Derek’s phone went off at six forty-seven, and he answered it without checking the screen, already sitting up before Sheryl’s voice came through.

  “Are you up yet? We’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Karen,” Sheryl said. “She’s a werewolf again.”

  Derek put his feet on the floor. “Wait... what?”

  “Karen is a werewolf again!” Her voice cracked. “I thought her memory was wiped—she was supposed to be normal.”

  “I thought so too. Okay, slow down. How did this start?”

  “She showed up at my site last night. During the full moon.” Sheryl’s breathing was audible on the line, controlled, but just barely. “We both transformed at the same time. And then we fought.”

  “You fought her?” Derek asked.

  “I slammed her into a lake, but then—” She paused, catching her breath. “She dissolved, Derek. Turned into black smoke right there. Just gone. I tried using my senses, tried to track her, but nothing. It was like she never existed.”

  Derek pressed the phone tighter to his ear. “What do you mean, smoke?”

  “Before she disappeared,” Sheryl said, her voice dropping, “she told me Karen was gone. She said her name was Lycara.”

  Derek went still on the edge of his bed. “You mean like in that book you were reading?”

  “Exactly like that,” Sheryl said. “The goddess. The first of her kind.”

  He ran his hand through his hair and looked at the wall. “Oh no. This can’t be real.”

  “It’s real.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On my way back from the woods,” she said, the exhaustion running flat through every word. “I’m heading straight to the shower. I need to rest and clear my head.”

  “All right. We’ll get in touch with Marsh. He’s the only one who might understand what’s happening.”

  “Not today,” Sheryl said. “I can’t deal with him right now. Not after last night.”

  Derek hesitated. “Okay, fine. I’ve got class tonight, but I’ll check in before that.”

  “Good. Be safe, okay?”

  “Always, Mom. Always.”

  The line went dead. He stared out the window at the ordinary street, sun up, phone heavy in his lap. None of it matched what was sitting in his chest.

  By noon, after eating, showering, and a half-absorbed network security lecture, he called Olivia from the parking lot.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  “Detective Hale. Hey, how’s it going, stranger?”

  “Stranger? I think you’re the stranger in this relationship.”

  Derek exhaled. “Yeah, fair. Look, you told me to call if something crazy ever happened.”

  “And?”

  “It’s happening again,” Derek said. “Karen, our cousin, is a werewolf.”

  Olivia’s tone shifted. “What? Did the Compound wear off?”

  “I don’t think so. Mom said she saw Karen transform last night, then Karen disappeared mid-fight—turned into smoke. She wouldn’t even respond to her name.”

  “So what did she say?” Olivia asked.

  “She said she’s not Karen anymore.” Derek lowered his voice. “She said her name is Lycara.”

  A pause. “Hold up. Lycara? The werewolf goddess?”

  “You know about her?”

  “Yeah,” Olivia said. “From mythology. Greek, I think. She was the one the moon clans worshipped. The devourer of false light.”

  Derek leaned against his car, phone still in hand, while he watched two students pedal across the lot. Images flooded his mind: the sarcophagus, the mist that had seeped from it, the green light in the storm. He realized these events were forming a pattern he should have noticed weeks ago.

  “I’m heading to Dr. Marsh soon,” he said. “If anyone can make sense of this, it’s him.”

  “Then go,” Olivia said. “And keep me updated. If this thing is real, it’s not just your family’s problem anymore.”

  “Trust me,” Derek said. “I know.”

  He hung up, lingering by the car, his reflection in the window showing the gold rings at the edge of his irises—never fully gone since Everdale.

  Two days after Sheryl’s call, Derek drove them to Baton Rouge on a Tuesday morning with the sky overcast and the humidity already pressing through the car’s air conditioning before they’d cleared Bayou Mounds city limits. Sheryl sat in the passenger seat, watching the roadside vegetation pass, her jacket collar turned up despite the warmth.

  Sheryl’s eyes were rimmed red, and she leaned her head against the window, silent. Derek glanced at her, understanding not to push her about how little she’d slept.

  Dr. Carlos Marsh’s cottage sat back from the parish road behind a stand of live oaks whose canopy had survived the recent storm intact, the ivy on the east wall thicker than the last time Derek had seen it. The gravel path from the road to the front door was freshly raked. Marsh had always been meticulous about the property perimeter, a habit Derek suspected came from the same professional instinct that kept his lab organized to the centimeter.

