Direct Descendant

by Tanya Huff

Genres: Humorous Fantasy; Fantasy Romance; Horror; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

This cozy horror novel set in modern-day Toronto includes phenomenal characters, fantastic writing, and a queer romance—the perfect balance of dark and delightful

This stand-alone novel from the bestselling author of the Peacekeeper novels mixes the creepy with the charming for plenty of snarky, queer fun—for fans of T. Kingfisher, Grady Hendrix, Sangu Mandanna and Erin Sterling

Generations ago, the founders of the idyllic town of Lake Argen made a deal with a dark force. In exchange for their service, the town will stay prosperous and successful, and keep outsiders out. And for generations, it's worked out great. Until a visitor goes missing, and his wealthy family sends a private investigator to find him, and everything abruptly goes sideways.

Now, Cassidy Prewitt, town baker and part-time servant of the dark force (it's a family business) has to contend with a rising army of darkness, a very frustrated town, and a very cute PI who she might just be falling for...and who might just be falling for her. And if they can survive their own home-grown apocalypse, they might even just find happiness together.

Queer, cozy, and with a touch of eldritch horror mixed in just for fun, this is a charming love story about a small-town baker, a quick-witted PI, and, yes, an ancient evil.

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Release date: April 1, 2025

Publisher: DAW

Print pages: 336

Sample

ONE

Cassie

The path from the lake to the lookout was steeper than I remembered and more overgrown than I’d anticipated, but that extra half hour of sleep had left me no other options. Slapping predawn mosquitoes and squinting up at steeply angled chunks of the Canadian Shield, I reluctantly admitted it might not have been the best idea to have taken advantage of having a solo and therefore unsupervised responsibility.

Nothing to do now but gird my loins and climb.

I clutched at a protruding root and hauled my ass another meter up the path, while buckthorn snagged my clothes and dug painful lines into my skin. Paused my upward progress to rip my hair free. Paused it again to yank my foot out from between two rocks. A little more light would have helped, but the whole point of the exercise was to beat the midsummer sunrise to the top of the hill.

One foot, hand, elbow, and other assorted body parts in front of the other, I kept climbing. I was not going to fail, not when the other Three had finally begun to take me seriously. Of course, not failing would have been easier had I not decided to sleep in. Contradictions are us. Well, me.

The sky had lightened, but the sun hadn’t quite risen above the horizon when I heaved myself up onto the top of the cliff. Before I could either congratulate myself or catch my breath, I realized I wasn’t alone. There was a stranger already standing on the lookout.

No, not on the lookout. That would imply he stood on the rock that bulged out over the lake. He was standing on the Dead Ground, the misshapen circle of dirt between the rock and the trees where Charlie had died back in the 1920s, where nothing grew. Not only was he standing on the Dead Ground, he was standing in the center of the Dead Ground, wearing a sheet and holding a knife, and that never ended well.

Sweat stinging in a multitude of acquired scratches, I staggered forward and bounced off an invisible barrier hard enough my faceprint hovered in the air for a moment as I stumbled back.

The stranger smiled at me over a scruffy blond hipster beard. A smug I’ve got a secret smile that made me want to kick him off the cliff and into the lake. Close to a foot taller than my five feet five inches, he was wiry rather than skinny, and I could see a lot of wiry, given the way he’d draped the sheet. He had enough muscle that even without the barrier, I wouldn’t have been able to physically move him if he didn’t want to be moved.

If he thought I was going to let him make me look like an idiot, he could think again. I also had a secret.

As I opened my mouth, three things happened. One, the sun rose. Two, the stranger dropped to one knee and slammed the knife through his right foot into the ground. And three, before he could scream—and he definitely looked like he intended to scream—he disappeared,

 sucked down into the dirt, leaving his sheet and bloodstained knife behind.

I stretched out a careful hand. The barrier had also disappeared.

Heart pounding, I twisted around and checked the lake to see sunlight sparkling on calm water. I released a long, thankful breath. Signs indicated that whatever the stranger had intended, it wasn’t the imminent destruction of the immediate area. I could toss the sheet and the knife off the cliff, watch them sink, and pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened.

I could.

But instead, I put on my big-girl pants and texted for reinforcements.

 

• • •

“I was not late!”

