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He hurried over from the opposite side of the circle of standing stones, although I noticed he was careful not to pass through the center.

“What is it?”

I pointed at the footprints. “I think those might belong to my mother and grandmother.”

Rather than tell me that was crazy, that there was no way their footprints could have survived all these months, he knelt next to me, keen hazel eyes surveying the two sets of prints.

Now it seemed obvious there were six in all…

and they disappeared as soon as they crossed into the center of the stone circle.

Now I was gladder than ever that Ben had come around the long way. If he’d walked through the middle, would he have disappeared, too?

I didn’t want to think about that.

“Do you recognize the treads?”

Despite the unease humming along every nerve ending, I had to shoot him a sardonic look. “Sorry, I didn’t have those memorized. But I know my mom and my grandma had feet around the same size as mine. Grandma’s were a little bigger, so I have a feeling the ones on the left must be hers.”

“And they vanish as soon as they go into the stone circle.”

I swallowed. “Do you think it…swallowed them up or something?”

Ben’s eyes narrowed. “After seeing the unicorn, I’m ready to believe almost anything is possible. And I’ve read that some people believe circles of standing stones can act as portals to other worlds.” He shook his head, adding, “It’s not like we have any evidence to the contrary.”

No, we didn’t.

“Maybe this is why the unicorn guided us here,” I said. “Maybe he was trying to get us to go after my mother and grandmother.”

Ben rubbed his hand over his chin, which was beginning to get stubbly. I didn’t know whether he shaved every day, but it seemed clear to me that he didn’t have to wait too long for regrowth to happen. The scruff made him look sort of rakish, and that much more appealing.

Not that I should be letting my thoughts go down those sorts of pathways, especially when I had much more important things to worry about at the moment.

“It’s possible,” he allowed. “However, even with the footprints, I’d want to find a lot more evidence — and do a lot more research — before I just blithely stepped in there.”

He had a point. As much as I wanted to discover where my mother and grandmother had gone, I didn’t know whether it was a very good idea to walk into that stone circle without possessing a lot more information than we currently had on hand.

Then he added, “I’ll do more research on Ogham when we get back to town and see whether the inscription on the tall stone here can give us any indication as to the circle’s purpose.

” He paused there, glancing around the clearing and the glowing plants that made it nearly as bright as day.

“Did you see any other clues that those footprints might have belonged to your mother and grandmother?”

No, I hadn’t, but that was probably because once I’d noted the prints, pretty much anything else had flown right out of my head.

“Not yet,” I replied. “But I suppose we should look.”

The two of us got up and brushed our knees, although the glowing moss wasn’t nearly as damp as the real stuff and hadn’t left any smudges on our pants.

Dutifully, we went all around the clearing and the circle of stones — although we were careful to avoid the footprints I’d discovered — but I didn’t see anything else to signal someone had been here before.

Then again, that might not mean much. My mother and grandmother had disappeared almost three months earlier, so it was entirely possible that the wind and weather had erased any trace of their presence in the clearing.

But if that was the case, shouldn’t the footprints have disappeared as well?

I supposed it was possible that, since we were dealing with magic, the normal rules of physics didn’t really apply.

“There’s nothing here,” I told Ben as we came back to our starting place to regroup.

“No, there doesn’t seem to be.” He looked around once more, then shook his head. “At this point, I think all we can do is try to get some rest and wait for dawn to arrive. Then we can get back to town and see what I can find out about those Ogham letters.”

He seemed very confident, as though it was no big deal to survive five or six hours out here in the middle of the forest at night and then retrace our steps until we could locate the edge of the trees.

Sure, I’d done my best to keep track of any landmarks we’d passed, but there hadn’t been a lot of them, and I knew everything looked different at night than it did by the bright light of day.

“Okay,” I said, knowing how dubious I sounded.

“It’s all right,” he responded at once, then placed a gentle hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently before he let go. “My phone has a very good compass app. It’ll guide us out of here in the morning.”

“You get a signal all the way out here?”

In answer, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and showed me the screen. It had one bar, not enough to do much with, but I hoped it would be sufficient to send the necessary signals to his app.

Sure enough, when he pulled it up, I saw that north was straight ahead of us, which meant we should only need to walk to the south and west to get to Silver Hollow.

“Then why not head out now?” I asked, and he gave me an understanding smile.

“Because once we’re away from this clearing and all these bioluminescent plants, it’s going to be pitch dark out here,” he replied. “There’s no moon tonight, and with the batteries in my flashlight dying on me, we won’t have anything to light our way.”

“There’s the flashlight on your phone,” I ventured, but he shook his head.

“Maybe, but using it for a long time will drain the battery. I don’t want the thing to croak while we’re still out in the middle of the forest somewhere and leave us without even a compass to guide us.”

That scenario didn’t seem very appealing.

Then again, hanging out here until dawn didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, either, but at least we could see where we were, and it didn’t look as if anyone would disturb us.

I knew I’d never seen this spot before, and since there didn’t seem to be a hint of a trail anywhere nearby, I had to believe no one else had, either.

“All right,” I said, surrendering to the inevitable. “We’ll stay here for the night.”