Suddenly, a crack sounded from the roof. Not a crack, a slow groan. It was weight against the wood, slow and deliberate. It was footsteps, each one measured as though the creature above them struggled to balance. The sound started at the center of Ashley’s bedroom ceiling, getting closer to the window above her bed with each step.
Ashley closed her eyes. Logan felt her racing pulse through the inside of her wrist.
The footsteps arrived above the window, and then stopped. The night outside was thick and dark as molasses. Logan felt a pull toward it, briefly, when her tote bag buzzed. This time it wasn’t the light of the ThermoGeist flashing. It was her phone. Logan didn’t recognize the ringtone. A message alert titled SCRIPTO8G popped up on her lock screen.
Ashley leaned over Logan’s shoulder to read.
unknown: FOLLOW
A chill crept up Logan’s spine. She looked at Ashley, but she couldn’t find the words to explain what it meant. According to the part of her brain that believed in rational answers—in provable science—it made no sense.
“Is this Tristan?” Logan asked the empty room.
Silence, and then her phone buzzed.
unknown: TRISTAN
Ashley gasped. She took the phone from Logan’s hands, staring at the screen like she thought he might appear to her. Her hands shook, but no messages came through.
“Tristan,” Logan continued. “Where do you want us to go?”
unknown: GRAVE
“The cemetery,” Ashley breathed. “Tristan, are we supposed to meet you there?”
unknown: OLD
They met each other’s eyes. Logan listened, but she only heard the branches outside and the horses in the barn and the slow, lumbering groans of old wood. Ashley looked at the floor, slowly muttering the word old to herself like it would eventually make sense.
She looked up.
“Old grave. It’s Pioneer Cemetery.”
* * *
As it turned out, driving was much harder during a panic attack.
Ashley rolled along Main Street, following the dull shine of Snakebite’s sparse streetlights. Most of the stores and restaurants along the main strip of town were closed for the night, but at the end of the road there was a blip of life. The Chokecherry still glowed faintly gold against the harsh blackness of the night. Ashley could just make out the thumps of classic rock pulsing from the jukebox inside.
Past the main stretch, the streetlights fell away and they were left in darkness. Storefronts gave way to the sprawling plateaus of farmland on one side and the black, ebbing mass of the lake on the other. Fog rolled in over the highway in a thin blanket of slate gray. Ashley turned on her low beams and pushed ahead, unable to shake the feeling that there was something hiding in the mist.
“Another message,” Logan said from the passenger seat. “It says CLOSE.”
“Yeah,” Ashley said. Her heart hammered in her throat. “Pioneer Cemetery is just around the corner.”
“I think we stopped here on the way into town.”
“You did,” Ashley said, maybe too quickly. She cleared her throat. “The day of Tristan’s vigil. I saw you and your dad there.”
Logan looked at her but said nothing.
They rounded a massive black hill and the Ford’s headlights caught on the squat fence that enclosed Pioneer Cemetery. The graves here were especially pitiful at night—only mounds of dirt bathed in yellow headlight beams. Outside the truck, the wind moaned. It was heavier now than it had been when they left the ranch, heavier than it should be.
“Do you feel that?” Ashley asked.