Standing as far from the edge of the cliff as he could get and still remain out of the woods, Eric spread his arms wide, golf shirt rising and falling over the kind of gym muscle that said I’m past forty and fighting it. “He got there before you, Cassie. That’s what late means.”

“Does it?” I paced along the edge of the lookout, a small part of me knowing I did it to show up Eric, who was afraid of the drop. “He could have been waiting up here for weeks, for all we know. How much earlier was I supposed to be?” I continued before Eric could speak. “Minutes? Hours? Days?”

“Not days,” Bridget said thoughtfully. “I came up to see Jeffrey on Tuesday; I’m sure he’d have told me about a man in a sheet.” Eric had been hanging around Bridget when he got my text, and she’d come with him up from the House. While the rest of us saw Jeffrey as our newest Guardian and obviously able to do the job, he’d always be her little brother, and she’d wanted to check on him. Caught up in a May/December—or to be fair, May/November or October—infatuation, Eric had been unwilling to stop her. In all honesty, I’d been glad to see her. Although no smarter than your average orange cat, Bridget was one of the nicest people I knew, in spite of her professional belief as a personal trainer that I needed to get more exercise. We were friends because Bridget saw everyone as a friend and because, as a red-blooded Canadian lesbian, I was not going to discourage even the entirely straight and platonic attention of someone so astoundingly beautiful. Here and now, she’d act as a buffer between Eric and I. It wasn’t that Eric and I didn’t get along; it was that Eric could be an ass, and while I had to work with him, Bridget didn’t. 

“If there was a man in a sheet,” Eric mused, arms folded, tapping his lip like a particularly annoying British detective, “shouldn’t Jeffrey have dealt with him?”

“If?” I began.

Bridget cut me off. “Take that back!” She stepped into Eric’s space and poked him in the chest with one shiny, pink-tipped finger. “Jeffrey’s new. He’s still learning. And the man in the sheet wasn’t an anything until Cassie was already here.”

Actually, he’d probably been a something the moment he activated the barrier, but he could have waited to do that until he saw me.

Eric made a grab for her finger and missed. “If he was peckish . . .”

“Peckish!” She poked him again. Hard. I was enjoying this. “Jeffrey is a vegan!”

“Oh, sweetheart, your little brother . . .”

Fortunately for Eric, who seemed determined to shove his foot further into his mouth, the roar of Great-Aunt Jean cresting the hill on an ATV cut him off. Although the groomed path up from the House rose at a gentle angle, at ninety-two, Aunt Jean would have found the climb impossible. That said, I had no doubt that borrowing the ATV had been at least fifty percent about making an entrance. We watched as she untangled her cane from between her legs, wincing in unison as one of the tennis balls jammed onto the four-tip base snagged on a plastic sandal strap. Bridget moved to help, caught a look, and retreated.

“Did you touch anything?” Aunt Jean demanded, the moment she was on her feet. “Any of you?” After we’d all assured her we hadn’t, she took her glasses off, carefully folded them, and dropped them to dangle against her blouse on the ends of a mint-green crocheted cord. “Cassidy, I found your text unclear; you should’ve called.” Her sweet-old-lady voice sounded disappointed. Her sweet-old-lady voice was a scam; she was hard as nails. “Can you remember if the barrier was inside or outside the perimeter of the Dead Ground?”

I smacked at a mosquito and thought for a moment. “A couple of centimeters inside, Aunt Jean.”

She wiped her nose on a tissue she stuffed back in behind the waistband of her light blue polyester pants, and began to slowly circle the patch of bare dirt, her gaze locked on the ground. “I can’t See anything,"

she complained after her third time around, lifting the cane so that its four filthy tennis balls pointed at me. “Are you certain you saw what you said you saw?”

A bit hard to mistake a strange man in a sheet stabbing himself through the foot and disappearing, but that wasn’t something you said to Great-Aunt Jean unless you had time for a lecture. “I’m certain,” I said instead. “And Bridget found his clothes under a bush.” I pointed at the T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes. “He’d dressed so he could say he was out for a run if he was seen. The shorts have that built-in underwear.”

Aunt Jean slipped her glasses back on and sighed. “Why do you care about his underwear, Cassie?”

