For the next twenty-four hours, Camp Black Crow granted my wish and became incredibly normal. Nobody woke up screaming and no dark figures walked in the woods. My pendant did not reappear and I didn't miss it. I never saw a single crow.

If yesterday had been measured in tension and panic, today was measured in coconut-scented sunscreen and arguments over whether ketchup belongs on hot dogs.

Obviously, it does not. Hot dogs get mustard and, if they're available, pickled jalapeños.

However, there was no convincing the thirteen-year-old boy in front of me. "I paid for this hot dog with my Snack Shack money," he said. "It's my constitutional right to put whatever I want on it."

"Ketchup is not in the Constitution," I said.

He scowled at me. "It should be."

I handed over the ketchup bottle. Some battles weren't worth the effort.

By lunchtime, I'd pretty much convinced myself that the nightmare had finally ended. My thoughts didn't center on ancient cursed creatures, but on how to get the vampire naked again.

Griffin's vampirism didn't strike me as a curse so much as a nutritional difference. Like being gluten-free, but less socially acceptable.

I brushed a thumb over the bite mark on my shoulder. I hadn't let him heal it, kind of liking the idea of a little Griffin scar marking me as his.

Harold was hanging around more. It would be a stretch to say he was relaxed. Guys like him were always a bit high strung. But he started making plans for next week's activities like nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened and never could.

"If this weather holds," he announced during the staff meeting, "we'll be able to launch the model rockets on time."

Nobody mentioned shadow people or cracking totems or men in feathered cloaks.

Griffin caught my eye across the pavilion while Harold enthusiastically explained the bathroom cleaning rotation.

His mouth quirked into the smallest of smiles.

Boyfriend.

What a ridiculous word. Wonderful, true, but also ridiculous.

I smiled back at him before remembering there were other people in the room.

Mateo slowly lowered the cookie he'd been eating and made a gagging noise.

Everyone stopped paying attention to Harold and looked over at him.

"What?" Leah asked.

Mateo pointed back and forth at Griffin and me. "They're making eye contact."

Leah frowned. "People do that."

"No." Mateo took a bite of his cookie and talked around the mouth full of food. "Not like this. This is relational eye contact."

"I don't know what that means," Sol admitted.

"It means they're transmitting dirty thoughts to each other telepathically."

Griffin laughed.

The sound caught me off guard. This more relaxed version of him was going to take a little getting used to.

"See?" Mateo said. "Not even a denial."

I looked at Kirat sitting across the table, hoping for an ally, but she wasn't smiling. She didn't even seem to be paying attention to us. Her gaze was fixed on Harold who was still carrying on as if there'd been no interruption.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I rubbed a hand over them, ordering them to calm down.

Everything was fine now.

It had to be.

But even after the meeting ended and Harold dismissed us all back to our duties, Kirat was watching him. Only when he left did she stand and gather her things.

"You okay?" I asked as I followed her out the door.

She glanced toward the lake before answering.

"Do you trust him?" she asked.

"Harold?"

She nodded.

I thought about it for a minute. "I mean, no. Not really."

"Neither do I."

"But..." I gestured toward a kid chasing a cabin mate, beating him over the shoulders with a pool noodle while Mike pretended not to notice. "Everything's better now."

"I know." She didn't sound reassured. Her finger tapped against her leg. "But he knew there were stories. He knew what that girl saw in the woods even before she finished describing it."

I remembered the brief instant when his face had changed, just long enough to betray him.

Kirat went on. "And that crack in the totem scared him."

"It was creepy," I said. "It scared all of us."

"Not in the same way."

"What do you mean?"

"He wasn't surprised." She glanced around as if making sure no one was listening. "He acted like he'd been waiting for it to happen."

Griffin sat on the grass helping a group of boys sort arrows into piles. Alvin stood near a tree pointing at lichen spots on the bark and explaining something to two of the girls.

The camp looked exactly like any summer camp I'd ever seen on a brochure or in a movie. It looked like I'd thought camp would when I'd been on my way here, and so Kirat's words stung.

"He's hiding something in his office."

I followed her gaze toward the trail that led to Harold's cabin.

"Hiding what?" I asked.

"I saw him load two coolers into his truck right before the meeting," Kirat said instead of answering my question. "He told Kayla he was going to head into town for supplies."

She looked back at me and the fire in her eyes startled me.

"I think this is our chance."

I'd wanted so badly for things to be normal. Now everything was normal. Picture perfect. Was I going to upend that by committing a B and E?

"Will you help me?" Kirat asked.

Yup. I was going to commit a B and E.

My shoulders drooped a little. "Yeah. Of course I'll help you."

She took off down the path toward Harold's cabin.

"Now?" I asked.

"His truck's gone," she said. "It's now or never."

Griffin was still sitting in the grass with the boys. His head lifted and his gaze found mine across the distance. One brow arched in silent question.

