He approached with arms swinging at his sides, hands loose, bearing a flat-lipped smile that presaged a storm. Aggression rolled off of his posture. He was hatless and wearing scuffed tan combat boots laced tight at his ankles. Andrew dropped his shoes onto the deck out of reflex. The muscles in his forearms bunched as he closed his fists.

“Riley texted me some interesting shit this morning, my friend,” Halse said, and this was Halse, not Sam, though Andrew didn’t realize he’d created the distinction.

“Define interesting,” he responded.

Halse stopped at the base of the steps, nostrils flaring as he gave Andrew a caustic once-over. His bare toes curled into the deck. The feral part of Andrew paced its cage, alert and uncertain. All the paths he’d found, so far, led to Halse—but knowing that was a far cry from having a plan to confront him about it.

“To start, that Ed’s phone has been missing this whole time, and you’re all fucked up about not knowing what he was doing with which people, especially me. Which is an accusation I feel like I deserved to hear from your own fucking mouth,” he said. “Put your shoes on. We’re going on a trip.”

Andrew’s chest collapsed into a painful squeeze, and he blurted out, “Fuck off.”

Measured, Halse repeated, “I said, put your shoes on.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.

Squared shoulders and quickening breath recalled their first meeting, and the tension that had begun to bank between them after regular exposure. Andrew stood stock still, neither retreating to the house nor forcing his way down the steps. The series of rambling texts he’d sent Del, the thoughts he had trouble quashing, roared into the substrate of his brain: if someone else had hurt Eddie, had kicked off some violence that led to the ugly end the revenant had shown him, Halse was his prime candidate. Getting in a car alone with Halse while he visibly boiled with anger, no one around to notice or care where he disappeared to, seemed stupider than Andrew was willing to be.

But then Halse said, “Forget your plans. I know where they found him, and we’re going.”

Rational resistance crumbled in an instant and Andrew bounded down the steps in two strides; Halse held his ground. Nose to nose, glaring into Halse’s auburn-flecked eyes from as close as he’d ever seen them, he snarled, “How do you know that?”

“Because I asked when it happened, you ungrateful dick, so put your shoes on and get in the damn car.” Halse jammed his arm between their bodies, wrist bone and the blade of his hand shoving into Andrew’s sternum.

Andrew staggered against the step and used it as an excuse to sit and yank his Converse on. Halse headed off across the path through the yard. Got on like a bonfire, he recalled, yanking his laces tight and double-knotting them. He had a dull pocketknife and the conviction of revenge if their unplanned field trip spiraled out of control, but nothing else. Eddie was a bigger, stronger man than Halse, but there was no telling how their fight might’ve started—who would have thrown the first hit, over which of a handful of possible triggers. Killing a man with a knife took some real intimacy, and while Halse and Eddie had spent a lot more time together while he was stuck up north than he and Halse had put in so far, Andrew figured he could manage if his skin was on the line.

Just to confirm, he called out, “Are you asking Riley to come with, then?”

“No, I’m not.” Sam kicked the gate open, wire rattling on wire. “This is our business.”

As he expected. Andrew’s phone buzzed a gentle appointment reminder as he got up to follow, seating himself in the WRX and clicking his belt into place. He swiped the alarm silent. Halse, jaw set firm, rolled out of the alley onto the main street. The air conditioner whirred over the stifling silence. A yellow rubber duck sticker decorated the gearshift, worn and faded. There was a quality to their coexistence in the small space, sour and ragged, that made it hard to take a full breath. Andrew propped his elbow on the rim of the closed window and put his fingers to his temple.

“Talk,” Halse said as he took a ramp to the I-40.

Andrew dug his thumb at the interior corner of his eye, strung high enough to vibrate in his seat. Having a conversation felt impossible, but he said, “I had a meeting.”

“Do you care?”

Andrew shut his mouth again. Eddie would’ve been irked with him for his laissez-faire attitude to this program, his research—but not angry, given that he was faced with something larger. He wanted to believe that, if their positions were reversed, Eddie would have already drowned the necessary parties in the ocean of his loss. Instead, Andrew was stumbling blind from one failure to the next, hamstrung by his own destruction, a boy made of clumsy mismatched pieces. Running straight into the mouth of danger, after it found him and invited him along for a ride.

Halse said dryly, “It’s an hour and a half drive, so it’s going to be real boring if you sit there quiet the whole time.”

“Hour and a half?” he questioned, turning a fraction toward him against his better judgment. “What the fuck?”

“They found him out in the woods, edge of a national park I guess,” Sam said.

