“This is obscene,” Harper said, ducking down to keep from inhaling a bug. “I think I’d much rather take being hot and sweaty over dealing with these insects. Let’s go back.”

“Okay, good idea.” He started walking back to meet her but stopped short.

“What?” she asked.

He stared down at the ground, seemingly frozen. The bugs flocking around him didn’t even seem to bother him. Harper was about to ask him what again, but he bent down and picked up something off the ground. It was small and green and on the edge of the path, smashed into the dirt so it had barely been visible.

“What’s that?” Harper asked and walked over to him.

Alex brushed the dirt off it, so Harper could see it. She still didn’t understand what it was exactly, except that it appeared to be some kind of ring, but Alex’s hands had begun to tremble.

“It’s a Green Lantern ring.” He turned it around in the light. “Luke had his parents get him this instead of a class ring. He never takes it off.”

“Maybe it fell off when he was going for a walk or something,” Harper offered, trying to ease his fears.

“He never takes it off,” Alex repeated and started looking around. “He was here. Something bad happened to him here.”

“We should get the police.” She swatted away another fly, but Alex was oblivious to them now.

His eyes were pinned on the cloud of flies a few feet off the trail. He turned and walked toward them, mindless of the poison ivy and brambles that covered the forest floor.

Despite her reservations—more likely because of them—Harper went after Alex. As soon as he’d found the ring, she’d felt it in the pit of her stomach. A sick tightness. Just like Alex, she’d immediately known that something was wrong, that Luke wasn’t okay.

Alex stopped when he saw it, but for reasons she didn’t understand, Harper took a few steps forward, as if she wanted a better look. In reality, she didn’t want to look at all. She wanted to forget it as soon as she saw it, but it was already etched in her memory, certain to haunt her nightmares for years to come.

Luke lay a few feet away, or at least Harper thought it was Luke based on the shock of red hair on his head. His clothes were stained a dark brown from blood. There’d been so much of it that it clumped in places, looking more like dried jam than blood.

His face and appendages appeared intact, other than the insects that covered him. A thick white grub crawled out of his mouth, and his closed eyelids moved with living creatures beneath them.