“Come on,” said Rose, hopping out of the SUV’s passenger seat. “It looks like the entrance is that way.” We’d rendezvoused with her and Dimitri in Houghton and then taken their more rugged rental vehicle out here to the packed-earth parking lot we now found ourselves in. Several other cars with Michigan plates were parked beside our rental, most of them the kind of heavy-duty models needed for life out in the wilderness. Admittedly, we were only an hour from Houghton, but it was hardly what you’d call a major metropolitan area. It had the basics—grocery stores, a hospital, Starbucks, even a university—but that was about it. Once you left the city limits, you were almost immediately out in the woods again. That was all I could see right now, and it took me a moment to spot the opening to the trailhead that Rose indicated.

“Narrow,” I remarked as Sydney and I followed her and Dimitri over to it. The trail itself was clear, but around it, the thick forest was difficult to pass through.

“By design,” he said, setting off like he did this sort of hike all the time. Probably it was how he’d gotten to school every day in Siberia. “Makes it harder for Strigoi to come through.”

“I bet it’s a real bitch to get through in the winter,” I added. I swore as a low branch snagged my coat.

Careful, warned Aunt Tatiana. That’s Italian leather.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them left for the winter,” Dimitri remarked. “This is an ideal summer location—somewhat high latitude. In peak summer, there’s probably only five hours without daylight. If you’ve got that and some solid wards, you can hold out relatively well against attacks—especially when it’s a group of dhampirs we’re talking about. They put up a good fight.”

I could believe that and stayed silent as I focused on paying attention to my footing and not eating any gnats. My muscles were stiff from so much time in the car, and the movement actually felt good. When Dimitri had said the medallion symbol was linked to a place called Wild Pine Intentional Community, I’d had no idea what we’d be getting into. Apparently, “intentional community” was the modern name for a commune, and they were something that humans still formed nowadays too. I’d also learned—thanks to Sydney’s endless knowledge on the drive here—that a lot of communes weren’t just hippie love fests à la the 1960s. Some were very modern but embraced green ways of living. Some were little more than campgrounds. Dimitri had told us in Houghton that this particular dhampir community likely fell somewhere in the middle. I was crossing my fingers for something on the more modern side, maybe like a secret wooded resort. Images of the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi came to mind.