The plants were so dense, I almost didn’t see the giant stone at the center of the clearing. It was dark, a black granite of some kind, and flat on one side, almost like a gravestone. It definitely wasn’t natural to these woods, and I found myself drawn to it, folding away the ferns to see the flat side clearly. I gasped. It was a gravestone!

Well . . . maybe.

I cocked my head, trying to read the words roughly carved into the side of the boulder. Moss had seeped into the cuts and cracks over the years, running the letters together. I was pretty sure the language was Latin, but I only recognized one word.

Primus.

The first . . . something.

I had no idea what the next word meant, but I knew who would. I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the full text, then I circled to the other side. It was rougher, and the flat plane on this side seemed to have been hacked away with a manual tool. There was more writing in a totally unrecognizable language. I’d seen enough dusty old texts and learned enough history over the decades to know the language was far older than the town of Nowhere—older than Iowa or America itself. I snapped another photo, then hurried back to the orchard to find Dex. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe some farmer dropped the boulder to mark his land as the first farm in Iowa, for all I knew. But my gut told me it was more than that, and that this place was keeping secrets.

“So, what do you think? It’s Latin, right?”

Reg hunched over the kitchen table, squinting at my phone screen. “Yes, but it’s hard to read. Primus . . . primus . . .”

“It’s the moss,” I said. I reached over to zoom in to the words.

Primus interitus.

Reg sat up and blinked. “The first death.”

I shivered. “Really?”

“Or first destruction? First decay? What an interesting little mystery.”

I didn’t know if Reg was really that fascinated by my find or if he was just glad I was talking to him about anything besides my date. He hadn’t said much about Poe since our last conversation, and I got the feeling he wasn’t up for my gushing.

“Where did you say you came across this marker?” he asked.

“In this overgrown stretch of woods by the apple orchard. It looks like nobody’s been back there in a hundred years.”

I took my phone from Reg and read the words again.

“Primus interitus. The first death.”

“Close,” Sal said, rumbling into the room and banging through the cabinets to start dinner.

“You speak Latin?” Reg asked with a note of doubt in his voice.

“I speak uppity vampire, and I know how they interpret that rock.”

Reg and I were mirror images of raised eyebrows and dropped jaws.