  Derek parked, and they walked the path. Marsh opened the door before they reached it.

  “It’s been a while,” he said. “What brings you back?”

  He stepped aside to let them in. The interior smelled of antiseptic solution and coffee that had been on the burner too long. Lab equipment ran in the back room, a low harmonic that mixed with the hum of the overhead fluorescents. Marsh had a glass slide sitting in the specimen cradle of his main microscope, and the table beside the workstation had three open journals with sections underlined in red.

  Sheryl sat down across from the workstation, put both hands on the table, and looked at him. “Karen’s a werewolf again.”

  Marsh went still. His hand, which had been moving toward the stool beside the microscope, stopped where it was.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I saw her with my own eyes,” Sheryl said. “Same build, same strength. But her eyes were green, not yellow. And she said she wasn’t Karen anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Marsh asked carefully.

  “She called herself Lycara.”

  Marsh sat down on the stool and said the name under his breath, once, then looked at the surface of the table for a moment before looking back at her. “That name belongs to mythology. A lunar deity, goddess of blood and rebirth. I dismissed it as symbolic material tied to the original genome documentation, not a literal entity.”

  “You mean the werewolf DNA recovered in 1979?” Derek asked.

  Marsh nodded. “Yes. The ancient scrolls recovered with the sample contained embedded references, fragments about a moon’s hunger. I read them as poetic notation, cultural mythology attached to the discovery site. Not instruction.” He paused. “If Karen has become this Lycara, then a reactivation event has occurred that I did not account for.”

  Sheryl folded her arms. “There was a storm here about a week ago. The worst one in years. It opened a sinkhole just outside the city limits.”

  Marsh got up from the stool and started moving. He went to the far shelf and pulled two journals, brought them back, and set them open. “A storm,” he said, scanning a page. “An electromagnetic surge at the right frequency and duration could reactivate dormant sequences in the viral genome. Or it triggered a metaphysical mechanism. Both possibilities are on the table now.”

  He looked up at Sheryl. “You said her eyes glowed green. That is not standard Lycan biology. Yellow irises are the viral expression. Green is outside the documented spectrum for the virus entirely.”

  “You think she was possessed instead of infected?” Derek asked.

  “It’s consistent with what I know about Karen’s biological history,” Marsh replied. “Her Lycan strain was never purged, only suppressed. Compound 47 severed the hive connection and buried the active genome, but the DNA itself remained integrated at the chromosomal level. It has been sitting there for two years with no active signal running through it, which means when Lycara arrived, she found viable architecture with zero resistance. Karen’s immune system had stopped defending against the viral sequences because Compound 47 had convinced it the threat was neutralized.”

  “Ideal for what?” Sheryl asked.

  “For a vessel,” Marsh said. “Lycara could not manifest in a fully human body without biological infrastructure. She needed an anchor. Karen’s dormant Lycan genome was precisely that.”

  Sheryl reached into her jacket pocket and set a sealed vial on the table between them. Inside it, a luminous green fluid shifted with the movement, holding its color at full saturation in ordinary fluorescent light.

  “This came from her. I opened a cut across her snout during the fight. This hit the ground and I collected it before I left the clearing.”

  Marsh picked the vial up and held it at eye level, rotating it slowly. “It hasn’t degraded.” He set it back down and looked at the fluid’s color for another moment. “Standard Lycan biological fluid loses viability within four hours of open air exposure. This is two days old and the luminescent properties are fully intact. This is not standard blood.” He carried the vial to a containment cradle mounted to the workstation and sealed the housing. “Energy-laced plasma is my best initial description, but I need to run a proper analysis. Give me time.”

  “How long?” Derek asked.

  “As long as it takes,” Marsh said. “But if this substance behaves the way I think it will, it could tell us what Lycara is operating on biologically, which is the prerequisite for understanding how to stop her.”

  He exhaled and turned back to them, leaning against the workstation with his arms crossed. “You both need to understand what you’re dealing with. Lycara is not an infected animal. If the legends hold any factual foundation, she is a self-aware consciousness that predates the modern viral strain, possibly by several centuries. She will not behave like Monica, who was a human being using the hive as a control mechanism. Lycara is the hive, or what the hive was originally derived from. She will plan. She will expand. She will build toward a long-term objective.”

