“There are things I still need to say,” she says. “I need to apologize for thinking rules are more important than friends.” She inhales sharply, and I come to stand beside her. “I’m sorry for what happened with Blake and your mom. You were right. Blake never did really forgive me. She just said it. I think maybe she hoped she could believe the words one day.”

“Blake blamed the Order, not you, Nat,” I say quietly.

She shakes her head and then looks up at me. Her eyes are red, and tears slide down her cheeks. I brush them away. I hate seeing her cry. “I lost Lily even before she died… I’ll never forgive myself for that,” and then she falls into me and sobs.

Sometime later, after Natalie’s tears have subsided, we leave. Shifting into our hybrid forms, we land in the clearing where I parked my Jeep after leaving Anora’s. I look at Natalie. “I want to go back to where we found Lily. What if she was resurrected nearby?”

Natalie stares at me for a moment and then says, “Are you asking me to come along?”

“If you’re up for it,” I say.

She smiles. “More than ever.”

We shift and take off together. The Rayon High students chose to hide Anora in a pocket of wood near the graveyard. Guess they didn’t want to take Anora too far from where they abducted her.

We land in the field. Natalie and I pause a moment, observing our surroundings before we make a plan. Evidence of Lily’s animalistic state are everywhere—in the blood pooled on the ground where Jake fell, the earth torn apart by her savage attacks. The Order will brush Jake’s death under the rug, claim it was an animal attack, and only a few of us will ever know what really happened. It’s hard to be back here so soon, but necessary. Someone reanimated Lily’s corpse, and with the graveyard so close, I’m guessing the ritual was completed nearby. All that energy from lost souls probably fed the spell.

Natalie and I split up. She heads for the graveyard, and I follow a set of hellhound tracks into the woods in the opposite direction. Their prints are deep and fierce, evidence of their desperation to reach Anora. At some point, the tracks diverge—two on the left, two on the right, and one straight ahead. I follow the tracks in front of me, thinking they will probably lead straight to the ritual site. The other sets make me think the hounds got distracted by a scent or a chase. I’ll check them later.