“Well, if he wasn’t wearing any . . .” I realized I had no idea where I was going with that and stopped talking.

“And why is Bridget here?”

“Jeffrey,” I said quickly. “If he gets upset, he’ll get in the way.”

Eyes narrowed, she swept her gaze along the tree line. “Is he still hanging about? Fine, then, Bridget can stay.”

Bridget shot me a grateful smile.

“Can we return to the pre-underwear discussion?” Eric asked. “If he came up the path from the House, he had to have gotten here earlier than the first

 arrivals. I checked with security; the first car arrived in the park at four. Of course,” he added while I reflected on how the stupidly enthusiastic ruined it for those of us who preferred to sleep in, “there’s a chance he could have slipped by when security was distracted by the crowd.”

“Security watches the House, not the path,” Aunt Jean pointed out.

“I like to run at night,” Bridget said. We all turned to look at her and she smiled, the queen of the almost non-sequitur, only just having caught up to my observation about the stranger’s clothes. “It’s cooler than in the daytime, and it’s like you’re in your own little world. Once, I jumped over a skunk. I didn’t see it until the last minute. The poor thing was terrified. If Cassie’s stranger went for a run early this morning, it would have been cooler then, too.”

“Did you see the intruder while you were out running?” Aunt Jean’s gaze locked on Bridget’s face. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Bridget shook her head. “Oh, no, I didn’t run last night because I had to be up so early this morning, and I didn’t run this morning because I was at the House. I’ll probably run tonight, though. I know running isn’t for everyone, and I seldom recommend it for my clients, but I enjoy it, and I think you should do the things you enjoy. Don’t you? You’d probably enjoy some gentle yoga.”

After a long moment, Aunt Jean sighed and said, “No, I wouldn’t.” Then she kept talking before Bridget could politely press the issue. “I’ll stop by the bookstore later and ask Alyx to have a look. If there’s a lingering signature in a different tradition, her coven might be able to spot it. Now, then . . .”

Carefully not meeting her gaze, Eric stepped in front of her before she could enter the circle. “Watch yourself. Just because the barrier’s gone, that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”

She waggled her head sideways, in a you might be right kind of motion, put her hand flat on Eric’s chest, and shoved him hard enough, he took a single backward step across the invisible line. “Looks fine to me,” she said, walking past him. “Out now, please.”

Glasses off again, she circled the sheet and the knife three times. Not because three had any kind of metaphysical significance; Aunt Jean liked to be thorough.

“I can See where the blood and the blade went into the ground. Doesn’t Look any different than the rest of the dirt.” She slammed her cane down hard enough that dust kicked up around the tennis balls. Eric frowned. I held my breath. Bridget watched a butterfly. Nothing happened. “Given the disappearance, my best guess is he built a manufactured gate into the darkness using the lingering residue of Charlie’s death. The lingering residue of a Guardian’s death. Anyone want to argue?” She glanced around. Eric opened his mouth. “No? Good. Right, then, now for the lake.”

“I looked, Aunt Jean.” I gestured toward the water. “Totally calm.”

“You looked, Cassie. I didn’t.”

She gripped the crook of my elbow with cold old-lady fingers, and I escorted her out to the edge of the rock. I glanced back when I heard Bridget muffle a giggle and saw Eric making exaggerated push her over the edge motions. He looked thrilled to have made her laugh. Based on the way Aunt Jean dug her fingers into my abraded flesh, Eric was risking a lot for . . . well, as sad and pathetic as it was, let’s call it love.

The western shore of Lake Argen gleamed, bathed in the light of the rising sun. 

The trees to the east painted dark lines across silvered water. A gentle wave rolled north. Alice was awake, but she wasn’t upset.

“I See calm.” Aunt Jean snorted. “Calm. That’s a little anticlimactic, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t wrong, I acknowledged silently as we shuffled around together until we were facing the other two again.

“I See runes on the knife, but I don’t recognize them.” She frowned. “And the sheet is from the Lake Argen Motel.”

“You can See that?” Bridget’s eyes widened.

“The name is stamped on the selvage edge.” Pulling a clean tissue out of wherever old ladies kept their endless supply, she swiped at her glasses and put them back on. “What did your stranger look like, Cassie?”

