They'd walked along the edges of the lake, well out of sight, until Ziya's men stopped probing around the hillside with their guns and their bulky gray suits. Matt could see the scintillating metal of the bikes, resting disposed on their kickstands. Dark leaves stacked on their leather seats. Those'd been some expensive goddamn rentals, and he was the only one with enough cash to cover the deposit. Four-hundred bucks, vanished from his bank account. He was starting to understand why everyone wanted Ziya dead.

Matt sat there at the edge of the water, gnawing on the skin around his thumb until he tasted blood on his cuticles. They should've chased after Jaylin. They shoulda followed the truck that'd taken him to Ziya's bogus pharmaceutical lab. Instead, they'd settled down beside a toppled tree, watching the lights in the windows of the white lakeside building, shifting ever so subtly across the waters. They looked kinda like stars—just a lot closer to Earth.

He raised his head to the thin veneer of shredded clouds that bleared the starlit sky. The moon cut an engorged circle in the center of the night, and when Matt tried hard enough, he could imagine the face of a man, matrixed together with all the dark crevices and deep craters. Maybe it was the stress of the situation, but Matt swore for just a moment that the man on the moon smiled. The bastard was mocking him. Coward. Coward, that smile said.

"Let's go scout the building." His words popped through a thick screen of dead silence, and Matt folded his arms around his middle to hug in his heat. "We should go look for a way in."

"He said to stay here," Sadie countered, shining the light of her phone in his face.

Gunner's text still shown on her screen.

Stay at 6:00.

"Maybe he meant six in the morning," Matt said, slapping at the slight prick in his neck. The mosquitoes had been after his blood all night. He cringed when he felt the little insect body beneath his fingers, then again when a sudden pain wracked his bitten shoulder.

"Why would he mean six AM?" asked Tisper, huddled close into Sadie's side. "He's obviously speaking in code. Six-O'-clock. The lake is the clock and we're at the sixth hour."

"Obviously," Matt said. Tisper frowned at the way he mocked her tone of voice, but he went on, "How do we even know we can trust this guy?"

"I trust him," Sadie said, in a way that meant, we all trust him, end of story.

Matt's hands felt numb at the knuckles. The night was colder than even the stormiest days in California. He'd light a fire if he could, but their whole goal was to stay tucked away in the blanket of dark until this Gunner guy came to the rescue. Matt wondered why the wolves hadn't sensed them yet. Ziya used human beings to service these places, right? Maybe there were too many around to pick up their scent. Couldn't smell the forest through the trees.

Matt glanced to the forest lining and the thought piqued at him.

"What'f it's the trees?" Matt said.

Tisper and Sadie had both grown tired of his talking. Their beady glares held question, but only as if to say, what now, Matt?

"The trees," Matt explained, "from the poem. Maybe they were talkin' about, like, actual trees."

"Trees," Sadie snorted. "Trees are going to kill Ziya."

"Listen, our closest friend is a bear-dog monster and you're a witch. Who's to say the trees don't grow legs and kill people?"

Tisper peeled at the cracks in her nail polish. "This isn't Lord of the Rings, Matt."

No. It was Twilight with a dash of fascist bloodshed. But before Matt could get his point across, a long beam of light flurried along the pale skin of his arm, up his shoulder, into his eyes. His heart leapt so suddenly into this throat, he could feel himself choke on it. Was it a pair of headlights? Had the truck come back? No; there was only one beam. One glaring white light with only blackness behind it.

Then Sadie was standing to her feet. "It's you, isn't it? It's you."

The beam shut off, and the stocky, bleary shape on the other end of the flashlight snapped away into blackness. Matt blinked his eyes wildly until he could make out the cut of the stranger again. The white lab coat he wore curtained in a gallop of wind. The moonlight cast back in the round lenses of his glasses.

"I found this bag by your bikes," he said, tossing a black backpack towards the ground at their feet.

Tisper snatched it up, heaving out a breath of relief at the sight of her bow and arrows inside.

"Would be wise of you to hurry," the stranger said. "Ziya prefers her executions on a full moon."

For the second time, Matt tilted his head back to the sky. The moon couldn't have been any fuller.

They followed Gunner and his beam of light to a dirt-road path where he and the rest of Ziya's pawns made their daily commute by car. Most of the time. Other times, he said, they were forced to stay overnight and sleep in break rooms that felt a lot like barracks.

"Ziya thinks we're on the cusp of a new breakthrough with the lich DNA. But we've completely lost the path we were on." He was out of shape, Gunner. Five minutes into their journey through the forest and he'd lost his steady breath. It was choppy now, his words quaking every time his feet stamped against the dirt ground. "We were trying to recreate it, but she's beginning to build off of it instead. She wants to alter the DNA now. Large muscles, sharper vision, higher metabolic rate. We've strayed so far from the path of DNA cloning and the end is nowhere in sight. She doesn't seem to agree. She sees some kind of light at the end of the tunnel."

"If she thinks everything's going so great for her, then what's her plan with Jaylin?" Sadie asked.

"Ziya's a spoiled sixteen-year-old brat," Gunner said. "If she can't have what she wants, she's going to take it by force. Your friend is not only her consolation prize, but the absolute specimen. He's everything she's been looking for."

Tisper's voice caught. "Is he okay? She hasn't touched him, has he?"

"Not yet," said Gunner. "He's going through examinations now. They're taking blood samples. Data to store in our systems so we know how to medicate him, what to feed him, how much bane we'd need to force him to turn. He'll be fine until Ziya decides it's time to play scientist."

"So what's the plan?" Matt asked. "Pop in and prison-break Ziya's favorite monster?"

"He's not the one you should be worried about," said Gunner. "The wolves that brought you here are on death row."

Again, Tisper's voice held no poise. "You think she'll kill them?"

Gunner shoved away a tree branch and the white paint of the angular building beamed in the dark of the forest.

"If they aren't dead already."

An; short chapter, I know. But I have much more for you on the way.