Lost to the duck low, leap high, dodge left—no right!—obstacle course that was our flight through the woods, I was paying attention to my feet and not Dell when she flung out her arm. The difference in our heights meant she nearly clotheslined me.

Panting hard, I leaned back against rough bark and gained my bearings. Something about this place set my hairs on end, the intense sensation requiring me to rub my arms to ease the prickling awareness. This spot was familiar, but not, the memory wispy like a forgotten photo glimpsed upside down that would come into focus when righted.

I smelled water before I saw it. The earthy scents of decomposition and mold, decaying fish and leaves dissolving into a new layer of silt, burned my sinuses. Above us, the towering longleaf pines leaned forward as if admiring their reflections.

Acid splashed the back of my throat, and I almost toppled sideways when the puzzle of our location solved itself in my head.

This was Pilcher’s Pond.

Marie Graeson’s body had been found here. I had first met Graeson in this spot, too, the grieving brother who searched for his sibling until locating her remains, who had joined in the hunt for Charybdis to avenge her. This was…the last place I expected to find him. Unless…

Whisper-soft, unsure why the quiet felt so absolute, I asked her, “Has his grief rebounded?”

The selfish hope that I was wrong, that he was still fit to help me work the case, warred with a tremulous fear that the desperate man I had first met would reemerge and that I would have no way to haul him back from the precipice, to teach him how to balance the same edge I walked daily.

Dell lifted a finger to her lips.

Those concerns flittered away to be replaced with new ones once the thunderous rush of blood in my ears receded.

Snapping teeth. Yelps. A short howl muffled.

Those sounds led me in a clockwise circle, until the full breadth of the lake revealed itself step by step. What I saw at the water’s edge chilled me to my marrow. The wolf I recognized as Graeson was ringed by four others whose colors and patterns were vaguely familiar. Two more lay on their sides, panting heavily, their flanks slick with what the moon revealed as blood.

Dell hooked her arm through mine at the same time I stepped forward, and she clamped her hand over my mouth. I hadn’t realized I was about to speak, but the words burned up my throat now.