XLII
In the backseat, Penny was a one-woman riot, headphones blaring pop music as she performed surgery with a mascara wand.
Safe behind her wall of sound, I leaned my head back and watched Heaton’s profile.
He drove with a casual, one-handed grace that made the Nova feel less like a car and more like an extension of his body.
“So,” I said, keeping my voice low enough to stay between us. “Did the family reunion go well?”
A shadow crossed his features, like storm clouds bruising a dark lake. His grip shifted on the wheel, leather creaking beneath his palm.
“No,” he said, voice a low vibration beneath the engine. “They know about you.”
“Me? Why would they—”
“Because our little bond isn’t exactly a secret anymore, Madeline. It’s a broadcast.”
He glanced at me, gray eyes unreadable before returning to the road. The Nova took a curve with precision, tires gripping the asphalt in a low hiss.
“They’re curious,” he admitted.
The word sounded like a threat.
“And I’ve learned that leaving my kind curious for too long usually leads to them taking matters into their own hands.”
I shifted toward him.
“Then maybe I should meet them first?”
His eyes cut to mine, sharp and assessing, before snapping back to the road.
“You really think showing up on their doorstep will improve my situation?”
“I don’t know.” I twisted my fingers together in my lap, less certain now that I’d said it out loud. “Maybe. I don’t want to be a problem for you, Heaton. But I also know I’m the reason you’re in this mess. If meeting them, if showing them I’m not a threat, would help . . . ”
I lifted a shoulder.
“I’d do it.”
For the first time in several miles, his composure slipped.
Not enough for Penny to notice, but I felt it through the bond: a sharp fraying of nerves, old resentment, and the hard, tired awareness that what he had done to save me had detonated something in his own world too.
Finally, he let out a slow breath.
“Well, you’ll have your chance in a few weeks,” he said, his voice rough. “My sister hosts a Day of Thanks every year. Think of it as a less genocidal Thanksgiving—no dry turkey, but plenty of vintage spirits and dancing.”
He looked genuinely pained by the suggestion.
“That sounds . . . weirdly nice.” I offered.
“It isn’t.”
My instinct wasn’t fear this time. It was sympathy.
He had saved my life at the cost of his own standing, and now he was bracing for the fallout alone. I didn’t want to tell him I understood.
I wanted him to feel it.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I reached inward.
The bond wasn’t one clean thread. It was a dense, quiet network running up the phantom path of my spine, cool and alive beneath my skin. When I focused, I felt it branch around my ribs, brightening in places I still didn’t understand.
Most of them felt like him.
Cold and numb.
But woven through that frost was something finer now.
Something softer.
Mine.
I followed the thread and focused on the feeling I wanted to send—not a thought, not an image, but a sensation. Sunlight on my face. The grounding comfort of wrapping both hands around a hot mug of tea.
The effect was instantaneous.
A golden filament flared in my mind. It didn’t fight the cold of his threads; it illuminated them from within. The whole tapestry of the bond bloomed, sudden and startled—bright as sun hitting the pavement after a week of rain.
Heaton went rigid.
Not dramatically. But I felt it: the lock of his shoulders, the way his hand tightened on the gearshift, the leather creaking. The Nova drifted an inch before he corrected it with a sharp, controlled jerk of the wheel.
My pulse skipped.
He felt that too.
Slowly, he cleared his throat. His posture remained painfully stiff, his jaw working as he rebuilt the walls my warmth had just melted.
“What was that?”
I blinked at him with what I hoped passed for innocence.
“What was what?”
His voice came quietly. Rougher than before.
“Don’t. Do that. Again.”
I turned toward him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
This time, he looked at me. The silver in his eyes seemed brighter.
“No,” he said. “You probably don’t.”
“What’s your problem?” My fear sharpened into defiance. “You didn’t like it?”
A bitter laugh escaped him.
“That’s not the point.”
“Feels like maybe it is.”
“If you insist on experimenting,” he said, attention flicking to me, hard and direct, “I can arrange lessons before you burn out your own nervous system trying to prove a point.”
His voice dropped, raw and intimate.
“But if you want to survive this connection, there are things you should know. Things you should never do by accident.”
He looked back at the road.
“Don’t waste your light on the dark, Madeline. It doesn’t fix it. It only reminds it of what it can’t have.”
I stared at him, stunned.
I had meant it as a comfort, a connection.
