By the time we found Harold, Sol had returned from the woods with no answers and a very stiff smile. He stood at the edge of the quad with one hand on his hip and the other rubbing the back of his neck, while the girl who'd seen the man in black clung to Jada's side. Her cabinmates seemed to have moved on.

Children are resilient little beasts.

Harold took it all in with a sweeping glance as Jada and the camper drew near. "So, was there a stranger in the woods or not?"

Sol let his hands fall to his sides. "I didn't find anything."

"Well, all's well that ends well, right?"

"That girl saw something," Sol said.

Harold gave a forced chuckle. "It happens in the woods, doesn't it? Shadows sway and branches groan. The light plays tricks."

"It wasn't a branch," the girl whispered. "I'm not stupid."

Harold's smile looked plastic as a doll's.

My stomach rolled. Something is off about him.

Griffin noticed, too. I felt it in his stillness as he stood beside me.

"Well, what did this man look like?" Harold asked the girl.

She shrank away from his big, booming voice and looked up at Jada.

Jada nodded and offered a small, reassuring smile. "It's okay, sweetheart. Harold is the camp director. He's in charge of the whole place. If anyone wants to know about any weird stuff going on, it's him."

He already knows, I thought. He's the one who called us. He's at the center of everything.

The camper clung to Jada's hand. "He was tall and he had weird clothes. Like from an old movie, but all covered with feathers."

Harold jammed his hands into the pockets of his red shorts.

Was that recognition flashing across his face? Or was it just fear? Either way, he smothered it under a laugh loud enough to draw the attention of the other campers in the quad.

"A fantastic imagination," he announced. "It's bound to happen. Big storms and late nights and all those creepy camp legends, right?"

Jada leveled an impressively scathing look on him. "Harold, if she—"

He cut her off with a wave of his hand. "No need to alarm everyone. We have a full afternoon schedule for these kids. Maybe it's just time to lay off the spooky stories. Someone find Mateo and tell him to lighten things up."

My pendant warmed. Not the same sharp pulse from earlier, but something quieter and, weirdly, more familiar. Like a friend telling me to look closer. I reached up and pressed a palm over it.

Griffin watched me for a beat before turning to Harold. "Can we speak in private?"

Harold turned toward him, and for one heartbeat, the friendly camp director mask slipped entirely. Then he smiled. Or maybe he was baring his teeth?

"Of course we can. Come to my cabin after activities."

"Now," Griffin said.

The word was spoken softly, but let no room for argument. Both campers and staff in the little circle we'd formed stilled and watched with wide eyes for Harold's reaction.

Further away, water balloons burst and kids shrieked. Someone shouted, "No fair!"

Normal.

Harold's gaze slowly scanned over the group. "Fine. Five minutes. You're supposed to be supervising this." He gestured toward the nearby happy chaos. "It already appears to be getting out of hand."

Griffin's fingertips tugged on mine. The totem pendant pulsed softly.

Stay together.

So when Griffin started walking, I followed.

We didn't go toward Harold's cabin, but toward the front of the camp where the towering totems stood sentinel before the campers' lodges.

The wooden animals, wolf, owl, deer, bear, and crow. Carved eyes peered down at us from ancient, weather-worn faces.

I'd walked past them countless times by then, but something about them drew my attention. They felt bigger. They felt aware.

A shiver slid through me. I moved a little closer to Griffin.

We stopped in front of the crow totem. It loomed above us, black with age. Its eyes seemed darker than the shadows around it.

"Tell us what you know," Griffin demanded.

"About what?" Harold asked. He was still wearing his too-big grin, but it was starting to look a little strained around the edges.

Griffin stared him down.

Harold caved after all of three seconds before looking down at his feet, shuffling in the sandy earth. "There are stories about this land. Just stories."

"Keep talking," Griffin said.

Harold shrugged a beefy shoulder. "Every old place has stories, kid. There's always a ghost or a curse or a native burial ground. People love a good story."

"Are you saying all the camp legends are just a marketing ploy?" I asked.

"I'm saying that a little mystery creates atmosphere. It draws interest."

My pendant warmed and Griffin's hand found mine.

"And how do people like knowing their kids are at a camp where a man in a feather cape stalks the woods?"

Harold huffed. "It's just a story."

A sharp wooden crack sounded behind him. Not too loud, but a sharp clean sound that reminded me too much of the time a boy in my third-grade class fell from the monkey bars and snapped his femur.

We all looked up.

A jagged line split down the face of the crow totem.

The crack wasn't large in comparison to the statue. Maybe ten inches long.

But I knew with absolute certainty that it hadn't been there five seconds ago. The break zigzagged up over the beak and through one dark eye like a horrible wound.

All the color drained from Harold's face. Not a hint of his smile remained, and he suddenly looked fifteen years older.

"What is happening at this camp?" Griffin asked.

"The wood is old," Harold replied in a thin, unconvincing tone. "There were those humid stormy days and it's so dry now, the change in moisture probably..."

He drifted off, failing to convince us or himself. His gaze kept darting up toward the split in the totem.

My pendant was pulsing like a heartbeat now. Mimicking my own heartbeat, maybe? I wrapped my fingers around it and tugged it away from my skin to rid myself of the discomfort.

Griffin's voice cut through the silence. "What. Is. Happening?"

Harold flinched. "Nothing."

Griffin dropped my hand. His fists curled at his sides. "Stop lying to me."

"Watch yourself, kid."

The temperature of the conversation dropped ten degrees.

I inched closer to Griffin, ready to grab his arm if he lunged. As if I'd have any chance of stopping him.

"I blame Mateo," Harold said, lifting his chin a fraction. "All of you, really. You've fed the nonsense with all those stories."

"The stories you printed and put in our rooms?" I asked.

