Walker dropped his hand from my shoulder, and we walked over to Joe. He was in the shadow of a tall standing stone, crouched down with one knee on the grass. Something in the vegetation had obviously caught his attention. He ran a finger through the grass, and it came up with some sticky liquid on it, dark and red. He held his finger under his nose, then nodded. It took me a moment to realize it was blood.

“She’s a fighter,” he said to us.

“What do you mean?”

“She killed at least one of them.”

I remembered the other card of Cassie’s, the one that showed a bogan funeral in the Tombs. When I told Joe, he just nodded.

My gaze went back to the bloody grass at his knee.

“And Lizzie . . . ?” I asked.

“There’s only bogan blood here.”

“The Tombs,” Walker wanted to know. “That’s in Newford?”

Joe nodded. “But let’s see where this trail takes us first.”

He wiped his finger clean on the grass. Standing up, he led us across the grass and into the forest. We didn’t get far before we ran up against an impenetrable wall of thorns and undergrowth.

“She went through that?” I asked.

Joe shook his head. “There’s a smell here I don’t recognize. Fairy, but it’s not one of the bogans.”

“Look at this,” Walker said.

While we were studying the wall of vegetation, he’d wandered over to one of the nearby trees. He pointed out the blood on the bark of its trunk, the wooden spikes on the ground at its base. When we joined him, we saw the holes in the trunk from which the spikes had obviously been pulled.

Oh god, Lizzie, I thought, but Joe seemed to be reading my mind.

“It wasn’t your friend. The bogans had somebody else nailed up here. One of their own—or at least some kind of fairy.”

“And there was someone else here, as well,” Walker said. “I don’t know the scent, but it’s definitely a cousin.”

“Maybe it was the blind man that Mother Crone saw,” I said.

“Maybe,” Joe said.

He took the scent from one of the spikes, then let it fall back onto the grass.

“A cousin handled this,” he said, “and so did Lizzie. I guess she was taking down whoever they’d nailed up.”

Walker shook his head. “So, now it’s fairy against fairy, cousin against cousin. This gets worse all the time.”

“Unless it’s not a racial thing,” Joe said. “Maybe we’ve been coming at this all wrong. Every race has its assholes. Could be all we’re dealing with is a bunch of freaks who just happen to be fairy and cousins. Could be the targets are all random—just whoever happens to get in their way.”

Walker frowned. “I thought it was only humans I didn’t understand.”