  Sheryl’s jaw tightened. “You think she’s creating another pack.”

  “Almost certainly,” Marsh said. “And if she is as powerful as what you described, she will want territory. The ancient texts described her primary objective as reclamation, rebuilding the dominion of her kind across human geography. She would interpret populated areas as territory to be taken, not avoided.”

  Derek leaned against the far edge of the table. “So what do we do?”

  Marsh looked from Derek to Sheryl, taking a moment before he answered. “Be prepared. Keep silver on you at all times. Silver nitrate rounds if you can source them, silver-edged blades at minimum. Because if Lycara truly walks among us again, I’m not sure modern weapons can stop her.”

  He paused, his eyes going back to the sealed vial in the containment cradle.

  “And pray she doesn’t find others like herself before I do.”

  The lab equipment ran its quiet harmonic into the silence. Derek and Sheryl looked at each other across the table, and neither of them said anything, because everything that needed to be said had already been covered.

  “You think she was possessed instead of infected?” Derek asked.

  “It’s consistent with what I know about Karen’s biological history,” Marsh replied. “Her Lycan strain was never purged, only suppressed. Compound 47 severed the hive connection and buried the active genome, but the DNA itself remained integrated at the chromosomal level. It has been sitting there for two years with no active signal running through it, which means when Lycara arrived, she found viable architecture with zero resistance. Karen’s immune system had stopped defending against the viral sequences because Compound 47 had convinced it that the threat was neutralized.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “Ideal for what?” Sheryl asked.

  “For a vessel,” Marsh said. “Lycara needed biological infrastructure—an anchor. Karen’s dormant genome supplied it.”

  Sheryl reached into her jacket pocket, withdrew a sealed vial, and set it on the table between them. Inside, a luminous green fluid shifted whenever her hand moved it, maintaining its saturated color even in the fluorescent lab light.

  "This came from her. I cut her snout in the fight. It hit the ground. I picked it up before leaving the clearing."

  Marsh picked up the vial and rotated it at eye level. “It hasn’t degraded.” He eyed the color. “Standard Lycan fluid loses viability in four hours. This is two days old, fully luminescent. Not standard blood.” He slotted the vial into a cradle and sealed the housing. “Energy-laced plasma is my first guess. I’ll run the analysis. Give me time.”

  “How long?” Derek asked.

  “As long as it takes,” Marsh said. “If it acts as I expect, we’ll learn how Lycara works—and how to stop her.”

  He turned, arms crossed. “You need to understand. Lycara isn’t an infected animal. If legend has truth, she’s aware and predates modern strains. She’s nothing like Monica. Lycara is the hive’s origin. She will plan, expand, and pursue long-term goals.”

  Sheryl’s jaw tightened. “You think she’s creating another pack.”

  “Almost certainly,” Marsh said. “If she’s as powerful as you say, she’ll want territory. Ancient texts say her goal is reclamation—restoring her dominion across human lands. She’ll see populated areas as targets.”

  Derek leaned against the far edge of the table. “So what do we do?”

  Marsh glanced from Derek to Sheryl, pausing. "Be prepared. Always carry silver. Silver nitrate rounds, if possible, silver-edged blades at least. If Lycara is truly among us again, modern weapons may not stop her."

  He paused, his gaze lingering on the sealed vial now resting in the containment cradle nearby.

  “And pray she doesn’t find others like herself before I do.”

  The lab equipment ran its quiet harmony into the silence. Derek and Sheryl looked at each other across the table, and neither of them said anything, because everything that needed to be said had already been covered.

  Outside, the cloud cover had thickened since they’d arrived, pressing the horizon down to the treeline. As night settled over Everdale, life continued elsewhere in town.

  Wild Dogs Bar and Grill sat on Everdale’s rebuilt commercial strip behind a gravel lot packed with pickup trucks, its neon sign running pink and orange over the entrance. The place had been operating for eight months since its reopening under new ownership, and on Friday nights it ran at capacity with the kind of crowd that came back out of habit and stayed out of relief.

  Howard Mills and Frank Hall had taken the last two seats at the bar at nine o’clock, which was exactly where they always ended up when Frank came through town between runs.