I smiled.

It probably looked guilty AF because I was seriously feeling guilty AF.

His eyes narrowed.

I gave a cheerful little wave and turned away before he could read the words, "Breaking And Entering" written all over my face.

"Subtle," Kirat grumbled.

"I panicked."

"You are clearly new to the criminal life," she said.

"That's why you're in charge. I'm just an accessory."

"I don't think that means what you think it means."

Harold's cabin looked different that day. Much less ominous and frankly a bit pathetic with its sagging porch and faded welcome mat. A ceramic frog planter squatted beside the door. The flowers were dead and most of the green paint had chipped off.

Kirat climbed the too-soft wooden steps and tried the door. It was locked, of course. None of the other buildings even had locks.

My muscles relaxed in an unexpected wave of relief. Welp, we had tried and failed. Too bad, so sad. Back to sunscreen and hot dogs with ketchup.

Then Kirat pulled a department store rewards card from her pocket.

"What are you doing?" I hissed.

"Unlocking the door."

While I stood there sputtering, she crouched in front of the door and jimmied the card into the latch.

"Where did you learn this?" I asked.

"Reruns from the nineteen-eighties. Ever see MacGyver?"

I checked to make sure no one had snuck up on us. "I don't even know what that means."

The latch clicked and the door swung open. Kirat stood, beaming, and held her arm out toward Harold's domain. "After you."

"Absolutely not," I said. "The accessory doesn't go first."

In the distance a whistle blew. All my nerve endings tingled with adrenaline. People were way too close. I wasn't a goody two shoes about following the rules, but this was way over the line.

Kirat grabbed my hand and dragged me into Harold's cabin.

The room smelled like stale coffee, old paper, lemon cleaning spray, and mold. Sunlight streamed through dusty windows and illuminated a small, cheap desk buried beneath clipboards, stacks of paper, and half-empty bags of chips.

I took a step toward a bulletin board hanging on one wall. The floor creaked loudly. The notices pinned up included staff schedules, supply lists, and parent contact numbers.

"Tell me again why we're in here," I said.

Kirat slid a drawer open. "We're in here because we know Harold is hiding something."

Maybe she was right. Probably, she was. But I didn't have a clue what we were looking for or where we might find it.

Between us, in the next few minutes, we managed to turn up several pens, a rubber band ball, two granola bars, and a shocking number of antacid rolls. There were folders labeled maintenance, payroll, and incident reports.

I tugged the incident report folder free of the stack and flipped it open.

"Find something?" Kirat asked as she poked through the few books lined up on a nearby shelf.

"I don't know."

The pages didn't seem to be in any particular order. One noted that a girl had been stung by a bee. The name Miriam Cole was in parentheses with a question mark.

Another described a sprained ankle. (Lucan?) There was a food allergy report. (Brian Doyle?) A camper bit another camper during capture the flag. (Ionel?)

At least it wasn't the activities director biting campers. Seriously wouldn't mind if he bit me again, though.

I snorted.

Kirat looked up.

I waved her attention away. "Nothing. Just being weird. Sorry."

At first, all the dates were within the past few years. Then they started going further back. Ten years. Twenty. The paper yellowed. It felt softer between my fingers.

"These go back a long way," I said.

Kirat crossed the room and peered over my shoulder. "How long?"

I flipped toward the back and found one dated July 18, 1998. A boy in Wolf Cabin walked into the lake and almost drowned. He claimed a woman was calling from under the water, promising to take him home. (Sofiya?)

The lake is the monster.

But all that was over... wasn't it?

Why? Because the sex was good? Could it really have been good enough to defeat ancient evil?

I mean... maybe.

It had been pretty great.

Kirat tugged a report free. It was from August 3, 1987. A counselor had reported crows gathering on the roof of the pavilion. They'd attacked a child when she attempted to leave. (Ionel?)

"That's a really odd name to occur twice," I said. "And why do you think they're all with question marks like that?"

Kirat just shook her head.

We kept reading.

On June 29, 1974 three campers woke up screaming. They said they'd dreamed of their houses burning. All three had been in different cabins. (Silas Venn? Vasile Dragan? Sofyia?)

"Kirat?" I whispered.

"Yeah?" she matched my low tone.

"What is happening here?"

"Maybe it's kids with the same names as their parents?" she suggested.

"Some of these are really odd names."

A shadow crossed the window.

Kirat snapped upright and I froze with the file open in my hands. My stomach dropped all the way to my toes.

Then Sol's voice came through the door. "You two are terrible at this."

Kirat exhaled so hard she nearly folded in half.

I snapped the file shut and clutched it to my chest.

Sol stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and looked around Harold's office. "What are you even doing in here?"

"We don't trust Harold," Kirat said.

Sol nodded. "Obviously."