He kept a hand and one knee touching the wheel, the other hanging a measure above the gearshift. Traffic passed behind them at a steady clip, going the compulsory twelve miles per hour over the limit. Periodically his fingertips twitched to rub the edge of the peeling sticker.

When it became apparent that Andrew wouldn’t continue, Halse said, “He had Riley listed as his emergency contact through Vandy. I guess the cops looked that up when some lady out walking her dog or whatever found him. I asked to see where, after they brought him back and called his parents and shit.”

“Why?” Andrew asked, packing weight into that one word.

Sam said, shrugging, “Because I needed to know.”

Sober and strained, the pair lapsed out of conversation. Andrew scrolled on his phone with nerves jangling, typed a brief email to Dr. Troth to apologize for missing their arranged time. Without his hat, Halse was a younger-looking man, still unfinished around the edges of his stubbled jawline and prominent cheekbones. The mantle of his persona hung looser on him than usual. Andrew swallowed a knot of uncertainty, his earlier aggression dissolving from the simple awkwardness of the situation and the lack of continued provocation.

Sam took his eyes off the road to catch Andrew staring and said, “I’m not stupid. I’m guessing you think something bad happened with him and us. Like we did something to help him along. Riley has buried himself ass-deep in guilt. He didn’t see shit wrong, and I didn’t either. Eddie was acting kind of manic at the end there, but who doesn’t sometimes?”

The responses that rose to his mouth and died there formed a block of clutter. Andrew grunted and nodded instead of offering an explanation. Halse hadn’t quite hit the nail on the head, but he was too close to the truth of the suspicions knocking around Andrew’s skull. Something bad covered a whole manner of sins.

“It doesn’t sit right with me that his phone is missing. Odds it’s out there in the woods?” Sam asked.

The question sounded rhetorical, but Andrew said, “Not strong.”

“Maybe it landed in someone’s pocket,” Sam said slowly, testing the idea.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said to the man he thought might’ve taken it.

“You’re crazy,” Halse said. It didn’t sound like a real disagreement.

After another drag of tense quiet, Sam turned on the radio and spun the dial to loud. Andrew sat gnawing his nails in sequence to pass the drive. He had come with Sam alone, friendless, far from the city, and he hadn’t bothered to so much as text a person his whereabouts. Ethan’s monologue lingered in Andrew’s head: protective of his cousin, disapproving of the gothic obsession that selfsame cousin shared with Eddie, prone to clashing with Eddie bad enough that other people noticed. He recalled the scabs on Halse’s jaw the first time they’d met, and West’s observation about Eddie’s fights. The fact that the pair of them had been running Halse’s business routes together. All the secrets Eddie had hidden from Andrew. He was starting to feel like every one of Eddie’s lies and evasions had something to do with Halse.

At a turnoff with a national parks sign, Sam spun the wheel and took a hairpin turn faster than he needed to, with a noisy scatter of gravel. He parked at a service road that said NO PARKING. Their doors slammed in the birdcall-split solitude of the wood’s edge. The total absence of other humans was notable in the density of the quiet. His skin crawled. If Halse was the one responsible, despite his performed ignorance—

“Down here,” Halse said as he set off walking, interrupting Andrew’s uneasy hesitation.

Andrew followed him onto the hiking path. The trees closed over their heads, undergrowth lush on either side of the packed dirt track. At a sharp curve in the trail, split with a snarled ankle-thick root, Sam grabbed a tree branch for balance and clambered off the path. He waved an unconcerned hand through a dreamcatcher of a spider’s web at face-level. Andrew picked through the underbrush at a more sedate pace. He drank in the gloaming-dimmed forest around him for signs, for some necromantic twinge, and scuffed his feet through the leaf litter in pursuit of more tangible evidence. Then Halse stopped. Andrew halted two feet behind him.

Halse laid his palm over the trunk of a broad, craggy white oak with its bottom branches curved almost to the ground. The tree was as broad as Sam’s wingspan, Andrew guessed, a monster planted in the middle of a ring of skinnier growth. It had a certain poetic weight. He hated it with a fierce, scouring depth.

“Cops said here.” Halse moved his hand from the trunk, uncovering a freshly scarred carving, EF. “Under this tree. Might’ve taken weeks to find him, if that dog hadn’t helped.”

Andrew swallowed. “Has Riley seen this?”

“No,” Sam said. “I wouldn’t bring him out here.”