  “Business is booming again, man,” Howard said, wiping barbecue sauce from his fingers with a paper napkin. His HVAC company had been running double crews since the storm reconstruction contracts started moving. “I’ve got three jobs scheduled simultaneously right now. Haven’t had a slow week in a year.”

  “Hell yeah,” Frank said, working through his second beer and looking out at the room. “You give folks cheap booze and country music, they’ll forget the world’s burning.”

  They laughed. The band on the small stage was a three-piece blues outfit, the guitarist running a groove that ran under the room’s noise without competing with it. Waitresses moved through the packed tables, trays up. The smell of frying oil, pork ribs, and wood smoke rolled out of the kitchen and settled across the dining area, mixing with the cigarette haze drifting in from the side door that the smokers kept propped open.

  On the surface, it was an ordinary Friday in Everdale.

  Outside, under the fractured halo of a failing streetlight across the road, Lycara stood without moving.

  She wore the black leather bodysuit with its gold-stud chevrons running in paired rows down the torso and outer thighs, the hammered gold chain riding across her hips, and the thick black cuffs covering her forearms. Her straight black hair fell loose to her shoulders. Her eyes carried their green at full saturation, throwing their own faint illumination across the ground in front of her. Beside her, emerging from the strip of shadow along the building’s east wall, stood Paul Harris, Gwendolyn Harris, Michelle Warner, and Carl Sims, each of them dressed ordinarily, each of them standing with their hands at their sides and their eyes running the same quiet green at the pupils.

  “Tonight,” Lycara said, her voice low and even, “we begin.”

  The bouncer at Wild Dogs’ front door—a man named Terry, who’d worked the door since the reopening—watched the group as they approached. He stepped forward from under the overhang, raising a hand to stop them. As he opened his mouth to say the cover was fifteen with a thirty-minute wait, Lycara walked by, locking his body from the ankles up. His arm remained raised, his mouth frozen open, and he stood unmoving as the other four followed her inside.

  Frank elbowed Howard when the door swung open.

  “Damn,” Frank muttered, turning on his stool. “Who’s that?”

  The room did not go quiet all at once. It shifted, the conversations nearest the entrance dropping first and the ones further back following the sight lines, until the bar’s ambient noise had dropped two registers from where it had been a moment before. Lycara moved through the room, and her pack spread out behind her, each of them taking a slightly different line through the crowd, and the patrons in their paths stepped aside without being asked.

  “Hey, darling,” Frank called from the bar, leaning forward with his beer loose in his hand. “You want a drink?”

  Lycara’s eyes moved to him without her head turning, registered him from collar to belt, and returned to the room.

  Cliff Tanner, the weekend floor manager, came forward from the bar side with his hands out. He was a stocky man who had run a tight room for three years and had removed people twice his size without incident. “Hey! This isn’t a catwalk. You and your friends need to move off the stage.”

  Lycara looked at him. Her eyes held his face at the same level a camera holds a fixed point, steady and without variation, and the green in them ran edge to edge across each iris with no white remaining. Cliff’s forward momentum stopped. His hands stayed out at his sides, but his feet stopped moving, and he stood there with his mouth slightly open and his next sentence fully evaporated.

  Frank stood up from his stool and moved past Cliff. “C’mon, Cliff, you want some help? Let’s get these clowns out of here.”

  He reached for Lycara’s arm.

  Michelle stepped between them before his hand made contact. She caught his wrist, closed her fingers around it, and turned his arm at the elbow in a single rotation that took the joint past its natural range before Frank had processed that she’d moved. He went to one knee with a choked sound, and his free hand slapped the floor.

  “What the—” he started.

  Michelle’s eyes blazed a full green, shining steadily and brightly. She straightened her arm, hoisted Frank into the air by his wrist until his feet dangled eight inches above the floor, and his shoulder twisted past its safe point. Then, turning at the waist, she released him in a flat arc, sending him sailing across twelve feet and into a cluster of high-top tables along the east wall. The tables collapsed in a cascade of wood, glass, and steel, taking the four seated patrons with them.

  From somewhere at the back of the room, a woman shouted: “Is this part of the act?”

  It wasn’t.

