Carroll knew firsthand how easy it was to get lost in those woods. There was no logic in there. No pattern to follow, no code to crack. In the North Woods, you might be walking what felt like level ground before you started panting and discovered you were walking uphill. Things were different in there…laws of nature weren’t followed. No maps existed because no one was allowed inside.

“Can you tell me,” Trachtenbroit asked, relieved by Carroll’s permission, “how best I can go about not getting lost?”

Then Trachtenbroit removed his velvet jacket and listened to eighty-something-year-old Carroll explain the rope system they’d used so long ago, when they’d staged a phony evacuation to fool Son of Blackwater and more.

The tales of the witch and exploding hearts meant little to the Scotsman, but he felt a burning in his chest all the same.

It’s what he called target.

Purpose, direction, intent.

Target.

A word Neal Nash would think of every time he took aim with a gun, every time he added false bricks to the base that supported his title of the best hunter in the history of Goblin.

Even on his birthday.

8

“Let’s blow some shit up!”

Nash was in a groove. The whole place was. There was constant chatter, constant coming and going. Mob motion. Like the house and grounds (the stables and the hangar included) were a living thing trying to lift off from the grass to head sailing to where the rain originated. Nash was a key part of this. But his motivations were varied. The owls lurked, perched upon the gnarled branches of his deepest desires, their shadows cast upon the party. And as he stumbled through the crowd, he looked different to some guests, some who knew him, and those who knew the look of a predator with a sudden thirst for a particular prey. He tried to blend in. He entered and exited conversations, often gripping random unfinished drinks and tossing their remains down his throat.

And yet he couldn’t blend in. And he couldn’t get drunk, either. Not the way the star of the party ought to.

After making a full round of the house, with a drink in each hand, Neal slumped between two women on the couch in his office, breaking their conversation in two.

“Get out,” he said.

The women laughed. Neal Nash didn’t demand people leave, he demanded they come.

“Get out,” he repeated, an echo like a hoot, and the women, flustered, removed themselves from his office.

“Get out!” he shouted, long after they had gone.

Then he sat behind his desk and opened the top drawer. There he eyed a book he’d had for the better part of forty-five years, picked up for a penny when he was but fifteen.

Get to Know Jonathan Trachtenbroit

More of a pamphlet than a book, with only so many pages and pictures.