“He wasn’t my stranger, Aunt Jean.”

“The Dead Ground and the weakness between realities that it represents was your responsibility this morning, so he’s your stranger until someone else claims him.”

“That’s not fair.”

“And you’re not twelve. What did he look like?”

I opened my mouth to argue, saw Eric settling in to enjoy himself, and closed it again. “Early twenties, maybe,” I muttered, after a moment’s thought. “Young, but not a teenager. He looked like those pictures of smug, white-boy Jesus you see all over the internet.”

“Was he holding a lamb?” Bridget asked.

“No.”

She sighed. “That’s too bad.”

“Because Jeffrey would love to sprinkle a little mint sauce on a la . . . AH!”

Bridget’s hiking books had pink laces and might have had steel toes, given the way Eric was hopping around, clutching his ankle. She was very protective of her little brother.

Ignoring them, Aunt Jean frowned in my general direction. “You’re bleeding.”

Shorts and a tank top, although closest to hand when I finally hauled butt out of bed, might not have been the smartest thing to wear. “Ran into some buckthorn,” I told her.

“Did you come up the path from the lake?” She clicked her tongue. “Left home a

little late, did you? You’re lucky you got through. When I watch the Dead Ground, I always get here at least half an hour early.”

“That might have been early enough to stop him,” Eric pointed out.

I leaned around Aunt Jean and flipped him off.

She clicked her tongue. “Honestly, you young people need to learn to manage your time.”

 

• • •

“. . . and then he disappeared. But I was at the top of the hill, at the Dead Ground, before sunrise.” All things considered, I wanted that last point remembered.

Amanda reached over and patted my arm. “Of course you were there on time, Cassie. There’s no need to be so defensive.”

It was always hard to tell if Amanda, who’d been a kindergarten teacher for over twenty years, was being honestly sweet or slightly patronizing. This morning, having endured Aunt Jean shouting criticism over the sound of the ATV as Eric and I followed her down the path to the House, I was going with the latter.

We’d left Bridget at the top of the hill waiting for Jeffrey to join her. Should the stranger suddenly reappear where he’d disappeared, she was positive Jeffrey could handle him. Should he emerge through the cellar door like everything else, security was already in place.

People who’d shown up bright and early to be part of the frontline defense should there actually be trouble at midsummer for the first time in the town’s history had left by the time Aunt Jean had led us down to the House. The sun was up, they’d done their duty by tradition, they wanted breakfast. Only Amanda, the last of the Four, had remained, keeping an eye on the cellar door, and waiting to be filled in.

“Interesting that there was so little to be Seen,” she mused, filling an ancient Melmac mug from her enormous thermos and passing it to me.

“I said I Saw nothing, Amanda.” Aunt Jean adroitly avoided Amanda’s attempt to pour milk into her black coffee. “The word little implies I saw something. I did not.”

Amanda passed the faded plastic yogurt tub full of sugar to Eric. “He drove a knife through his foot. I find the absence of screaming impressive.”

“But was it relevant?” Aunt Jean dunked an off-brand cookie into her mug and frowned

as the lower half dissolved.

“He may not have had time to scream,” I pointed out, perching on the edge of the locked cellar door, one foot braced on the ground because of both the angle and the hour. Sure, the sun had been up for a while—and I’d been there on top of the hill when it happened—but according to my phone, it was still only 6:20 AM. A red dot appeared next to my hip. “It happened really fast,” I added, tossing a salute in the general direction of its source. “Stab. Gone. He’s likely screaming the walls down wherever he ended up.”

“Men don’t scream.” Knees wide, Eric dominated one of Amanda’s plastic lawn chairs.

“Of course not, dear,” Aunt Jean murmured sarcastically before I could respond. “We need to find out who this boy is.”

“Was,” Eric snorted.

“Is,” Aunt Jean repeated. “A knife through the foot certainly wouldn’t kill him. It wasn’t that kind of a sacrifice.” Eric twitched at the s-word; given our origin story, it was the most likely word to catch the attention of any errant power. We’d learned, over the years, that it was easier to be careful than it was to plug the leaks. I swallowed the last of my coffee and cleared my throat, just in case. We waited. Nothing happened.

Amanda sighed. “Jean, he disappeared into the Dead Ground . . .”

