Mads and Lorelei were both there. Neither of them brought up the fires or the hospital, and it was probably for the best; the shop was swarmed all afternoon and straight into the night. TheDead Men Walkingcrew was doing their Forester House investigation, which meant plenty of fans and thrill seekers were setting up at Hal’s for the unobstructed view of Black Creek Woods. It wasn’t as if you couldseethe Forester House from here—you couldn’t see anything except trees andthe red blinking lights of the radio tower farther north, toward Piper Mountain—but I guess they thought this was better than nothing, and the ice cream was a bonus. Officers Norm and Jack had parked themselves at the bridge and weren’t letting anyone pass over Black Creek.
The tops of the trees rippled in the wind, making a roar loud enough to hear even from this far away. Somewhere in there was my mother, hunting for secrets, lost to the darkness and the snagging branches. If I thought hard enough, maybe I could pull her out. Pull her back here so I didn’t have to go after Ludwig alone.
“Zora.”
I jumped at Mads’s hand on my arm and let go of the lever on the soft-serve machine. Ice cream trailed over my glove. I hissed through my teeth and took the napkins she offered me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.” I said it too hard and too fast. “Sorry. Thinking.”
“Okay, well, put your game face on. Bach just pulled in.”
His Mustang was indeed parked in his usual spot, and he was visible behind the wheel. All the ghosts in the vicinity had fled, including the old town council members. The chief had questioned him about yesterday, too, and found nothing. I busied myself and kept Bach in my peripheral. He stopped and tilted his head up as if he was reading the menus nailed above the windows, but he always knew what he wanted.
There had been a time when, despite his history, I’d have been giddy that Bach was waiting for me. Most of the time I loved that I was only aesthetically attracted to people who fit the gothic vibes of your eighties’ movie vampires, but when the person you like is anactualsupernatural creature, it feels like there’s something wrong with you. Like natural selection had determinedIwould be the easy kill.
I had long since decided that natural selection didn’t own me or my sexuality. There was nothing wrong with me whenhewas the one lighting people on fire.
When he got to my window, he said nothing, just slid me a picture and walked back to his car. It was a photo that must have been taken around the same time, if not the exact same day, as the picture of the Foresters we’d found with Mom’s notes. It was the Forester mansion again, with workers moving in the background and a tiny Sam Forester tottering through a gravel driveway. Behind him, in the same clothes as before, was Bach, standing with a woman and another man.
The man had short gray hair, light skin, and a brown suit. He looked like a bad lawyer, maybe. The woman was statuesque. I couldn’t make out details of her face because of the fuzziness of the picture, but she had waves of dark hair, brown skin, and a black trench coat. Scrawled on the back in long-faded pen, not in my mother’s handwriting, were three names and a year.
BACH
LUDWIG
HILDEGARD
1973
I turned it over and looked at the figures again. Ludwig, in an earlier body, before Hildegard banished him, and Hildegard, before she herself had disappeared. I couldn’t even begin to fathom the reasons for that, but if she could create something like Sam Forester and control other firestarters, I wasn’t begging for her to come back.
I stuffed the picture into my jacket. “Mason, I gave a customer wrong change. She’s sitting outside; I’m gonna go correct it.”
Mason didn’t look up from the Oreo topping dispenser, which had gotten clogged again. “Okay, make it quick.”
I hurried out the back door and jammed to a halt. Bach was already there, standing by the dumpster, and he wasn’t alone. With him was a shorter man, who next to Bach looked positively delicate. Wire-framed glasses perched on his birdlike nose, red from the cold. He wore a button-down shirt and khakis, like any upper-middle-class suburban dad, and his dark hair was neatly trimmed. He turned glittering black eyes on me.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“Zora” —Bach motioned to the man— “this is Sam Forester.”
There was something not quite human about Sam Forester. Something writhed under his skin, a shadow that disappearedwhen I looked too closely. He smiled as he watched me.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.
I had to force words out. “You came out of the woods.”
Forester clasped his small hands in front of him. “I hope I didn’t startle you too badly. After Bach told me what happened, I thought it might help if I came with him to explain.”
Thiswas the man who had killed twelve people, including all the members of his own family.Thiswas the man who now fed off their souls, corrupting their ghosts. He smiled as if there was nothing wrong in the world.
“Zora,” Bach said. “The photo.”
“Right.” I handed it back to him. “Are you here to say you’ll help me with Ludwig?”
“Let’s not jump ahead of ourselves.” Forester held up a hand, cheerful as a Sunday school teacher. “We should take a moment to get to know each other before we start talking about partnerships. I knew your mother, and Bach tells me that you have the same abilities she did and have taken up her mantle. Is that right?”