But to him, it was an act of unimaginable recklessness.
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He shifted gears, and the Nova growled as he accelerated, leaving the warmth and the conversation behind in a cloud of dust.
The school rose through the morning mist, red and brown brick pushing up from the gray. The parking lot was a hive of activity. A police cruiser sat crookedly across the main entrance, lights washing the stone pillars in sickly pulses.
A silent crowd had gathered near the doors. A man in a high-visibility vest smoothed a sheet of paper against the cold brick wall.
Sasha Hayes stared back from the grainy photograph.
In the backseat, Penny’s headphones cut out. I heard the sharp click of her compact snapping shut.
“Wait,” she whispered, leaning between the front seats. “Heaton, turn the radio up.”
He flicked the dial.
The announcer’s voice came through thin and grave.
“ . . . authorities are still searching for eighteen-year-old Sasha Hayes. The senior was last seen leaving a high school party near Pelican Point on Saturday night. Search and rescue teams are asking anyone with information regarding her whereabouts to come forward . . . ”
The car went deathly quiet.
“Penny,” I said, voice thin. “Did you hear anything from Ford?”
She uncapped her eyeliner, knuckles white around the little pen. Her hand shook, leaving a tiny, smudged black line near her lashes. She swore under her breath and wiped it away.
“Ford texted around midnight,” she said. “He said the wind was doing some really weird shit up there. They had to call off the search early, but they’re heading back up this morning.”
My stomach twisted.
First Harvey had disappeared into his ghost work. Now Sasha Hayes was in the headlines. Ford had always been the kind of person who ran toward a crisis, and if Natalie had called him about Sasha, he would never let her face it alone.
A sharp frost drove through my chest.
Beside me, Heaton didn’t move, but the temperature in the car plummeted.
He didn’t have to say a word. The bond told me enough.
He could feel the shape of my concern for Ford, and he hated the space it occupied in my head.
His head.
The side door clicked shut as Penny hopped out, her footsteps fading into the muffled chatter of the parking lot.
I forced myself to hold Heaton’s stare. “Did Ruby see anything? She went back to check on the party. She must have seen where Sasha went.”
He leaned into my space, cold thumb hooking beneath my jaw to pull my attention deeper into his.
“I didn’t send Ruby back to play detective. Her directives were clear. Make sure Penny got home safely. Return to town.”
“She could have—”
“I only had one light in those woods I could still reach,” he said. “I chose it.”
The words hit harder than they should have.
“So, you know what happened to Sasha?” I challenged. “Because her light still matters to someone, too, Heaton.”
His expression went stone-still.
“I told you the Lanterns were more than a social club. They are collectors. They don’t leave loose ends, and they don’t waste resources.”
“So, they just . . . took her?” My voice thinned. “And you’re going to let everyone think she wandered off into the woods?”
“I’m not letting anyone think anything,” he said, voice dropping. “I’m more focused on the living problem right in front of me.”
He looked past me, toward the grainy poster of Sasha’s smiling face. Toward the deputies and students pretending this was still a normal Monday.
“Ford is out there chasing a story. I’m trying to keep you from becoming the next one.”
Inside, the Halloween party had already become a legend, but the laughter felt brittle.
The hallways buzzed with a shallow energy that couldn’t quite hide the patrol officers at every junction or the line of students stretching down the main hall toward the counselor’s office.
“Best party of the year,” the whispers went. “Did you see the senior prank? Smoke bombs. Epic.”
High school had a way of polishing violence into entertainment. Anyone who had actually gotten hurt was dismissed as someone who couldn’t handle the heat.
Or their liquor.
But as the morning bell rang, the louder boasts fractured into quieter, uglier whispers.
Sasha’s name drifted through the lockers like a cold draft.
“The police found her jacket near the treeline.”
“The Sheriff’s department is calling it a rogue bear, but they’ve got DNR out there with rifles.”
“Something with enormous claws.”
“Maybe she took a dive off the cliffs.”
What happened to Sasha Hayes was already shifting—changing from a rumor to a story to a cautionary tale.
By noon, the town had narrowed around her disappearance like a fist. Curfew moved to sunset.
The hardware store sold out of deadbolts.
The fog rolling off the cliffs every morning no longer felt like weather.
It felt like an omen.
And we didn’t have the luxury of time.
