Rosanna cut the engine completely, and the boat glided silently forward to the broken wooden post nearest the shore. She climbed into the front of the boat and was waiting with a rope when the prow of the vessel bumped the column. She tied the boat to the post, then hopped down into the water and waded the rest of the way ashore.

“Oh, good,” I muttered. “More wet.”

From back behind us, the still-rising wind carried forward a gurgling, warbling cry. I’d been up north a few times, and it might have been the call of a loon—but all of us there knew better. Summer was still on our trail.

“We aren’t going to make it any drier by waiting here,” Michael said quietly.

“There are men in those trees,” Sanya murmured, sheathing his sword and taking up the Kalashnikov again. “Thirty yards up, there, and over there. Those are machine-gun positions.”

I grunted. “Let’s get moving. Before they get bored and decide to start making like this is Normandy.”

“God go with us,” Michael prayed quietly.

I unlimbered my shotgun and said, “Amen.”

Chapter Forty-two

Michael had planned ahead. He had a dozen chemical heat bags with him, the kind made for hunters to slip inside the wristbands of their coats. He passed them around to us, and we put them inside our socks after we waded ashore. Otherwise I don’t know if we would have made it through the snow up that hill, not with our pants soaked to the knees.

Rosanna, of course, wasn’t having any issues with the weather. With her wings draped around her like a cloak, the demonic form she wore seemed inured to the cold, and her cloven hooves moved along the frozen, stony hillside as nimbly as a mountain goat’s, her barb-tipped tail lashing back and forth dramatically as she went. Sanya walked along behind her, then me, and Michael brought up the rear. It wasn’t a long walk, but it fit in a lot of unpleasantness into a little bit of time. The little town had been a company town, built up around what looked like an old cannery—a long building, falling to pieces now, at the very end of the ruined street.

Partway up the hill we ran across a trail that had obviously been in use over the past several days. Someone had kept it clear of snow, exposing a path that had been cut into the rock of the hillside, including stone stairs that led up to its summit. As we went up the stairs the shape at the top of the hill became clearer, as light from the large fire beside it revealed it more clearly.

“A lighthouse,” I murmured. “Or what’s left of one.”

It might have been a fifty-foot tower at one time, but it had been broken off perhaps twenty feet up as if snapped by a giant’s hand. Beacon towers dotted the shorelines and islands of all of the Great Lakes, and like all such structures they had accumulated more than their due of strange stories. I hadn’t heard any stories about this one—but staring up at the rough grey stones, I got the impression that it might have had something to do with the fact that in order for strange stories to spread, someone has to survive a dark encounter in order to start the tale.