She glanced at me. I nodded and made a sucked-into-the-ground motion with one hand.

“. . . so, as the Dead Ground is an acknowledged weak point,” she continued, “he’s entered the darkness. He’s dead.”

Aunt Jean sniffed. “We don’t know that. He was alive when he disappeared.”

Her turn to glance at me. I nodded again.

“Being alive when he disappeared and staying alive in the darkness are two entirely different things,” Eric pointed out. “Unless you think he has power that will allow him to survive.”

“I know he has power, and so would you if you thought about it for a moment,” Aunt Jean told him. “He knew about the Dead Ground. That means he was able to overcome the town’s protections. And he was able to sacrifice himself.”

During this pause, I almost thought I felt something slide across the other side of the cellar door, one elderly slab of wood between it and my ass.

I did not leap up. I stood at a perfectly normal speed and went to refill my mug.

“Neither point means he can survive the darkness.” Eric tossed me his empty mug. I poured the last of the coffee into it and handed it back, overcoming the temptation to toss it. “Has anyone ever survived the darkness?”

“Has anyone ever gone into the darkness?” I asked. “No one’s mentioned it in the Journals.”

Aunt Jean opened her mouth and closed it again. Amanda looked at Eric. Eric shrugged. I had another cookie. It tasted like triumph, albeit crappy processed triumph.

“Given that Alice hasn’t reacted,” I said, brushing crumbs off my tank top, “maybe the power is in the dagger, and since we have the dagger, we’re in no danger.”

“I Saw runes on the blade,” Aunt Jean announced.

It took effort, but I managed to keep from rolling my eyes. We’d all seen runes on the blade.

“Amanda.” Aunt Jean pointed at her, as though we didn’t know who Amanda was. “Just to be safe, you’ll need to be the one to retrieve the sheet and the knife from the hilltop. Take them both to the library for Janet to research.”

As the Hands of the Dark, Amanda could touch what she wanted—fire, acid, sharp edges, fruitcake. In the Journal entry for the day she was Chosen, Eric made a suggestive comment about touching, the kind her predecessor had appreciated. She’d ripped the door off his car. I wish I’d been there . . . although the strength thing? That made no sense. Hands gripped, they didn’t lift, but as I hadn’t been around to be consulted way back when the Dark was handing out body parts, I kept my opinion about the Knees, Back, and Shoulders of the Dark to myself.

“Shouldn’t we take the sheet back to the motel?” I asked around a yawn.

“No. If Arthur gives you a hard time . . . more than the usual hard time,” she amended, “tell him to call me.”

It took a moment—and Eric’s most obnoxious grin—before I connected the dots. “Why do I have to talk to him?”

“You’re the youngest.” Amanda tossed me the last cookie. “The youngest always gets the shit jobs.”

Aunt Jean was the oldest by a considerable margin and, more importantly, had been

the Eyes of the Dark for a long time. To those under seventy, she’d always been the Eyes. Eric had inherited the Ears at thirty-one, so eleven years against Amanda’s eight years and a bit of being the Hands. I’d only been the Mouth for eighteen months, making me, at twenty-eight, younger in the job than the fifty-one-year-old Amanda by about six years. Simon, the last Voice, had been the Voice for a little less than eighteen months. He’d Talked a lot, drunk more, and had gotten drunk enough he forgot the drone loaders at the silver mine that gave Argen, town and lake, its name, couldn’t actually hear him.

My first Words had been a quietly muttered SO STUPID.

Since even Amanda had found Simon impossible to deal with, and Amanda had spent her working life dealing with the occasional five-year-old who hadn’t been properly toilet-trained, Eric might have actually been right when he said, “Sometimes, big D likes to test us.”

Well, not right about the whole big D thing. That was just wrong.

Aunt Jean heaved herself up onto her feet. “Amanda, you should go with her.”

“Oh, come on!”

Amanda’s expression echoed my protest. “She’ll be fine.”

“Like she was this morning?”

“Hey!”

“Hay is for horses, Cassidy Prewitt.” Aunt Jean stared at me for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. “Fine. Go. Tell Arthur.”

“Tell him what?” I spread my hands. “That I found his sheet on the Dead Ground? Just lying there? Surprise, it’s a sheet?”

