Outside the church, Julia was stirring a pot on the stove, while Nick leaned against the tailgate, cradling a steaming bowl. He still looked half-asleep. Julia dished out another bowl and handed it to Gaby.

“Thanks.”

“No problem,” Julia said, with a slightly forced cheeriness. “So, do you have it?”

“Yeah,” said Gaby. “It’s in Atlanta. Won’t be too hard to find.”

“Okay, cool.” Julia looked over at Nick, who was staring blearily at the ground. “We can stop for coffee on the way into town.”

“I don’t want to lose any time,” Gaby said hesitantly. She didn’t feel right pushing, since they were the ones with the car, but she was painfully anxious.

Julia frowned. “How urgent is it? I mean, whatever we do, it’ll still be a while before we’re able to get to him, right?”

“Hours, at least. I don’t think it’s urgent. He’s just… stuck somewhere. Trapped, and lost. I don’t know where, and I don’t know if the man we’re going to see will be able to help. We may have to start looking from scratch after we see him.”

“Well then, a little extra time won’t make that much difference, right? Besides, we can’t show up at someone’s house at eight on a Sunday morning.”

She had a point. “All right,” said Gaby, trying to push down her anxiety. They would get there as fast as they could.

“Gaby,” said Nick, sounding suddenly very awake. He was still staring at the ground between them. She looked down, and saw what he was seeing. Faint in the early light, her shadow fell toward the van, but it was shaped wrong; there was a huge lump to one side, as if she was wearing a backpack. She edged slowly to the side: the lump lagged for a few seconds, then followed her.

Julia drew a sharp, hissing breath. Gaby looked up warily at them both. “It’s what I think it is?” she asked. They nodded together. Gaby stepped further to the side, just so she could see for herself: the light was too diffuse to show moving legs, but the shadow came along after her just like a patiently waiting dog. She stopped again, not wanting to be out of Nick and Julia’s reach.

“How is it here?” Julia whispered. “How did it track us?”

“And why isn’t it attacking?” Nick murmured.

Gaby stood stock still, feeling as if they’d spotted a scorpion on her back. “What can we do?” she breathed, wanting to cry, Get it off me! Make it go away! She had felt so safe here, had slept soundly, believing that the cemetery would protect them.

“I don’t think we should do anything sudden,” said Nick. He caught the panic in her eyes. “We won’t leave you,” he said. “We’ll get it if it strikes.” Gaby nodded.

Julia was looking all around them. “I don’t see any others. That’s weird. That is so weird. It shouldn’t even be able to smell you here. We’re right in the middle of the gravestones.”

“Maybe it’s too small,” whispered Gaby. Julia shook her head.

“We’ve stayed in smaller ones, for several nights. We’ve stayed here for almost a week. If it wasn’t hiding us, they’d have gotten here long ago.”

“You think it’s me?”

Julia shrugged.

“But Will’s been with you. There’s nothing special about me that he doesn’t have too.”

“However it found us,” said Nick, “let’s work on how to get away from it. Julia, you want to grab our stuff from inside?”

“Yeah, okay,” said Julia. She set her bowl down on the tailgate and went inside. The shadow didn’t budge; it seemed solely interested in Gaby.

“I wonder if there’s some way we can distract it, while we get you into the van,” said Nick. “I don’t suppose they eat.”

“Actually, they do,” said Gaby, remembering. “I threw my sandwich at the one that was following me yesterday. I saw it eating—at least, I saw the sandwich being eaten.”

“Huh,” said Nick. “Okay… tell you what. You step closer to the van, and I’ll hop inside and see what we have that might interest a dog.”

Julia came out with the rest of the packs and sleeping bags. They loaded the van up, keeping a sharp eye on the shadow, while Gaby stood by. Julia frowned at the oatmeal-crusted pot and bowls. “That’s going to be a nightmare to clean up later.”

Nick came out with a piece of jerky in his hand. “Not our biggest problem,” he pointed out.

Julia rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. Do you think we can make it into the van without it attacking?”

“I have a distraction. We close up the van, then we throw this. If the dog goes for it, great. If not, we’ll just have to make a dash for the front.” They both nodded. Nick hurled the jerky toward the woods, and to Gaby’s faint surprise the shadow broke away from her and dashed after it.

“Huh,” said Nick again. Julia grabbed his arm.

“You two going to stand there?” she said, pulling him around toward the front of the van. They all got in and drove off, Gaby and Julia watching behind. They didn’t see any sign of pursuit, though with all the trees around it was impossible to be sure.

