I hold my breath and navigate around them, wishing myself invisible, hoping none of them are like Vera and follow me, when something grabs my wrist. A scream rises in my throat, and a hand clamps down over my mouth. I bite into the flesh.

“Fuck!” the voice roars, and I twist to find Thane behind me. “You bit me!”

“You snuck up on me! What did you expect?”

“Obviously not your teeth in my skin.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad. You’re lucky. The last guy who snuck up on me got kneed in the crotch.”

A ghost of a smile graces Thane’s lips. “Too bad. He would have probably preferred your teeth.”

“Shut up. What are you doing out here anyway?”

“Following you,” he says, taking a quick look around. “I figured you’d need help.”

“I’m pretty good at playing dodge the dead, thank you very much,” I say.

We stare at each other for a long moment. I know he didn’t follow me to help; he followed to spy.

Then we hear the voices.

“Sean, stop!” The voice belongs to a girl. “It’s not what it looks like!”

In my experience, it’s often what it looks like.

“I can’t believe you, man!”

Thane surprises me by taking the lead, wandering even deeper into the woods. I follow, led by the voices and that horrible, energetic pull. It makes my insides shake.

“Put that down, Sean!” The other voice is male and alarmed.

Uh-oh.

I try to move faster but drag my feet. Maybe I’ll scare off whoever’s fighting in the woods.

We find them in a clearing—two boys and one girl. The one called Sean is holding a large branch like a baseball bat, and I’m fairly certain he’s about to use it like one. His skin glistens with sweat, and he is breathing hard. His eyes move from the boy to the girl and then go dim, like he’s not actually present in his body. I’ve seen the look before—in people who are dying or grieving.

“Sean! No!” the girl screams.

Sean lifts the branch and swings, hitting the other boy square in the face. He falls like a rock. I burst through the trees.

“Stop!”

Sean’s back goes ramrod straight, his head snaps back, and a plume of gray erupts from his mouth and gathers in a cloud above his head. I freeze. I’ve seen this thing before, tangled with my poppa’s soul after his death. The thing hisses at me and then ripples through the air like the aftershock of an earthquake. Its energy is dark and disturbing. It cuts through the trees, making their branches shake. I run after it, dodging limbs and dead things, but it is dark, and my clothes snag on branches and thorns, and I trip over rocks and raised earth, finally stumbling right through a dead guy.