"Something's going on." I handed the file to him.

Sol accepted the folder from me and flipped it open. His eyes skimmed one page, then another. The easygoing expression melted from his face. "Where did you find this?"

I gestured at the cluttered desk. "Over there in a drawer."

"Did you read it all?"

"We read enough," Kirat said. "Whatever is going on around here, it's been happening for decades."

Sol slowly closed the folder. "Not decades."

Kirat and I exchanged a confused glance.

"Harold's only been running this place a couple years," Sol said. "The owner before him was collecting these reports. And the one before him."

I tried to force my conscious brain to override my panicking cave dweller brain. "Most of these reports are things that could happen at any camp. A kid got stung by a bee. Someone wandered into the lake. Food allergies aren't the work of the devil."

"Tell that to my cousin who can't eat ice cream," Sol muttered, tapping one finger against the folder. He wandered toward Harold's desk and looked inside the same drawers we'd already checked. "This place is too clean."

I sneered at the Dorito-dust fingerprints on the desk blotter. "Too clean?"

"This man kept fifty-year-old incident reports and every empty pen he's ever owned. Where are his personal things?"

"Probably in the bedroom," I said. But when I peeked into the bedroom, all I saw were rumpled sheets that looked like they'd never been washed and clothes piled in the corners. Not a single family photograph or cheesy tchotchke anywhere. No novels or crossword puzzle books. Not even a porno magazine.

Thank God for that.

Back in the office, Kirat walked to the bookshelf she'd already examined once. Six battered binders, three camp manuals, and a bird identification guide leaned drunkenly against the scratched wooden side of the shelf.

"Help me move these," she said.

Sol and I pitched in and slid the entire row of books forward.

Behind them, tucked against the wall where nobody would notice unless the shelf was empty, sat a narrow wooden box. It was not much larger than a shoebox and made of dark walnut with iron hinges spotting orange rust stains.

"All of a sudden, I'm feeling like this is a terrible idea," Sol said.

Kirat ignored him and lifted the lid.

At first, I couldn't see anything, but I could smell the old paper and leather and dust. It smelled like something that had gone untouched for a very long time.

Leaning closer, I made out the lines of three cloth-bound journals tied with faded ribbon. Kirat lifted them carefully, revealing a roll of yellowed parchment secured with cracked leather straps. She set the books aside and then, using only her fingertips on the edges of the paper, gently placed the parchment beside them.

Then she began pulling drawings out of the box. Dozens of them. They were in charcoal and ink and watercolor, and all in different styles as if each were created by a different artist.

The first showed the camp entrance, except it wasn't really the camp entrance. Not as it existed today. There were no cabins, no parking lot, no painted welcome sign. I wouldn't have recognized it except for the five totems in a wide clearing.

"How old is that?" I asked, eyeing the cracked, brownish edges of the paper.

"Old," Kirat said.

The next page showed the lake, black as a mirror and surrounded by a growth of trees even thicker than in modern times. At the bottom of the page, someone had written in neat block letters, "Lacul Corbului."

"What language is that?" I asked.

Sol shook his head. "No idea."

Kirat set the drawings back in the box and opened the smallest journal. Brittle paper flaked away under her fingers, despite her care. She read silently for a few moments, turned a page, and then stopped. "The truth is buried in the first settlement, not the second."

Silence pulsed between us.

"What's the first settlement?" I asked.

"There were two?" Sol asked.

Kirat delicately turned another page. This one contained a hand-drawn map in faded, barely there pencil. Over it was a much fresher, darker outline of the current camp.

I leaned closer and squinted at the page. Beneath the cabins and the trails and the pavilion an entire village had once stood. There were several tiny houses and a central square near the totems. A chapel had been where the rec hall was now.

Sol pressed right up against my back to see. "What's on the next page?"

Kirat turned the page to reveal a list of names.

Sofiya the shepherd girl > Anne Thatcher > Kayla Brooks

Ionel the orphan boy > Cabin Boy Peter Gray > Riley Washington

Marinello Stoica > Corin Finch > Mateo Alvarez

Nicu > Will Williamson > Harold Whitcomb

Bogdan Blacksmith > Brian Doyle > Malik Johnson

"Who the hell is Lucan the tithing man?" Sol asked.

My eyes found the name near the bottom of the list.

Lucan the tithing man > Silas Venn > Sol Laurent

The blood pulsing through my veins turned to ice water. The room suddenly felt much too warm and infinitely too small.

"And who is Mother Zora?" Kirat said in a voice much softer and shakier than normal.

It was a few lines below Sol.

Mother Zora > Frances Bell > Kirat Patel

I searched down the page for my own name once and then a second time. It wasn't there, and neither was Griffin's.

But at the bottom of the page, written in heavy, slashing letters that were gouged into the paper, were the words, "WHERE IS TEREZA?"