It wasn’t until we checked the rooms on the right side of the stairs. Top and Bunny moved down the hall to take the second bedroom, leaving the first for me. I scanned the door with an Anteater but detected no alarms. So I reached for the knob.

But before my fingers closed around it, a voice behind me said, “Be careful, Joe. This is a bad place for you.”

I whirled, bringing up my barrel.

But the hallway behind me was empty.

Ghost whipped his head around and stared. Not at the hall, but at me. There was confusion in his dark eyes. Down the hall, I saw Top watching me. My movement had alerted him, and he looked at me and past me down the empty hall, then back to me again.

I waved him off. He lingered for a moment and then shifted back to the job at hand. Bunny had been scanning the door and did not appear to notice.

Be careful, Joe. This is a bad place for you.

I’d heard those words clear as day.

But the voice.

Fuck me.

That voice was impossible. Achingly so.

Those words had been spoken in the voice of my brother, Sean.

Sean, who was three months in the cold ground of a Maryland cemetery, along with everyone else I was related to by blood.

The shivers kept wanting to take mastery over me. My knees wanted to buckle. There were tears burning in the corners of my eyes.

Was that who I saw in the forest?

No.

No, that man was older. He was …

Oh, Christ. I knew who the man in the woods had been. My height. My basic build, but thirty years older.

“Dad,” I breathed.

Top and Bunny stopped, and this time, they both turned to me. I’d whispered the word, but the team channel was live. Which meant Andrea and Belle had heard it, too.

I’m losing my shit, I thought, and no voice—living or dead—spoke out in contradiction.

Ghost pushed against my leg with his nose. I thought he was just concerned for his master going around the bend, until I noticed that all the fur on his back was standing straight up.

Top began moving down the hall toward me, but I waved him back. Again there was that lingering look. He did not like what he was seeing. They all knew the emotional stress I was under and how that was built on a fragile framework of a psychological makeup that could best be described as shaky. Or, less charitably, that I was deeply damaged goods.