Lexi shook her head while Dorian slowly walked the area, a careful eye trained on the ground.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I’m trying to see where the ground may have been disturbed, but I’m not finding anything.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice shaking. “How could it just disappear?”
“You must have imagined it,” said Lexi. “Have you been getting enough sleep? Perhaps you are working too hard.”
“I’m not sleep-deprived, and I didn’t imagine it. I know what I saw.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “there is nothing here now, so we should be heading back.”
“No. It was here. We need to dig.”
Lexi shook her head. “We should head back. There is no grave. You were seeing things, I’m afraid.”
I held up an authoritative hand, and when I did, I was surprised to see them both flinch, as if I somehow held the power in the situation—which perhaps I did. Probably even places like Hildegard didn’t want a social media controversy on their hands. “Everyone keeps telling me these woods are dangerous, but no one has told me why exactly. I saw a wolf here earlier—right here like it was guarding the grave. Is that what everyone is so afraid of? Wolves?”
“No. There are no wolves here.”
“But I saw one.”
“It must have been a dog.”
“There’s no way in hell that thing was a dog.”
“A coyote, then,” Lexi said definitively, and then she turned and started walking back through the woods toward campus.
“Lexi is right,” said Dorian. “We shouldn’t linger.”
As he spoke, I noticed some fallen leaves begin to pick up and dance lightly along the ground. A strange wind blew through the trees, and there was a shift to the energy in the air. Above us, shadows drifted across the sky, and although I knew all this probably was an indication of an approaching storm, in my bones I felt something else, something ancient and malevolent breathing down my neck.
“Look,” I said, running my hand through my hair infrustration, “you have to see this from my point of view. I’ve been told that this woman left recently and no one has seen or heard from her since. Now I find a grave with her name on it in the woods. You can understand how I might be alarmed?”
“But there is no grave here,” said Dorian as if he were talking to a confused child.
“I can see that now, but there was. And it wasn’t just a grave. It had weird inscriptions, something about an Ancient One, and a symbol associated with the horned god. Why would I make something like this up?”
“I’m not saying you are,” he said. “But it must be some kind of prank.”
“A prank? Who would think this is funny?”
But he had nothing to say to that.
I held his gaze. “So Dr. Casimir isn’t dead?”
He shook his head.
“Swear to me on whatever it is you hold most holy—swear to me she isn’t dead.”
Gracefully he slipped a hand over his heart. “I swear to you on the breath of the Mother, Isabelle is not dead.”
A cold wind flitted across my brow.
“The Mother?” I whispered. “Who the hell is the Mother?”
A noise came from behind us, something I couldn’t identify—a strange grunt, a low growl.
