Emmett

Emmett wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffed.

He sat on a stump in the middle of a strange forest, in the middle of a strange world, crying over a man he'd killed.

He wasn't supposed to feel like this. Isaac had been about to die in a catastrophically terrible way, his body shredded from the inside out by some mythical fucking force. Emmett had put him out of his misery. He'd saved Isaac from unnecessary pain.

Yet his heart sank with the guilt of a murderer. That guilt mingled with the guilt of lying to Siena. Again.

He couldn't stop lying to her, could he?

He wasn't tracking Cam. Even if he found Cam, there was no way she'd return to the cabin unless Emmett knocked her out and dragged her back. She was too damn stubborn, and he didn't possess the will or the energy to put up such a fight. But if Siena thought Emmett was searching for her, she'd stay at that cabin until he returned.

Emmett tugged a folded envelope from his pocket, his name scrawled on the back. He'd found it nailed to the bedroom wall when items started shifting and appearing in the cabin, and hidden it beneath his mattress and out of Siena's sight.

From the envelope, Emmett slid free a black-and-white map on printer paper. The drawn area depicted part of the forest, and as far as Emmett could tell, the landmarks matched not Deadswitch, but this place. The map painted on the wall of the cabin.

The Briardark.

Scribbled in the corner of the map, about four miles due west, was a red star. At the bottom of the page, a handwritten note read: Find the cache, and this will all make a little more sense. —Brock.

Brock. His boss. His boss, who had refused to rescue them, had known of the Briardark all along. And the cache...

The cache was the only thing that would tell Emmett why he and the woman he loved were here.