Without waiting for a response he turned and paced around the side of the tree to give Andrew some privacy, scuffing his boots through the ground cover, as Andrew had been doing on his approach. He disappeared behind the trunk. Andrew sidled up to the tree with the caution he’d use for a skittish horse. The bark was rough and warm, but inert under his hands where he traced the scarred memorial letters he presumed Halse had left, the only other man to visit Eddie’s resting place. Andrew expected to feel a stab of recognition, the riffling wail of his spectral hanger-on, but there was nothing—the cold knot inside him didn’t even stir in response to the supposed site of Eddie’s death.

Andrew pressed his palms harder and laid his forehead on the coarse wood, grinding it into his skin. In all his dreams, he’d never seen the tree, this broad spreading creature standing guard over a forest he wasn’t sure the name of. The toes of his shoes touched the base of the roots, his shoulders rounding. The rustling steps on the other side of the trunk ranged farther out.

This didn’t feel like it could be the place. He felt more death walking down any street of Nashville. Any tree in the forest would have the same tug of interest or knowledge—which was to say, none—even though the cops said Eddie’s blood had watered this monster’s roots. Andrew took a knee at the base of the trunk. One hand on the root nearest him, crawling free of the underbrush, and one on the packed earth, he closed his eyes. He had an idea of how to ask, if asking was the right word. It was precisely the depths to which he’d promised himself he’d never stoop, but Eddie had called to him in his desperate times, and he still felt the visceral memory of power lashing out.

“Fuck you,” he said to himself, and to the boy who whispered in his dreams. Then he shoved mental fingers into the snake pit of creeping potential coiled in the base of his guts.

Disgusted and clumsy without practice, he woke the cold pulse into his veins and his tongue and the fingertips he curled into the dirt. Eddie had practiced drawing out the power; Andrew never had, not once. Fuck you, Eddie, fuck you for making me do this, he thought on a loop. Eddie would’ve crowed to see him. He’d been pushing so long for Andrew to embrace himself, their difference, their death-made-life. Andrew reached into the ground, and instead of Eddie’s praise, fresh blood pulsed up from the otherwise summer-dried earth with a reverberating strike that knocked the wind out of Andrew’s lungs. An unnatural gust stirred the leaves up in a tiny red-spattered cyclone around Andrew’s wrist, his fingers, stinking of rot and life.

The vision he’d called for spilled up from the ground and into his flesh, bowing him face-first into the wet earth and forcing his hands deeper into the solid ground: cool lax limbs spread to their full length, knife lying suggestive at the knee, jaw hanging a fraction loose. Uncaring alien fingers adjusted the dead weight and thumbed the livid purpling bruises at the elbows, the wrists, chafed and burned around his matched tattoo. Andrew existed in that moment as both the dead man and himself, inside and outside, witness and victim all at once in an immense moment of confirmation—someone else was there. Another set of hands arranging the stiff corpse.

Violence hadn’t found Eddie here in the forest, not at this resting place, quiet and green under the leaves that had scattered themselves on Andrew’s call in a paroxysm of sacrifice. The land had known Eddie, had given him its rites, drunk the dregs of him down. He was one and the same as that earth. But the true death had happened elsewhere, not beneath the handsome tree in the woods far from home. The soil had so little spilled blood to give as offering to Andrew when he came for his inheritance.

Andrew came into his skin heaving, slumped on his side in the fetal position. The blood on his hands might’ve come from his cracked nails, but he knew otherwise. The dampness on his face might’ve been sweat or tears. Footsteps approached and paused at the side of the tree, and he scrubbed his fingers ineffectually on his shirt.

“I leave you for five minutes,” Sam said, strained.

“He didn’t die here,” he slurred.

“Remember that thing I told you, about not fucking with things you shouldn’t fuck with,” Sam said. There was a subdued fury in his voice. “This is one of those things. What even were you doing?”

“I needed to be sure.” He planted his back against the tree, legs spread. A tremor crept up from his hips to his heart. He was lying now in the same spot Eddie had been staged. Panic raced and spasmed. “Someone killed him, someone fucking—”

Halse grabbed his upper arm and hauled him to standing, grip like iron. Andrew staggered against him. “That’s the real reason you’ve been asking around, huh? Asking questions about me and him? It didn’t occur to you to wonder why Riley told me all that shit when he hadn’t told me before? We all met up last night to talk about you, compared notes after your party with Ethan.”

The blazing fire in his stare was the realest thing Andrew had seen in weeks.

“Say it to my face,” Halse snarled. He released Andrew’s arm and took a step and a half back, shaking his elbows out. “Fucking hell. Ask me if I did it, you fuck, come on.”

“Fine.” Nausea gripped his esophagus. “Was it you who killed him?”

Halse’s fist caught him square in the stomach.