“You know, Franks, all of this being manipulated and lied to, now you get to know how Hunters feel about you guys.” It felt good to laugh at him. “Sucks, don’t it?”

His helmet rotated toward me. I couldn’t really see his face, but I could still tell he was contemplating throwing me over the death fence to look for foaming coyotes. But he didn’t—probably decided I might still be useful—then it was back to waddling.

Several small red flags had been stuck into the ground, and the major took a right when he reached them. There was no real trail here, but the feet had made a path through the snow. The sagebrush grabbed at my clumsy booties and tried to trip me. I was glad when the major led us onto a clear spot where the annoying knee-high bushes were missing.

“Motion detectors went off at oh-four-hundred yesterday. Our responders found this hole and we lowered a camera to find the seal broken. Since there were tracks leading out, but not in, that’s when we called your agency. Tentacle deer was enough for me. It’s your problem now.”

It seemed strangely familiar, this cleared area…and then the hazy, half-forgotten dream from the night before came rushing back and my knees turned to jelly.

I had seen this place before.

Slowly turning, I confirmed that the open spot was a perfect circle. The brush hadn’t been cleared at all, it simply wouldn’t grow above what was buried beneath.

In the dream, there had been a hole in the middle, with a rusty ladder leading down to a hatch that was never intended to be unsealed. I was scared to look, because to confirm it was to confirm my worst fears. I hadn’t volunteered to be the Chosen One, or poster boy, or whatever the hell I was, for a bunch of dead Hunters and the combined forces of good, and I dreaded when they tried to tell me something. Experience taught that when I dreamed about a case, it meant that bad things were on the horizon. For a moment, I couldn’t spot the hole and I felt nothing but relief, but then I realized it was just a trick of the light. There was a depression in the snow. The footprints led right to it.

The major pointed one black rubber glove at the hole. “There’s your containment unit.”

“Shit.”

“What?” Franks asked.

If the dream had been prophetic, sent by Mordechai or Bubba or whoever, then at the bottom of that shaft would be scratched the symbol I’d been terrified to finally find in real life…the mark that belonged to a being that would bring about the destruction of mankind. The mark that would end my father’s life. “Nothing.”

I didn’t need to see his face behind the mirrored visor to know that he didn’t believe me. Franks waited.