t know what Fox can actually do besides call on his own version of Elementals. At least I know how you’ve been trained.”

“Well, my Elementals, at least the little ones, are clearly too terrified to be of any help.” Giselle reached up to get her gunbelt and her newest acquisitions; since Bad Schoensee she had been learning to handle the revolvers that Cody Lee was so good with. She was a fair shot with them now, and was used to their weight and kick. She very much doubted that she’d be ever be as good as the Captain was unassisted, but with another month of practice she thought she might be able to do some trick-shooting with them.

Right now, though, if she and Rosa were going to go hiking through the forest in search of something dangerous, they presented a better option than a rifle, no matter how good she was with the rifle.

She buckled the belt on and settled the weight of the revolvers so they rode comfortably, and made sure she had enough cartridges. “Anything else I should take?” she asked.

Rosa considered. “Salt,” she said. “Lots of things besides ghosts are discomfited by salt.”

Giselle added a pouch of salt, procured from a box in the ammunition chest, to her belt.

Rosa got her crossbow, her coach gun, a pair of daggers and—somewhat to Rosa’s surprise—an ax from her arsenal. She stared meditatively into the chest for a moment, staring at something that Rosa couldn’t see. Then she shut it resolutely. “Not the silver armor,” she said. “Your sylphs would not have been the least afraid of a werewolf or a vampir, and those are really the only two things that the silver armor is useful against.”