Penny and I disappeared into the lab after school, fueled by caffeine and terror, combing through Harvey’s notes while the rest of Mapleton closed its eyes and let Sasha Hayes become another shadow in the woods.
By late afternoon, the chaos of my dad’s work had started to resolve into a pattern. The same symbols surfaced across decades of entries, always tied to the same families.
October.
Marrow.
Riven.
But the deeper we dug, the darker the language became.
One word kept rising through the margins like something dragged from deep water.
EIDOLON.
It appeared beside frantic notes and unfinished charts.
ELDER CONTAINMENT.
ANCHOR CORRUPTION OBSERVED.
HOST INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.
Host.
My stomach tensed around the word.
There was no explanation waiting beneath it. No neat paragraph where Harvey had decided to make any of this make sense. Only arrows. Crossed-out calculations. Names scratched through so violently the paper had torn.
Penny’s thumb traced the edge of a lifespan chart where the final columns had been left blank.
“These don’t look like death dates,” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “They look like failures.”
She leaned back, the chair scraping across concrete.
“Whatever your dad was studying, it wasn’t just theory. It was a system. An old one. And from the look of this—” she tapped the page, “—your family’s been tied to it for generations.”
Tied.
The word settled over me like a hand around my throat.
I had spent most of my life believing Harvey’s ghost work was grief given shape. Another way to chase my mother through a world that refused to give her back.
But the dates in front of me stretched back too far for that.
This wasn’t an obsession. This was a haunting passed down through blood.
Our blood.
That evening, reading wasn’t enough anymore. We left the maps and notebooks open across the table and moved to the locked cases at the back of the lab—the ones Harvey had packed for a war he had never admitted was real.
I reached into the weapons case and touched the iron: cold-forged rods, dark and waiting.
The bond reacted instantly.
Pain lanced up my arm the second my fingers brushed the metal. Inside me, Heaton recoiled—a sharp, involuntary pull edged with restraint.
He hated the iron—hated it touching me.
But he didn’t stop me. He couldn’t afford to.
Not when finding the compass was the only thing standing between us and whatever had taken Sasha.
This wasn’t just my dad’s work anymore.
It was becoming mine.
And as I accepted that newfound inheritance, I lost other things too.
Ford stayed in the real world while Penny and I disappeared into myth and metal. Every few nights, the crunch of gravel announced his return with some new piece of truth clenched in his hand, as if he could still drag me toward something solid if he tried hard enough.
Tonight, it was a stained folder full of county records and land plats marked in red.
He crossed the kitchen, boots thudding on the linoleum. He didn’t stop until he was right beside me, his arm brushing mine as he leaned over the counter.
“Thought you should see this,” he said quietly.
From the living room, conversation murmured low. Penny’s bright, relentless laughter cut through the dry, lethal cadence of Heaton’s replies. They were a world away, absorbed in their own labyrinth of research.
For a moment, this small corner of the kitchen was just ours.
Ford flipped the top page back with a blunt fingertip.
“The Lantern Society,” he said. “The group that hosted the party. Registered as a tax-exempt historical preservation trust.”
My pulse slowed, the world narrowing to the red lines on the page.
“Preserving what?”
“Land,” he said. “Mostly empty. Ghost towns. Places nobody’s lived in for decades. I cross-referenced your dad’s old survey records with county titles. They’ve been buying it all up since the sixties. Piece by piece.”
The red marks formed a pattern when I leaned back far enough to see it.
A ring. A net tightening around the valley.
“They own everything,” I whispered.
“Yeah.”
Ford leaned closer, voice dropping to an intimate near-whisper meant only for me.
“Including this.”
His fingertip tapped a jagged line on the map.
Pelican Point.
My ribs ached with the memory.
“They acquired that lot three months before the party.”
I turned my head, and our faces were inches apart. I could see the flecks of gold in his hazel eyes, the worry etched around them.
In the other room, Penny let out another hysterical laugh at something Heaton said.
Ford’s head snapped toward the sound, eyes darkening. He turned back to me as he leaned in even closer, his voice barely a breath against my cheek.
“Just be careful with him, Maddie. I don’t trust him.”
The bond tightened, quiet and alert, like a perimeter adjusting around a changing threat.
I could feel Heaton’s attention shift, his focus narrowing from the living room to this small, shared space.
I forced my fingers to unclench on the folder.
“Don’t worry. I’m being careful.”
But I wasn’t sure if I was lying to Ford—
or to myself.