"How was I supposed to know you'd take a bunch of nonsense so seriously?"

I gestured at the totem. "Is that nonsense? It just happened right in front of our eyes."

"Wood cracks," he said, like he was speaking to a preschooler.

"And the man in the cape?" I asked.

"For Pete's sake it's just a story."

Griffin stepped forward, pushing me slightly behind him. "Is the thing that wrapped around my body and pulled me toward the bottom of the lake just a story? Is the thing that tried to murder Evan a story? What about the people walking on the water? Is that just a story?"

Harold's pulse thumped so hard I could see it in a bulging vein in his forehead.

"What did you see?" he asked in a much softer, less combative tone.

"I think you know," Griffin said.

Harold looked like a rabbit, cowering in a hawk's shadow.

I couldn't help but take pity on him. "We saw people. Families with children and old people just living their lives. And there was a man in a black feather cape, just like that camper reported seeing."

The wind stirred through the clearing, rustling the tall grass at the edges of the forest, making it whisper.

I glanced up at the crow's face.

Is that crack deeper now?

Maybe my imagination really was running wild. When reality turned nightmarish, how could a person distinguish dreaming from wakefulness?

He curled inward on himself as if struggling under a great weight. "Tell me what else you've seen."

"There are things in the shadows," I said.

Griffin still looked ready to throw a punch. "Emmilyne—"

"No." I stopped him. "Let me tell him. People are having bad dreams. I'm having them, but I'm not the only one who wakes up smelling like smoke from terrible fires. Someone told me they hear the lake calling to them. Nicole found a camper sleepwalking toward the water in the middle of the night."

I hadn't put it together with the other things before, but now that I was starting to talk, it all seemed linked.

"There was something in the shadows during that storm," I went on. "And Mateo songs carry details that we've all seen in our minds but that aren't written in any of those stupid books you printed."

Griffin spoke so quietly I thought at first I'd imagined it. "When everyone else is sleeping, I hear them in the woods, begging to be set free. They just want to go home."

Far away, a roar of laughter rose. It sounded impossible, like a transmission from an alien planet.

Harold flinched. He looked up at the cracked totem and then out toward the lake. He looked anywhere but at us. Then he shook his head. "You're not the first people to see things."

Impossibly, Griffin grew even more tense beside me. I worried, like the totem, he might be cracked down the center by some invisible, internal pressure.

Harold scrubbed his face with both of his catcher's-mitt hands. "Every year someone reports something strange. There's always a voice or a dream or a shadow where it shouldn't be."

He cursed under his breath. "But never like this.

Griffin cocked his head. "Like what?"

Harold cursed under his breath and leaned back against the crow totem as if he no longer had the strength to stand.

It struck me how small the big man looked in that crow's shadow.

"It's usually just one or two people." He swallowed hard. "Campers have nightmares. Sometimes a counselor thinks they saw something standing in the trees."

Mike's voice echoed in my memory. Something in the land, maybe. Magnetic weirdness. Or bad water.

"It's never like this," Harold said.

But was that true?

For the third time, Griffin growled out the same question. "What is happening?"

"I don't know."

Griffin leaned in.

Harold held both hands up. "But..." He emphasized the word. "There are some old journals."

Of course there were. What was a haunted location without some creepy historical accounts?

"Whose journals?" Griffin asked.

"One is from the couple who owned the camp before me. There are some from other previous owners. Some are much older."

My pendant turned ice cold. That was new.

Did it mean he was lying?

Did it mean whatever animated the crow medallion was angry?

What did any of this mean?

The urge to pull Griffin toward my old car and hightail it out of there tingled in every nerve ending.

He tried seven times.

A wave of vertigo had me breathing slowly to keep from throwing up.

"Do they mention the Crow King?" Griffin asked.

Harold hesitated.

Answer enough.

"They all talk about him," I whispered.

"They are stories," Harold said. "Stories sometimes get passed on for thousands of years."

Griffin drew back and slipped his hands in his pockets in a way that felt decidedly calculated. "What do these stories say about him?"

I saw the moment Harold found some inner well of resolve. He rolled his shoulders back and lifted his chin. "You know what? This camp teaches and feeds hundreds of kids every summer. We've provided summer income for more college kids than I can remember. Our tax dollars are keeping books in local classrooms." His voice grew stronger, more defensive. "The stories are fun legends people love to spread, but if word gets out that kids are having some kind of haunted nightmares here the place could get shut down."

"So you're gambling with these childrens' lives out of some sense of altruism?" Sarcasm dripped like venom from Griffin's words.

"Nobody is in danger because of a bad dream," Harold snapped.

"Evan would have died if Griffin hadn't been as fast as he is," I reminded him.

Harold pointed a shaking finger toward the black lake. "He should have never been near that water." Then a little of the wind left his sails and he sagged again. "I wanted to believe it was all just stories."

Whoever had taken over games blew a whistle and a chorus of combined cheers and groans lifted up over the camp's treetops.

Harold glanced toward the entrance road. "We need to lock everything down."

"What?" Griffin and I spoke at the exact same moment.

"If people start panicking and leaving, it's going to be chaotic. And what if this guy in black is some local yokel out to snatch a kid?" He shook his head emphatically. "Not on my watch. No one comes in, and no one goes out."

"People are going to die here," Griffin said. He spoke softly, almost as if to himself.

Harold took a single step toward the gate. "I won't let that happen."

He strode away and, after a moment, we followed him all the way down the trail to the parking lot where my car sat, dust-covered and abandoned beside the vehicles of the other staff members.

Harold lifted a heavy chain off a post, swung a huge iron gate until it clanged shut, and then looped the chain through a clamp and clicked a padlock shut.

The little dirt road that disappeared into the trees felt like it existed in another universe. One I could never return to.