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“That’s just what the townsfolk say back in Hemridge. They think we’re all crazy up here. My parents, they sure think I’m crazy.”

“Your parents live in Hemridge?”

He nodded. “They hate that I moved up here.” The corner of his mouth twitched downward. “They think they’ve lost me, too.”

There was a lot to unpack there. Grief, for sure. Willow pushed down her curiosity, knowing she didn’t have time for distractions.

“All right, well... I’d love a ride. I’m Willow, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Willow.” He raised his eyebrows expectantly: Shall we, then?

She bent down and grabbed her backpack and sandals.

Cole opened the passenger door for her, and she got in.

The seat was torn but warm. The door thunked shut behind her, and then Cole was sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine.

The truck coughed, then steadied, and gravel popped beneath the tires as they climbed higher, ever higher, on the dusty mountain road.

~

Cole stank . Willow hadn’t noticed it when they’d been outside with the mountain air to mask and dilute it. But now? Trapped together in the cab of his pickup truck?

Willow knew she didn’t smell the best herself. But compared to Cole, she smelled as sweet as a summer rose.

Cole smelled like the manure-packed flower bed it grew from.

She edged as far toward the passenger door as she could, her backpack clutched in her lap and her bare feet tucked beneath her. Cole had covered a tear in the upholstery with duct tape, but the tape had peeled back like sunburnt skin. Its stiff edge rubbed against Willow’s skin.

The old truck rattled and clanked as they climbed higher. The headlights carved pale arcs through the dark. A low mist was coming in over the mountains, and it might have been pretty, but all Willow could focus on was the horrible stench radiating from the man who’d offered her a ride.

Could she crack open her window? That felt rude.

She could pull the soft gray baby blanket from her backpack and wrap it around her neck and lower face, using it like a scarf-slash-mask. That felt even ruder.

She scooted one millimeter closer to the door, pulling her knees toward her chest and subtly—or so she hoped—burying her nose in the crook of her arm. She wished she were wearing long sleeves.

Cole threw her a look. “I can stop. I can let you out.”

So much for being subtle.

“No, sorry,” she said. She lowered her arm and tried to breathe normally. She gagged, a visceral heave that made her chest spasm and her shoulders cave in.

“It’s just mud,” Cole said crankily.

“Are you sure?” Willow said.

Cole shook his head incredulously. “Let me guess. You’re a city girl? You have, what, a lawn guy who mows your yard every other week?”

Every week, actually. But he wasn’t Willow’s lawn guy. He was her father’s. And he wasn’t just a lawn guy . He had a name, which was...

Which was . . .

She scowled. “Do you have a problem with freshly mown grass?”

“Not at all. Do you have a problem with mud?”

“No. That doesn’t mean I go rolling around in it.”

“So you’ve never been muddin’,” he said. He made a contemptuous sound. “Why am I not surprised?”

Willow had no idea what “muddin’” was, but from the way Cole smelled, she guessed it meant throwing yourself into a great wet slick of the stuff and sliding down it like snow. Gee, how cultured country boys were.

She sank lower in her seat, annoyed with herself for yet again judging someone based on stereotypes.

Then again, overall-wearing Jefferson had turned her over to the church police, and Cole, good Samaritan though he was, smelled like a literal pigsty.

She turned toward the window and tucked her nose into the crook of her arm again.

So what if Cole judged her a snob? Let him.

Cole rolled down the driver’s side window. “There. Happy?”

“I am. Thank you,” she said icily.

They drove in silence, the road curling along the mountainside like a strip of ribbon. Trees pressed in, their limbs wild and untamed. Every so often, a branch scratched the frame of the truck.

Finally, Willow sat up straight and lowered her arm from her face. She still got whiffs of Cole’s stink, but the air was basically fine with the window rolled down.

“Why’d you move to Lost Souls?” she asked.

Cole’s hands stayed steady on the wheel, but his features tightened. “I had a little brother, Micah. When he was four years old... we lost him.”

Willow’s heart contracted. “He died? Cole, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” he said, acknowledging and dispensing with Willow’s perfunctory sympathy the way he’d surely done with dozens of different people, dozens of different times. “He didn’t die, though. Well. We don’t know that he did.”

Mystified, Willow just looked at him.

“He disappeared,” Cole said. “Something happened to him, something bad. Or maybe someone took him.” A muscle jerked in his jaw. “One day he was there. One day he wasn’t.”

“I’m so sorry,” Willow said again, aware of how inadequate her words were. “That’s awful. I just... I wish...” She grimaced. “I don’t know what to say. Just, I’m sorry.”

He snorted, as if to say, Gee, thanks, princess. That makes everything sooo much better. But he said tersely, “Thanks.”

She remembered what he’d said about his parents: They think they’ve lost me, too. But she wasn’t about to go there. Too many cans of worms, and the worms, like all the squirming things beneath a lifted rock, were all so wiggly.

Her gaze moved to the window. A light drizzle fell from the sky, and condensation blurred the glass.

“Why Lost Souls?” she asked. “Why move there?”

He sighed.

“What?” she said.

“It’s not worth trying to explain. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Because I’m a city girl with a nice green lawn?” she asked. Now who was being judgy?

He fluttered his fingers on the steering wheel, a gesture that said, You want the truth? Fine. “Some people are driven to find the things others choose to forget. I guess I’m one of them. And if you’re looking for lost things, Lost Souls isn’t a bad place to start.”

“Okay, great, that clears everything up,” Willow said. His pretentiousness was as thick as the muck on his boots.

The trees thinned, and the road dipped into a crooked little valley.

Squat houses sat far off from the dirt road.

Street signs hung from dented poles, but their words had faded long ago.

In one lawn sat a crumpled car, its surface entirely covered in bottle caps.

From the front porch of another house, wind chimes made from bent spoons and forks clinked gently in the breeze.

Willow felt as if she’d stepped backward into time. No, that wasn’t right. It was more like the township itself had turned back the clocks on purpose. Or gotten rid of them altogether.

Cole slowed the truck. “What about you? What are you seeking?”

What was she “seeking”? Pff. Not a country boy who used words like seek in an attempt to sound fancy, that was for sure.

Her thoughts flew to Serrin and the world he lived in, a world without cruelty and deceit. Willow was seeking him. That. A passage out of this tainted mortal world and to the fae realm she’d dreamed of since she’d been seven, where goodness reigned and muddin’ wasn’t a thing.

“I’m looking for a woman named Amira,” she said distractedly. “Amira Greer.”

Cole went still—and that got Willow’s attention. “Do you know her?”

His mouth opened. Closed.

A spark caught fire in Willow’s chest. “What’s she like? Can you take me to her?”

Cole turned left onto a street that was even dustier and narrower than the one they’d been on. The moon, which had crept slowly over the mountains as they drove, illuminated a sign nailed to a tree.

“POSTED: NO TRESPASSING,” read the raised white letters on a piece of green metal the size of a license plate.

Cole pointed with his chin toward a squat clapboard house set about a hundred yards back. Yellow light glowed in the front window. “If you want to find Amira, this is where you start.”