Aunt Jean sighed again. It was her I-don’t-know-why-I-bother sigh. “You tell him everything and you Tell him nothing. He won’t share information about your stranger without knowing why you want it, and we won’t know what to think of this nonsense until we know more about the stranger.”

“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Eric said smugly.

As I had no intention of asking what that meant, I ignored him. “So, it’s okay if everyone knows?”

“Did I say tell everyone?” Aunt Jean demanded. “No. I did not. We don’t want to start a panic.”

“It’s not like Arthur’ll chat about it to all his friends,” Amanda pointed out.

 

• • •

The Lake Argen Motel, besides being unimaginatively named, was a middle-American stereotype five hundred and half a kilometer north of the Canada/US border. It was a single-story building with the motel

office at one end of fifteen dark-grey doors that opened into the gravel parking lot. A plastic pot of coral-colored geraniums stood guard on one side of the office door, and a tall, handmade, empty metal ashtray guarded the other. As far as I could remember, the orange neon sign had always said VACAN Y.

Arthur Nollen was an incomer. Short, thin, with hands a little too big for his body, I’d never seen him in anything except worn cords and ratty sweaters. His eyes were a little too close together, his nose looked like it had been flattened in a fight, his mouth was almost wide enough to be creepy to someone who’d watched Mr. Sardonicus at a ninth-birthday sleepover, and he had great hair. Thick chestnut waves that gleamed in the sun and raised the entirely understandable question: Could they be as soft and silky as they looked?

No one knew.

Arthur did not like people. At all. His motel was not a welcoming refuge at the end of a long drive; it was a reasonably clean room with a door that locked, and if you didn’t like his attitude, feel free to move on.

Or as Arthur would say, “Fuck you either way.”

Half a dozen cats adored him, and the Dark had allowed him to put down roots just inside the southeast boundary, so as far as the town was concerned, that was that.

Any other morning, I’d have ridden my bike the short distance out to the motel rather than burn irreplaceable fossil fuels, but this had not been a good morning, so I’d gone home for my car.

Arthur’s ancient beater shared the parking lot with a brand-new king-cab pickup, jacked so high I had to go up onto my toes to see into it. The dashboard didn’t so much have all the bells and whistles as a full orchestra, and the black leather passenger seat had been left piled high with fast-food wrappers, empty takeout cups, and an open box of Canadian biscotti—Timbits, double-baked in the hot, closed cab.

The motel office was empty except for a fat orange tabby asleep in a patch of sunlight on the counter beside a sign that said, THERE IS NO FUCKING WIFI PASSWORD. I gave joining the cat half a thought, yawned, and hit the bell.

And waited.

And waited.

When my friends and I were kids, we’d ride out to the motel on our bikes and then

spray gravel in the parking lot until Arthur charged out, shaking his fist and screaming at us. He could spit out a curse faster than anyone we knew. Older and wiser, I was not going to hit the bell a second time.

Eventually, the door behind the counter opened, allowing me a glimpse of a crowded living room. Three tabbies sat on the overstuffed couch, watching what sounded like a cooking show. I couldn’t see the television.

“What do you want?” Arthur slammed the door behind him.

He’d bought and renovated the motel the year my grandparents were married. Over the intervening years, neither Arthur nor his hair had changed. Because his presence had set off no alarms—actual, metaphorical, metaphysical—we didn’t ask questions, no matter how desperately some people wanted to know his brand of conditioner.

As one of the Four, I had a certain amount of social authority—and no idea of what to do if Arthur refused to recognize it. Fortunately, he was so weirdly over-the-top angry about the use of his sheet in the commission of an s-word, the concept of confidentiality abandoned the conversation. Although I honestly couldn’t tell if it was the sheet or the s-word he was angry about.

“Travis fucking Brayden,” he snarled, stomping out the office and leading the way to room five.

“Is this his truck?”

“Of course it’s his truck.”

“It’s parked in front of seven.”

Arthur’s scatological opinion of Travis Bayden’s inability to park carried on until he got the door open. “He got here yesterday. Paid up until the end of the week.”

Here the day before the midsummer solstice, that made sense, but why pay to keep a room until the end of the week? Did he expect something else to happen when he stabbed himself in the foot? Was he not supposed to disappear?

