Kate’s and Linnie’s prints made dotted lines that disappeared into the darkness. Maggie paused, surrounded by the cacophony of wind and water. She concentrated on the winks of the first stars until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then she moved forward again, more tenatively now, straining to find tracks in the moon’s pale shimmer.

Snowflakes, small and hard, spangled the air. A gust swept her hair into her face. Smooth snow stretched ahead in bluish, seamless phosphorescence. She’d lost the footprints. Looking up, she shouted for Linnie.

“Here!” The faint response didn’t drift from the short beach below or the woods to the right. It floated from the left, where the land narrowed and jutted out over the water.

“Wait up!” Sam called. A flashlight beam, then two arcs of light whipped up alongside her.

“Which way?” her aunt demanded, resting a hand on Thomas’s arm.

“The bluff,” Maggie said.

“Shit.” Sam lurched ahead, and his flashlight drew a brilliant zigzag through the darkness. “Linnie! Kate!”

Linnie’s answer came from farther away this time.

Sam ran after the sound of her voice.

Maggie followed him. The flashlight’s narrow beam up ahead struck her as impossibly frail, a mere pinprick of shine in the blackness.

A branch caught her coat. One tree, another, another—she ran under their boughs. Between the trees, moonlight pooled and sifted. The branches cast shadows like shawls. The snow was thinner here. Maggie slipped and nearly fell on an icy patch. A moment later, she did fall, tripping over a rock.

She staggered to her feet. The trees thickened to a stand, even as the ground on which they grew narrowed. Thomas and Wren had fallen behind. Sam had sped ahead. So Maggie entered the thicket alone and almost blindly, with only the moonlight dappling the ground and lake.

The water stretched close and loud on either side. Waves glugged over ice and shale. With her hands out to help her feel her way forward, Maggie rushed through the wilderness of Devil’s Tongue.

Her feet were cold and wet in her boots. The trees towered around her, sentinels guarding a secret place. They penned her in. How many? Four, five, six. They circled her. She breathed fast, stumbled, used her fingers like claws in her panic and haste, tore through the vines and branches, caught a handful of thorns, winced. Her palms hurt. She was hurt. Hurt, hurry, get away, away, call Mom. Shirt, underwear, jeans, fast, faster, my phone, shit, where is my phone?

A sob overrode her gasping breath. It was her own sob.

The sound dragged her back to the present.

Kate. Where was Kate? She seized a trunk and held herself steady.