Two hours later they were pulling up to the house on Shallowford. Gaby expected it to be deserted, since according to Will the man had been so desperate to leave, but there were lights on inside and a car parked in the driveway. Nick parked the van along the curb, and turned off the ignition. They all sat silently for a moment.

“Now what?” said Gaby. Nick and Julia looked at her oddly.

“What do you mean, ‘now what?’” Julia said. “You’re the one that got us here.”

“Oh.” Gaby realized, with a sudden surge of panic, that they were expecting her to lead. That hadn’t occurred to her, and she suddenly felt a tremendous sense of responsibility. “Um… right. So I guess I should tell you, I don’t really know what we’ll find in there. All I know about this guy is his name.”

“And that he’s someone who will help us if he can,” said Julia.

“Welll… not necessarily. I mean, I hope he is. Will thought he probably was. But Will’s in trouble, so…” she didn’t need to finish the thought. The looks on their faces told her they got it.

“So you’re telling me we’re about to walk into a stranger’s house, the house my brother was headed for before he disappeared, and you have no reason to believe that this guy wasn’t responsible for his disappearance?”

“Um. Yes.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this earlier?”

“I thought you knew,” Gaby said lamely. “Or I thought… I didn’t think it mattered.”

“How would we know?” Julia cried. “It’s bad enough that you and Will don’t tell us anything, and now you expect us to just magically know what you’re up to? How is that supposed to work?”

“I didn’t think…” she couldn’t find a way to end the sentence.

“You didn’t think it mattered! And why on earth would it not matter whether or not we’re walking into a trap?”

“Because Will’s there! If it is a trap. And I’m not—I’m not here to be safe. I was safe for the last three years, and I was miserable. This isn’t about being safe, it’s about finding Will and finding answers. And the only place I know to look, right now, is here. So yeah, it doesn’t matter. Not to me anyway. Whether it’s dangerous or not, this is where I’m going.”

Nick and Julia exchanged a glance, and Nick gave a little half-grin. “That speech sound familiar to you, sis?”

Julia didn’t answer. Gaby, feeling thoroughly worked up now, went on, “I don’t know what you expect from me. I didn’t really realize you were following me. I don’t want to be responsible for you, and I don’t want to get you into trouble. And Julia, you get mad when I say you don’t have to come along, and then you get mad again when I say I don’t know what I’m doing. So what do you want from me?”

Julia stared back at her, silent for once, thoughts smoldering behind her eyes. Finally she said, “I want you to tell us what’s going on. We’re following you and Will pretty much blindly here, because you seem to understand a little bit more than we do. I wish you understood more, or had a better plan, but at least you could let us in on what you do have.”

“There’s a lot of background knowledge you’d need to have.”

“Good,” said Julia. “It seems like about time we were let into it.”

Gaby looked to Nick. He gave a little shrug. “I pretty much agree with her,” he said. “We can be a lot more help if we understand more.”

Gaby saw the justice of that, of everything they’d said, and her only reason for hesitating was that she and Will had kept these things to themselves for so long. But Nick and Julia had proven their skill and reliability, and they certainly wouldn’t have a hard time believing strange things. Besides Will, who else was more worthy of her trust? And she was pretty sure she’d need their help to find him.

“Okay.” She caught a flicker of surprise on both their faces, as if they hadn’t really expected her to tell them anything. “Well, to start with, I should tell you how Will and I met. You remember when you guys went to Luray Caverns, when you were about ten?”

“Yeah,” said Julia. “But you didn’t meet there, it was at the zoo. I remember it.”

Gaby shook her head. “My parents and I went to the caverns the same week. Not the same day, but close to it. And one night, not too long afterward, Will and I were both dreaming about the caverns. And we met each other.”

“In your dreams,” Julia repeated flatly.

“Yeah. It wasn’t the first time either of us had met real people in a dream. We always tended to wander into other people’s dreams. I met my new teacher the night before my first day of school. We were both nervous about it, I guess. When I was very little, I would have conversations with my parents in dreams, and then repeat them back the next day. That freaked them out. I learned pretty early that I shouldn’t let people know I remembered the same dream they did. Will did too. But then we met, and we played together around the caverns, and we had so much fun, at the end I said I wished he could come back again tomorrow night. And he said he could; could I? And that was how it started. We arranged the meeting at the zoo a while later, because we wanted to know each other in real life. I was afraid I’d made him up, like an imaginary friend. But—well, I hadn’t, and I guess you know the rest of it.” She paused, wanting to see how they reacted to that before going on.

“Okay…” said Julia.

“You get that? That we can walk into other people’s dreams?”

“Yeah, I get that. And it’s weird and freaky. And I throw rocks at invisible dogs, so, you know. Keep going.”