“Good thing I ran his card up front,” Arthur continued, cracking his knuckles. “City boy only wanted to pay for last night, but I told him there was a five-day minimum in the high season.”

Well, that explained it. “We don’t have a high season.”

“Dumbass didn’t know that, did he? If he’s not back by Saturday, I’m burning his crap.”

Travis’s crap consisted of a duffle bag half full of high-end clothing, a wallet full of credit cards, a driver’s license with a Toronto address—he

was twenty-two and six-three—thirty-one dollars and sixty-five cents, and a pile of crumpled credit-card receipts tracking his drive north. He’d been using the swampy-smelling “personal” products that came with the room, which may or may not have helped with his decision to s-word himself.

There was a half-eaten bag of chips in the unmade bed, and a damp towel on the bathroom floor.

What there wasn’t was a convenient journal detailing why he’d s-worded himself on the Dead Ground at sunrise.

Or a phone.

 

• • •

Amanda was home for the summer, so I texted ahead and the Four of us met on her porch. Mostly because Amanda always had snacks and I was starving.

“Travis Brayden? Of Toronto? No.” Aunt Jean shook her head, white curls bobbing. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Not many people have. His socials are a wasteland. There’s a Mother’s Day photo of him having brunch in a high-end restaurant with his granny, and nothing since.”

“Are they holding hands?” I asked, leaning carefully over Eric’s shoulder to peer at his phone.

“Looks more like she’s holding his hand. Probably trying to keep him from making a run for it.” He shot me a look that was all wink wink nudge nudge. “We may have sussed out why he s-worded.”

“Do you have to?” I dropped back into my chair.

“Hey, we need a motive. We have a motive.”

Amanda dropped lemon slices into glasses of iced tea and passed them around. “The question before us is what do we do now?”

Eric shrugged. “We drive his truck into the lake and let Alice deal with it.”

“Can’t.” I drew a circle in the condensation on my glass. “His loving grandmother will declare him missing, and the authorities will know he used his credit card at the motel.”

“So? He came to the motel, he left the motel, and Arthur will tell the authorities to 

fuck off.”

“Language!” Aunt Jean cautioned. “The question we need to consider,” she continued, “is do we want Lake Argen to be the last known place the boy was seen before he disappeared, never to be seen again? That’s a rhetorical question,” she added, smugly spreading cream cheese on a cracker. “We don’t want an unsolved mystery. Unsolved mysteries leave far too many inconvenient loose ends. Trust me, I’ve seen every episode. Unless you want to be dealing with this for years, we need to control the narrative.”

“It doesn’t have to be complicated.” I reached for an early strawberry. “Travis paid for five nights at the motel, so we wait six days, then have Arthur call the Ontario Provincial Police and tell them Travis has disappeared.”

“Which is, strictly speaking, the truth,” Amanda said thoughtfully.

“And in what way is that not an unsolved mystery?” Eric demanded, looking up from his phone.

“Boy and truck disappear never to be seen again is a mystery,” Aunt Jean told him acerbically. “Idiot southerner wanders into the bush and gets lost is not. It’s a familiar narrative. It’s a tragedy. It’s a shame. It’s a waste of our tax dollars having to call out search and rescue; why didn’t he stay in the city, where he belonged? He got lost, he was searched for, he couldn’t be found—how unfortunate, but it happens. It’s many versions of it’s a pity but it’s not a mystery.”

“My bad. I thought you meant mystery, not mystery.” Eric’s air quotes around the second mystery were some of the most sarcastic I’d ever seen. Props.

“Amanda’s observation that it’s also essentially the truth,” Aunt Jean continued, ignoring Eric’s response, “will make it easier for Cassie to Convince the authorities.”

“I don’t need it to be easy,” I muttered.

“So you say.” Aunt Jean spread a little more smug cream cheese.

“What if he comes back?” Amanda asked, fidgeting with a fork. “What if he walks half a kilometer to the cellar and pops up through the crack?”

“You’re assuming he’s alive.” Aunt Jean triumphantly popped cheese and cracker both into her mouth.

“No, I’m not.”

We all considered

that for a moment.

