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He went inside, crouching again and touching the walls and the objects around him, as the mage had.

Images bombarded his mind. Some were from the mage.

Some were from older events attached to each object.

A friendly summer tennis game was embedded in the strings of a racket leaning against the wall.

A game of catch on the back lawn with a very young Celine was attached to a large ball shoved toward the back of the small space.

Zeke focused and tried to work the events of the mage’s wait backwards, seeing her moving in slow motion, and in reverse, from the time she sprang out of the small space to accost Celine’s parents, working backward to the time she entered the closet.

He followed the path backward, his hands on the carpet, the walls, anything she might have touched, searching for the echoes that would tell him how she’d gotten into the house.

What he found surprised him.

“She had the alarm code,” Zeke reported as he passed his fingertips lightly over the keypad by the side door. “Three eight two seven,” he went on, seeing the code being pressed into the keys as he watched events of the past unfold like a movie in his mind.

“How could she have known that?” Celine asked, her tone shocked.

Zeke opened his eyes and met hers across the room. She’d been following his progress but clung to her grandfather’s arm for support as Zeke worked.

“We’ll work on finding that answer,” the master chief said, his expression grim.

Zeke nodded to the older man and went back to work. He followed the mage’s path out the side door and down the walkway toward the front of the house, but it veered off into the trees. Touching each tree, he followed as best he could to a neighboring property.

The rest of the team held back at Zeke’s hand signal.

They hadn’t drawn attention to their presence so far, but he was getting closer to the property line and wasn’t sure what he’d find on the other side.

Still, he had to follow the trail to see if he could find out where the mage had come from.

He paused and touched a tree that the woman had brushed as she’d made her way through the strip of dense woodland.

Without a sound, Master Chief Santini and Celine came up to stand just behind him. The rest of the team held back, out of sight. Though Zeke suspected the shifters who had come with them were spread out through the trees, blending in and keeping watch.

“Who lives over there?” Zeke asked, pointing toward the edge of the forested area, toward a house that was just becoming visible through the tightly packed tree trunks.

“It belongs to a senator,” Celine said softly. “Though it’s empty most of the year. Her family uses it for vacations, mostly.”

“Ah. That makes sense. So, what are the chances someone’s there right now? Or that anybody was there at the time of the murders?” Zeke asked.

“Low,” Celine responded. “They’ve never been here this time of year. And they weren’t in residence when Mom and Dad died.”

“What’s surveillance like on that property? Do you know, Master Chief?” Zeke asked, betting that the old sailor probably had intel on every house around the one where his son and daughter-in-law had died.

“They’ve got a basic security system. A few cameras that are easily avoided. Not full coverage. The cops asked every neighbor for their recordings just after the murders, but there was nothing found on any of them,” Santini said, confirming Zeke’s suppositions.

“I’m going to follow the trail as far as it will take me. Is there camera coverage on this side of the house?” Zeke asked, already moving to the next tree that held a tiny trace of the mage’s passage in its long memory.

“There’s one on the corner of the house, but the angle is narrow, confined to the side of the house itself, going out to about ten feet from the foundation.

I suspect the installer chose to focus on the windows and side door rather than the parking area,” Santini replied in a quiet voice that didn’t carry.

Zeke nodded. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Then, he went forward, slowly, gleaning all he could from the trees that he passed.

It was both harder and easier to read living objects like trees and plants because they had a somewhat different way of holding the information about past happenings.

Zeke did his best to focus on the timeframe he needed, though he caught the passage of a few deer and a family of racoons in the recent images.

Still, the mage’s passage brought with it a sense of distaste that he hadn’t expected.

It was as if the forest itself didn’t like the flavor of her energy or something.

Zeke made a mental note to talk that over with Lynn after this was all over.

For now, his focus had to be on the night a year ago when Celine’s parents had died.

He focused his new talent and went back to work.

He had to find out everything he could in order to help the woman who had become so important to him in such a short time.

Zeke stayed clear of the camera on the side of the house, as had the mage, he soon realized. She must have known she could use the senator’s driveway with impunity because he felt faint echoes of a car the mage had parked far to the side of the wide drive, near the trees. There, he lost her trail.

Annoyed, he made his way back into the trees. It was as he touched one of the old oaks on his way back to where Celine and her grandfather waited that he had a flash of further insight. He stopped short and pressed his palm to the tree trunk.

“There was another visit,” he whispered to himself, though the shifters seemed to hear him.

Santini’s eyes narrowed as Celine jerked her shoulders in shock.

“The mage did a trial run…or something. It wasn’t close in time to the murder.

It was before. I can’t tell how long before.

The tree’s sense of time is interfering a bit.

But I think it was a year earlier. Possibly two.

That mage walked these woods and brushed up against this tree, which feels like it has strong opinions about the mage.

It didn’t like her at all.” Zeke scrunched up his face.

How could a tree not like someone? He’d have to think about that later.

Santini’s jaw firmed as he ground his molars together in obviously controlled anger. He didn’t like this news any more than Zeke did. It indicated that Celine’s family had been under observation and threat a lot longer than they’d realized.

Zeke made his way back toward the Santini house, pausing at every likely tree to see if he could learn more about the earlier visit of the mage.

A few of the trees confirmed what he’d seen from touching the oak.

He would keep at it until he had a clearer picture of what had happened all those months ago.

Celine deserved to know as much as he could discern of the danger that had stalked her family.