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Sam hoisted the bat onto his shoulder. “You know what helps with trust? A baseball bat.”
Henry had appropriated the old wheelchair in the abandoned soldiers’ quarters, which he used now to carry Ling into the forest over pine needles that stuck to the rickety wheels like stiff brown hair. Up ahead, Evie and Sam trailed after Jericho as he led them deeper into the forest.
“I’ve seen this picture,” Henry said in a low voice. “Where the trusting victims traipse off into the woods. It doesn’t end well.”
“I can hear you,” Jericho said from several feet away.
“Superhuman hearing,” Evie reminded him.
They came to the charred clearing. “This is where I’ve seen the soldiers,” Jericho said.
“It’s… it’s just like my dream. Just like what I saw with Luther.” Evie ran to a moss-covered tree stump. “This is where the Victrola plays. This is where it happened. Where my brother…” She swallowed hard.
“It feels like a graveyard,” Ling said. A flock of birds circled into the sky, crying.
“There are things I need to tell you. Things I’ve held back because I… I thought I was being disloyal to Marlowe. One night, I saw two men in dark gray suits dragging a young woman upstairs—”
“Shadow Men?” Sam asked.
“I think so, but I can’t be sure,” Jericho said.
“What are Shadow Men doing at Marlowe’s estate?” Ling asked.
“The men said that she was a mental patient that Marlowe was trying to help. But she sounded perfectly sane to me—sane and terrified. When I asked Marlowe about it later, he said she was a Diviner.”
“Have you seen her since then?” Henry asked.
“No. Not a peep. She wanted me to know her name, though. She kept screaming it at me: Anna Provenza.”
“Anna Provenza!” Evie exclaimed. “Mabel spoke to her sister, Maria. Her family was deported as anarchists. Mabel swears it’s not true, though. She said Anna disappeared and the family had been looking for her ever since.” Evie wished she could talk to Mabel. About everything.
“Why would you deport a family but keep one sister you claim is a mental patient? That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Henry said.
“Maybe he really is trying to help her,” Ling said. She didn’t want to think bad things about Jake Marlowe.
“So, what does Marlowe want with Anna Provenza?” Sam said.
“There’s more,” Jericho said. He flicked his eyes to Sam.
“What?” Sam challenged, and for a minute, Jericho wanted to hold back.
It is our choices that define us, he reminded himself.
“Marlowe did an experiment with me. Something called sensory deprivation. I felt as if I were not in my body but floating in some other dimension, some porous realm between worlds. I heard voices. Terrible voices.”
Evie frowned. “Where were they coming from?”.
“I don’t know. Marlowe wanted me to talk to them, though, and tell him what they were saying. The voices told me that the door must be opened as before and that the souls must be refreshed.”
“What does that mean?” Evie asked.
“I honestly don’t know. But there was another voice that broke through and told me to keep quiet. That those voices couldn’t be trusted. I honestly didn’t know what was happening—whether I’d just imagined it or not.” Jericho looked at Sam again. “The woman had a Russian accent. She told me her name was Miriam.”
“Just like Conor!” Evie said. “Sam…”
“You… you talked to my mother?” For all the reasons Sam had disliked Jericho, this one hurt the most. Why would she speak to these other fellas—to Jericho, of all people—and not to her own son? “What did she say? Did she tell you where she was?”
“No. But she said I was in danger. That he was making a mistake.”