  Lycara raised both hands—palms outward, fingers spread—focusing on every entrance in Wild Dogs. At her gesture, each door—the front door, the fire exit at the rear, the side door off the kitchen, the stage door at the back of the performance area—slammed shut at the exact same moment, the impact reverberating through the floor and up the legs of every stool and chair in the building. As she lowered her hands, the locking mechanisms engaged one by one, their clicks echoing through the room like bolts being driven.

  The screaming began.

  Lycara opened her throat. The roar came out below the audible range first, a pressure wave that spread through the building at floor level before it climbed into the audible range, and when it broke into the audible range, it was not loud in the way an explosion is loud; it was pressure against every membrane and cavity in the room simultaneously. The overhead lights burst in their fixtures and rained glass down across the bar top and the tables below them. Bottles on the shelving behind the bar skated forward and fell in a mass slide of breaking glass. The bandstand’s monitor speakers blew their cones, and the guitarist’s amplifier toppled backward off the stage.

  People went to the floor with their hands over their ears or their faces against the nearest table or their knees simply giving out from the concussive impact.

  Green lightning cracked down through the ceiling in five separate columns. Each bolt struck Lycara and a pack member directly, driving a visible crater into the floorboards. Their bodies took the current and held it. The light ran through their frames in visible currents beneath their skin. The change moved through them in the seconds while the lightning was still active. Muscle layered over expanding frames. Jaws elongated and reset. Black fur pushed through skin in dense, rapid coverage across every surface. When the last bolt discharged and light cleared, five black-furred figures stood in the bar where five people had been. Each stood between seven and eight feet tall. The largest stood a head taller than the rest, her green eyes burning bright enough to color the floor in a four-foot arc. The others’ eyes ran the same green, but at a lower intensity. Their chests moved in synchronized, slow respiration.

  Lycara opened her throat and roared again, and the remaining windows in the building blew outward.

  Then she stepped into the crowd.

  She moved through the bar the same way a current moves through a channel, choosing the path that offered the most resistance because resistance was the point. A man near the overturned high-tops had gotten back to his feet and was pressing himself against the east wall with a bar stool held out between him and the room. He was broad across the shoulders, a construction worker named Dale who had been rebuilding Everdale’s east district for eight months and was not a man who went down without something to show for it. He swung the stool at her forearm when she reached him. The stool’s legs connected with her forearm and two of the legs sheared off at the weld and the stool spun out of his grip and Dale looked at his own hands and then at her. She closed her left hand around the front of his shirt, lifted him, and walked him backward into the brick pillar between the high-top section and the main floor until the impact transferred out of the brick and into the wall behind it and Dale’s body went slack and she set him down.

  Carl came over the bar in one clean vault, landing behind it with his claws on the rubber matting. The second bartender on shift, a woman named Priya who had started at Wild Dogs three months ago and had never worked anywhere with a dress code or a fight policy she needed to enforce, backed into the corner between the back shelf and the beer cooler and pressed herself there. Carl looked at her for a moment, his green eyes at full intensity, and then reached past her to grab the cash register off the bar top and set it aside, not because the money mattered but because it was in his way. He took the shelf beside her and pulled it free from its mounting with one hand and let it fall forward onto the bar top, bottles and glasses coming down across the customer side in a mass of breaking glass, and in the noise and the chaos that followed, Priya ran for the kitchen door and hit it and found it sealed and pressed herself into the corner beside it.

  Carl left Lycara standing in the crowd and climbed back over the bar to return to his previous position behind it.

  Gwendolyn moved through the main dining area. She worked from the south wall toward the stage, cutting off access to the rear exit by positioning herself between the tables and the back wall. A group of six people huddled near the jukebox, their backs to the wall. They tried to angle furniture between themselves and the action. She stopped in front of them and looked at each face in the group from left to right. Her eyes ran green, her jaw remained elongated, and the fur across her shoulders caught the dim emergency lighting from the exit signs, which were the only lights still functioning in the building.

  Two people at the far left end of the group broke left and ran along the wall toward the stage. Gwendolyn looked at the remaining four and held her position. They held theirs.

  The two who ran made it to the stage steps, climbed them, and hit the locked stage door, both of them working the handle at the same time with no result. Paul came across the main floor and up the stage steps, and the two of them turned to face him. He was in full shifted form now, his frame filling the stage’s width at the shoulder, the green in his eyes the only point of brightness on the dark stage. He took the first one by the upper arm, and the person’s forward momentum transferred entirely into Paul’s stationary frame, stopping, and Paul set him down on the stage floor. The second one ran for the edge of the stage and jumped, clearing the four-foot drop to the main floor, landing, rolling, and coming up running toward the front of the bar.