Aunt Jean swallowed, frowned, and finally said, “Then he’s Security’s problem. I, personally, find it strange that, as of yet, there’s been no repercussions from young Mr. Brayden’s foolish sacrifice.”

We listened together but only heard the distant burr of a weed-whacker. I glanced at Eric and he shook his head. He hadn’t Heard anything.

“It’s the yet we need to worry about,” Amanda pointed out.

“Should we tell the secular authorities?” I asked. “Mayor? Town council?”

Amanda blinked at me. “Why would we do that?” The mayor was Amanda’s ex-husband. It hadn’t been an amicable parting; she’d taken out two streetlights during the divorce settlement. “The police will fill them in when they show up to look for Travis Brayden.”

“The police don’t know about the s-word.”

“And until the s-word impacts garbage pickup, the secular authorities don’t need to know about it.”

Eric nodded agreement. Aunt Jean started in on the block of cheddar.

“Well, pardon me for not having the protocols down on this, my first unscheduled s-word.”

Aunt Jean pointed a half-eaten sausage at me. “There’s no need for sarcasm, Cassie. This is everyone’s first unscheduled sacrifice.”

The sudden smell of sulfur turned out to be a result of the cheese.

The Acolytes held a scheduled sacrifice every Agreement Day. They chopped the head off a chicken, let it chase a few screaming children around the yard, then prepped it and sent to join its previously, conventionally slaughtered sisters in one of half a dozen huge, cast-iron frying pans. In the evening, before the fireworks, most of the town sat down to fried chicken with all the fixings.

I was in the Acolytes Children’s Choir for a few years, and it’s kind of amazing how much distance a headless chicken can cover. My mother still donates four big jars of her award-winning bread-and-butter pickles to the feast.

“Found a graduation picture Travis was tagged in from last year,” Eric announced suddenly. “No beard, but . . .” He turned the screen toward me.

“That’s him. And he’s holding a phone.” I squinted. The phone matched the truck. Latest model. Stupidly expensive. I wouldn’t have paid what they wanted for that space-gold proof of entitlement. “Where

 is it now?”

“You young people spend too much time on those things,” Aunt Jean muttered. “Mr. Brayden is probably using his to make self-things wherever he ended up after the sacrifice.”

Some lingering sulfur. The weed-whacker. And a dog. A normal, this-world dog. We could all tell the difference.

Rattan creaked as Amanda settled back. “Why,” she demanded, running her hands back through her hair, “must you keep saying the s-word?”

“I’m old.” Aunt Jean shrugged. “My husband’s dead and my children are complacent blobs of flesh. Not actual blobs,” she added after a moment, in case we were concerned they’d gone through a metamorphosis. It happens. “I’m bored. I’d like a little excitement before I die.”

“I’d rather not die with you, so stop it.”

“If Travis took the phone with him, he’s going to have a shit . . .” Eric paused. Glanced at Aunt Jean’s narrowed eyes and reconsidered. “. . . have terrifying roaming charges.”

“If he took it with him,” Amanda said thoughtfully, “where would he have been carrying it? Cassie?”

I swallowed a little too quickly, coughed cracker crumbs, and said, “Knife in one hand. Nothing in the other. I didn’t check his butt crack. Might’ve been firm enough.”

“Got to hand it to a dude who doesn’t skip glute day.” Eric met my eyes and grinned. “Maybe we’ll be a Five when he gets back.”

“Glutes of the Dark!” I threw my arms out and nearly knocked a hanging basket of something pink off its hook.

“What are you talking about?” Barely audible over our howls of laughter, Aunt Jean sounded annoyed.

“Glutes are another word for butt cheeks, Jean.”

“I’m aware of that, Amanda. What I don’t understand is why this Travis Brayden’s butt cheeks . . .”

Hearing her sweet-old-lady voice quavering indignantly about butt cheeks set Eric and me, who’d been starting to calm down, off again.

“. . . would make us a Five.”

“I think a fifth would be very helpful.” Amanda’s tone was pure kindergarten teacher. “He could toot for the Dark.”

We’d all gotten up

stupidly early and I, at least, was a little on edge about the whole stranger from Toronto comes to town to s-word himself thing. The sun had visibly changed position by the time we got ourselves under control and realized Aunt Jean had eaten all the rest of the cheese.

And I was very late for work. ...