Carrie had been lifted onto one of the horses. She stared straight ahead, her mouth in a tight line, spots of bright color in her cheeks. The leader took the reins of her horse and then mounted his own. He pointed at Lee, disabling the charm that had been laid on him, but Lee just lay there, afraid to move, knowing finally and for true that he was, at heart, a coward.

And then it happened. A bolt of light blazed through the trees, blue-white and deadly, trailing flaming stars—like the fireworks Lee had seen once in Cincinnati. The air crackled with electricity, and even at a distance, his hair stood on end. The blast struck its target dead-on, and for a moment, Carrie and the horse beneath her were outlined in flames, like some heavenly bodies that had passed before the sun. There was a shimmer in the air, a kind of visual vibration, and then they were gone, horse and rider vaporized, as if they had never existed.

“It’s the White Rose!” one of the wizards shouted.

Turning his horse, he charged through the trees. The other wizards wheeled their horses and followed, screaming in rage, but the White Rose had done what it came to do, and was in full retreat. In a matter of minutes, the horses and riders were gone. Dust settled slowly through shafts of sunlight, and the clearing was quiet, save the sound of the wind moving the branches overhead.

By the time darkness had fallen, Lee was already miles away, sitting cross-legged on the riverbank. When the moon finally cleared the trees, it shone on the Ohio, which ran like a silver ribbon in both directions. Across the river lay Kentucky, a mysterious darkness pierced by the lights of scattered settlements.

“I won’t be a bear any longer,” he said to himself. He would be fiercer, more invincible. “From now on, I’m a dragon.”

Before he continued on, he took his sister’s knife and wrote something in the soft mud at the water’s edge, wrote it in order to fix it in his mind.

The word was “Wylie.”

TRINITY, OHIO

More than 100 years later

The baby awakened when Jessamine uncovered him. She thought he might cry, but he only gazed at her solemnly with bright blue eyes while she opened his shirt and examined the incision. Still a little red and puffy at the edges, but no sign of infection. Perfect. She’d half expected that the procedure would kill him, but he seemed to be thriving. Only a month post-op, her patient had gained weight, his color was good, pulse and respiration normal.

No reason he couldn’t travel. None at all.

She snapped the baby’s shirt closed, feeling pleased with herself. Those fools at the hospital had been difficult about everything: her methods, that she’d brought her own people to assist, that she wouldn’t let them observe the procedure.