Grief does strange things to people’s minds. This I know. One morning a couple of weeks after my mother died, my dad said he thought he could smell her cheesy grits cooking on the stove—my favorite and my mother’s specialty. Once, I heard her humming down the hall from my bedroom. Something so mundane and simple, so regular and small, that for a moment, the prior weeks were just a nightmare, and I was awake now and she was alive. Death moves faster than brains do.

I exhale through the memories, shut my eyes tight, open them again. No one else can see this, I think, scanning the group a final time. No one…

Except the figure on the other side of the fire, tucked between the trunks of two oaks.

Selwyn Kane.

He glares upward, his expression calculating. Irritated. His sharp eyes watch the there-not-there shape too. Long fingers twitch at his sides, silver rings flashing in the shadows. Without warning, through wisps of smoke rising in eddies and waves over the campfire, Selwyn’s eyes find mine. He sighs. Actually sighs, as if now that the hologram creature is here, I bore him. Insult spikes through my fear. Still holding my gaze, he makes a quick, jerking motion with his chin, and a vicious snap of invisible electricity wraps around my body like a rope and yanks me backward—away from the boy and the something. It pulls so hard and so fast that I nearly fall. His mouth moves, but I can’t hear him.

I resist, but the rope sensation responds, tight pain in my body blossoming into a single utterance:

Leave.

The word materializes in my brain like an idea of my own that I’d simply forgotten. The command brands itself behind my eyes and echoes like a bell rung deep inside my chest until it’s all I can hear. It floods my mouth and nose with dizzying scents—a bit of smoke, followed by cinnamon. The need to go saturates my world until I’m so heavy with it that my eyelids drop.

When I open my eyes again, I’ve already turned to face the direction of the parking lot. In my next breath, I’m walking away.

2

LEAVE.NOW.

I’m leaving. Now.

That seems right. Good. Best, even.

Beside me, Dustin is leaving too. “I need to go.” He shakes his head, like he can’t fathom why he hadn’t left the party already. I find myself nodding in agreement. Tor told us to leave and we should do as she says. We’re on the gravel path now, the lot a few minutes’ walk through the trees.