“Okay. That’s most of it, really. Most of what makes us different, I mean. There are a few other things: we figure things out quickly, and as kids we learned things really, really fast. And—sometimes other weird things happen around us. When I was about three, I threw a fit because I wanted a cookie, and the cookie jar shattered from the counter. I don’t know if you remember anything like that happening around Will.”

“Yeah, a little,” said Julia. “When he was small.”

Gaby nodded. “Those things freak people out even more than the dreams, so we both learned to suppress them. We have a lot of self-control.”

“So what does all this have to do with our whole family being hunted?”

“I don’t know. But the hunt stopped as soon as Will and I separated. We thought it might, might confuse them or something. That’s the only reason we let them separate us at all.”

“You were eleven.”

“Still. We’d have found a way to stay together. But it was killing you, so we tried anything we thought might stop it. And we didn’t talk or write or anything for three years, because we were afraid that might start it again.”

“So that’s why. I always wondered. Never dared to ask him though. You couldn’t have met in your dreams, like before?”

“We could,” said Gaby. “We did. We couldn’t help it, really—thinking about each other as much as we did. But here’s the thing: we have regular dreams too, dreams that are just our own brains making stuff up. And real people appear in those dreams, only it’s not really them. If they start walking up walls or turning into a dog or something, you can pretty much guess it’s not the actual person, but if you’re just hanging out and talking realistically, you can’t necessarily tell. The only way to be sure is to talk to them in real life, and see if they remember it too. And with me and Will, since we’d already agreed not to communicate at all if the hunt stopped, we couldn’t ever know that we were really meeting each other. How could we talk to each other, knowing that?” Neither of them answered. Gaby shrugged. “So we didn’t talk. We just sat.”

“All right,” said Julia. “And what about now? How do you know Will’s really in trouble? And what about this guy we’re going to see?”

“The guy is someone Will met in a dream, a couple of days before you found me. He’s another one like us. He agreed to meet with Will, but then he seemed to be running away, so Will hurried over to try to catch him. That’s all I know about him. And this morning I had a dream, not like anything I’ve had before. I didn’t see Will; I was Will, I felt what he was feeling. And what he was feeling was trapped, lost, and desperate. Don’t ask me how I know it was real. I don’t have any reasons, but I also don’t have any doubt. And that’s all.”

Julia and Nick exchanged a long, thoughtful look. Nick spoke first. “I can’t say that’s anything like what we were expecting. But okay. At least we know where we are, now. So what’s the plan?”

“Go in there and scope things out, I guess,” said Gaby. “Stay alert. We need to be able to communicate—if  you notice something that makes you nervous, talk about it as a smell: ‘Do you smell something funny?’ or something like that. If the others agree that there’s a problem, they smell it too, and we find a way to excuse ourselves and get out. If the others don’t see a reason for alarm, they say they don’t smell anything. If you notice something that’s definitely alarming and you think we should get out right now, you smell something burning, and there’s no discussion, we go. If we do decide to get out early, we try to make it polite and casual. We don’t show any signs of fear, or any inclination to use force, unless he does. Agreed?”

Nick and Julia nodded. “Okay,” said Gaby. “Let’s go.”

They walked up to the house, Gaby casting her eyes around for anything unusual. It was a small house, with a neatly mowed lawn. There were a few bushes in front of the house, but no garden. Gaby stood on the front step of the house and knocked, with Nick and Julia standing directly behind her.

The door was opened by a man with wooly grey hair and deep lines in his brown skin. He must once have been as tall as Nick, but he had a severe stoop. He looked at them without saying anything. After a strange pause Gaby asked, “Are you Mr. James Delacroix?”

“Yes,” he said. There was another pause, as he looked directly at each of their faces. At last he said, “I suppose you are not selling anything.” He spoke with the rounded, precise accent of someone who learned English in Africa or India.

“No,” said Gaby. “I’m Gaby Rice, and this is Nick and Julia Colven. May we come in?”

He stepped back and opened the door for them. They stepped into a small living room with comfortably worn furniture. The back of the room opened onto a small kitchen, where a young man was sitting at a little round table, head bent over a pile of books. He looked as they entered, and then stood and stepped forward. Mr. Delacroix turned to acknowledge him. “We may be some time. Perhaps it would be better for you to study elsewhere.”

“No,” said the young man. “I don’t think so.” His eyes were fixed on Gaby, eyes she knew she had seen before. Then, with a shock, she placed him.

“As you please,” said Mr. Delacroix. “Gaby Rice, Nick and Julia Colven, this is my nephew, Matthias.”