CHAPTER 8

The envelope marked 1 contained an intricate, hand-drawn map, not a letter. A single sentence was scrawled at the bottom.

Follow the map and open the second envelope when you get to the gate

Taped to the corner was an ancient-looking key. I gently peeled back the tape and held it in my hand. Questions about Circe’s secrecy and where she was leading me took root in my mind. I allowed them to grow and branch off into a hundred new possibilities. This woman had to know something about me, but why not just tell me, since she seemed to like writing letters so much? There had to be a reason she couldn’t simply say what she meant, and curiosity bloomed anew as I thought about what that reason could be.

I closed the safe and rehung the picture, untangled the vines from around my leg, and righted the pot. I grabbed my bag from my room, stuffing the other letters inside, and added the new key to the ring with the two others Mrs. Redmond had given me. I barreled out of my room and crashed right into Mo. She stumbled back, stunned.

“Something chasing you?” she asked.

I readjusted my glasses. “No. I—I’m gonna look around outside.”

“Oh, okay,” Mo said. “This property’s big enough to get seriously lost, so don’t go too far. You got your phone? You wanna take Mom’s Taser?”

“Got my phone. And I don’t need the stun gun. I have mace though.”

“That’s my girl,” Mo said. She narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s a lot of open space, and you’ve never been in the sticks like this. We’re so far from town, from other people . . .” She trailed off.

I looked at the floor. Would she ask me to be extra careful? To make sure I didn’t do anything that might put us all in some kind of danger? She slipped her hand under my chin and leveled my eyes with hers. “Stretch. Be careful, but not too careful. This is the perfect place to let your guard down.”

It was permission I didn’t know I needed. I grabbed her and hugged her tight before slipping on my shoes and circling around the back of the house.

A wide plain of half-dead grass that looked like it hadn’t been cut in years sloped away from the house. I took out the map. A red line traced the path Circe wanted me to take, straight through the center of the rear yard. I took a few tentative steps into the knee-high grass. It bent toward me as I waded through, cutting a swath of vibrant green into the brown.

As I approached the tree line, a series of low aching groans cut through the air. The trees twisted back on themselves. They had noticed me.

Stretch.

That was what Mo had told me to do. I wanted to let my guard down, but I didn’t trust myself not to make something terrible happen, so I turned my attention back to the map. I could hear the trees righting themselves as I put my thoughts elsewhere.

Three paths led into the dense forest, but the map said I should take a fourth. I flipped the map around, and in that moment, I was pretty sure I’d learned my map-reading skills from Mo.

After a closer look, I noticed a depression marked the ground where the other path might have been at one point, but it was completely overgrown. Hundreds of Dutchman’s-pipe vines tangled together to obscure the way. Smaller leaves with razor-sharp serrated edges—stinging nettle—interlaced with them, forming an impenetrable curtain. They weren’t deadly unless you were allergic, but their leaves and stalks contained microscopic barbed darts tipped with a mild poison. Contact with the skin caused rashes and pain that could last for days. I didn’t want to have to douse myself in calamine lotion, but after my encounter with the poison ivy and the hemlock, I wondered if I even needed to worry about it.

I looked at the map again. Even the drawing included the overgrowth of plants, but the red ink cut right through them. I took a step forward. Testing my theory, I reached out to stroke the leaves of the stinging nettle, then braced myself for the pain. It didn’t come.

A cool sensation washed over my hand, more intense than it had been with the poison ivy, but nowhere near the numbing pain I’d felt with the hemlock. It spread to my wrist, stopped, then retreated to my fingertips.

I took another step. The tangled curtain of ivy and nettle unwound before me. The layers of foliage parted, revealing the well-worn fourth path. I paused, and the plants responded to my hesitation. They curled back over the opening, making it impossible to see.

“Okay,” I said aloud, trying to calm my racing heart. “Okay.”

I stuck my hand out again, fingers trembling. The vines pulled back. I stepped onto the path, and the cloak of leaves and vines closed behind me.

The late afternoon sunlight slanted through openings in the canopy. The black spruce and red pine groaned as they shifted like hulking shadows, creating a corridor for me to walk through. The ground flattened as if it was making a way for me. Walls made of twisted branches bordered the trail. The red line on the map snaked through the woods before running into some sort of open space marked with an X.

Fifteen minutes passed before I came to the clearing. It was surrounded by ancient, towering oak trees. All across the glade, small, black creatures stared up at me with their wings spread, eyes shining, whiskers hanging from their chins like goblins. My heart jumped into my throat and I let out a choked scream, stumbling back.

It took me a few seconds to realize that they were a type of flowering plant. I was glad nobody else was around to see how quick my mind had jumped to goblins instead of plants.

I gathered myself and crouched to touch one of the inky black blooms. It immediately bent toward me, caressing my palm. These flowers weren’t poisonous. There was no cool feeling in my hand. Taking out my phone, I Googled “black bat shaped plant” and found that I was looking at hundreds of Tacca chantrieri, the black bat flower. Their petals looked like a bat’s wings in flight. They had a dozen whiskers dangling from their centers and white seedy pods that looked like glowing eyes.

The red X on my map was positioned at the other side of the glade and according to the drawing, beyond it was a large rectangle with a bunch of smaller rectangles set inside it. A building? Some kind of enclosure? I couldn’t tell. The trees on the far side of the clearing were tightly packed, huddling together, but as I drew closer, they shifted. The oak trees bent unnaturally, groaning loudly as they leaned away from the facade of an overgrown stone structure.

A towering iron gate peeked through the tangle of mulberry-purple bougainvillea like a wicked, rusty smile. Thick, thorny vines crawled along the top of the wall like giant snakes. I craned my neck to see if this led to someone else’s property, but the wall wasn’t longer than maybe two buses parked end to end. It was some kind of enclosure.