  Michelle was standing in front of the sealed front door.

  The person running toward it saw Michelle and cut right toward the bar itself, vaulting the bar top with enough momentum to clear it and land on the rubber matting on the far side. Michelle came over the bar from the customer side in the same motion, and the two of them met behind the bar between the ice well and the cooler. Michelle caught them by the collar, drove them down onto the rubber matting, and kept her hand there. It was over.

  Howard Mills had been at the bar since the beginning. He sat on his stool, beer glass in hand, feet on the stool's rung. He watched the room the entire time. Howard was not a man who ran. He learned this about himself at seventeen outside a venue in New Orleans. It had proved true every time since. He watched Carl go over the bar and back, Gwendolyn work the south wall, and Paul on stage. He finished his beer, set the glass on the bar, and got off the stool.

  He went for the front door at a full run, two hundred and forty pounds behind his shoulder, the same way he’d gone through offensive lines in 1987, and he hit the front door with everything he had, and the door did not move. His shoulder absorbed the impact, and he staggered back into the middle of the floor, then turned around.

  Lycara was facing him from across the room.

  She walked toward him through the debris. Her heeled boots clicked against the hardwood in the silence that had settled across the bar. She kept her arms loose at her sides, her fingers flexing, her green eyes focused on his face. Howard squared up and stood his ground, bracing his damaged shoulder and holding his empty hands in front of him. This was who he was.

  She stopped six feet from him.

  “Man enough to try,” she said.

  “Lady,” Howard said, his voice steady, “I don’t know what’s happening, but I know it ends the same way for everybody. So let’s go.”

  She looked at him for a moment. Then she raised her right hand and placed her palm flat against the center of his chest. Green energy spread from her palm outward, branching across his shirt and through the skin below. Howard looked down at his own chest, watching the light move through his sternum and along his ribs. He brought both hands up to push her arm away. She let the current run at full output, a single sustained pulse. Howard’s legs folded under him. He sat down on the hardwood with his back against the bar and his hands in his lap. He looked at her from the floor with the same expression he’d had standing up.

  Lycara looked back at him. She lowered her hand.

  The bar was quiet. The emergency exit signs flashed red across the far walls. The jukebox had gone dark. In the kitchen, the ventilation fan still ran, its rotation slowing as power failed section by section through the building. The smell of fried food from the kitchen mixed with the copper of split wood and blood. The cigarette haze from the propped-open side door had nowhere to go now that the door was sealed.

  Lycara stood in the center of the room and looked around. Her pack gathered behind her. Their frames contracted back toward human size as the shift reversed. The fur pulled back. Jawlines reset. The eyes kept their green but faded to a human shade. Paul, Gwendolyn, Michelle, and Carl stood in the near dark. Their breathing was audible and measured.

  Lycara walked to the front door, put her hand against it, and the seal released. She pushed through it and walked out into the parking lot and the cool air of the Everdale night. Her pack followed her through the door and spread out across the gravel lot. She turned and looked at the building.

  She raised both hands, palms forward, and the green energy built across them in a concentrated charge, the luminescence thickening from a diffuse glow to a focused column between her palms and the building’s facade. She released three beams simultaneously: one into the bar counter, the lacquered surface taking the beam and igniting in emerald flame that moved to the back shelf and climbed the liquor bottles in sequence; one into the east wall where the high-tops had stood, the dry new lumber of the reconstruction catching instantly; and one into the stage, the flame running up the back curtain and reaching the ceiling joists in under twenty seconds.

  Emerald fire spread across the interior of Wild Dogs Bar and Grill and pressed itself against the sealed windows until the glass gave from the heat, and then it ran up the exterior wall and across the roof line, and the building’s neon sign, already dead, glowed briefly from the heat beneath it before the plastic casing blistered and cracked.

  Lycara watched the fire for a moment. The green light from it fell across the parking lot and across her face and across the four people standing behind her. Then she turned toward the tree line at the road’s south end, and walked into it, and the others followed her into the dark until the trees closed behind them and the only light left was the burning bar reflected in the underside of the clouds above Everdale.