“MY HEAD is killing me.” Bobby kneaded his temples and stared bleary-eyed at the menu laid out on the table in front of him. After leaving Autumn Ridge the night before, he’d driven eastward along a twisting road through the Umpqua National Forest, where endless ranks of silent evergreens stood watch as they passed beneath them. They pulled off once at a truck stop in what Bobby had come to think of as the Middle of Absolute Nowhere. He purchased two five-gallon gas cans (just in case) and then had them and the gas tank topped off by a weary attendant before continuing on their way.

Now they’d stopped at a diner in a town called Lakeview, where Carly claimed to have stayed a few times on trips with her old school friends.

Carly lifted her gaze from her menu. “I’ve got Advil in my purse.”

“I don’t think it’s strong enough to help this headache. It’s like I’ve been brained.”

“Suit yourself.”

A server came and took their order (Bobby asked for eggs, bacon, and a twenty-ounce coffee that was sure to make him unstoppable), and Bobby laid his forehead down on the table. They’d stopped once during the night so he could rest his eyes a bit, but sleep had eluded him. He couldn’t keep going like this. Falling asleep at the wheel wouldn’t help him stop Thane.

Carly said something, and Bobby lifted his head. “Hmm?”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you had a plan.”

“Nope.”

Carly looked like she was about to supply him with a snide comment, but her expression softened. “I guess we should start thinking of one, then. Do you think Thane can hear us all the way out here?”

“Don’t know.”

“You aren’t really much help this morning, are you?”

Bobby felt too tired to argue. “I feel like I need an army.”

“You’ve got me. That’s a start.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt, though. You heard what Thane said.”

“Yes, and I’m not going to let him scare me. When I started working with Randy, I knew I should expect trouble at some point. It didn’t keep me from doing my job, did it?”

“This isn’t your job, though. You help people at the safe house. This is trying to stop a psychopath from murdering everyone I care about. I mean…I want to be able to do this alone so no one else gets hurt, but I can’t. Doing it alone means you’re all as good as dead, because if I die, there’s no telling what Thane will do to you all anyway. Not to mention evil having free rein, and all.”

He dragged in a breath and observed the rest of the diner, where a few other early-morning patrons scrolled through iPads over their breakfasts. None seemed to be paying him or Carly any attention, so he went on. “And what does that even mean, anyway? Evil having free rein. I mean, a Servant died in 1914 without a replacement and then the First World War broke out, but what about World War II? How was that any less evil than the first one?”

“No one ever said it was.”

“Then how did the Servant’s death give evil free rein, if the next full-blown war was just as bad?”

“Who knows? Maybe another Servant we don’t know about kicked the bucket.”

“What, you think there’s two lineages of Servants out there, and both of us have to stay alive to keep evil in check?”

Carly shrugged. “Could be. Could be more than two. Could be there’s only one and I’m just crazy.”

The server brought their food to the table, and despite Bobby’s hunger, his stomach turned at the sight of the bacon on his plate.

Carly stabbed a breakfast sausage onto her fork and bit off the end. “It makes you think, though. What if there really are other people like you? The world is constantly going through conflict, and the moment one of you dies without a replacement, it all goes to hell. It would explain a lot if you weren’t alone.”

Bobby took a sip of coffee and stared sadly at his breakfast. “Basically you’re saying the world could go to hell at any second even if I don’t die without a replacement, assuming there has to be a certain number of Servants alive all at the same time.”

“Yep. Sobering thought, right?”

“I think I liked it better when I assumed there was just one of me.” Bobby closed his eyes. Give me a little more guidance here.

“Let’s get back on track,” Carly said. “Problem Number One: Thane.”

“Problems Number Two and Three: Bradley and Ellen.”

“Let’s focus on one problem at a time. What do we know about Thane’s abilities?”

Bobby leaned back in his seat. “He alters perceptions and makes us think we see and hear things that aren’t there. He can influence thoughts but can’t control them. Somehow he managed to kill your great-grandpa and give Graham an aneurysm.”

“So he can obviously exert some control over people’s anatomy, then.”

“Right. I think he has limits, though. When we saw him in the nursing home, he had to concentrate hard just to generate an apparition in our minds. He might have a hard time influencing a lot of people all at once, so if we found a way to distract him, maybe we could, you know, stop him.”

“Kill him, you mean.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“Bobby, the man can do stuff with people’s minds. Locking him up isn’t going to stop that, and you’ve already told me he’s perfectly possessed so he can’t be cleansed.”

A man at a nearby table turned his head toward them and stared a moment, then returned his attention to his phone.

“Won’t killing him make me just as bad?” Bobby said, lowering his voice. “I’m not a vigilante.”

“You also won’t let evil have free rein if you can help it. I know you’ll make the right decision. You always do.”

Do I? Bobby wondered.

BOBBY CRANKED the heat all the way up in the car once he and Carly finished breakfast, and they sat in the small parking lot letting the engine idle.

“So do we go back home now?” Carly asked. “Or do you want to do something else?”

“We still haven’t figured out anything.”

“Then we shouldn’t go home.”

Use your atlas, the Spirit whispered without warning.

Skin prickling, Bobby said, “Would you get my atlas out of the glovebox?”

Carly opened the compartment and handed the atlas to him. He flipped it open, and it fell to the Nebraska page, but Bobby knew that didn’t mean anything. “Just for fun, I’m going to try it again,” he said.

“The atlas thing?”

“The atlas thing.”

Carly frowned. “But how is that going to help us?”

“Maybe it’ll tell us if there’s another Servant lurking around out there.” Bobby shrugged. “Maybe.” He closed the atlas and stared at the bent and tattered cover. He’d had this atlas for so long. When had he even gotten it?

A memory came to him then: his fifteenth birthday, just a few months after his father had passed away. Charlotte, his stepmother, had thrown a small party consisting of Ken Roland’s relatives (her own family had little to do with Bobby, so she hadn’t invited them). It had been a dismal affair, what with no one wanting to celebrate so soon after Ken’s passing, and Bobby remembered solemnly opening a giant gift bag from Charlotte and pulling out a brand-new 2009 road atlas with a picture of multicolored hot air balloons on the front.

He’d looked up at Charlotte, puzzled. “You got me an atlas?”

“There’s more than that in the bag, but yes.” She’d smiled at him, though the sadness in her eyes made his heart ache.

Six years later, Bobby couldn’t remember what else had been in the bag—probably some new shirts or a pack of guitar picks or something. What he did remember was going down to his basement bedroom after his relatives went home and flopping down on his bed with his new atlas. He ran a hand across the glossy cover and then flipped it to a random page, where differently-colored squiggles denoted various highways and such.

For the first time in his life, he’d found himself wondering about all the lines on the map and the places they might lead to. Probably somewhere much better than this lousy little town that flooded every time they got a bad patch of rain. Why, this atlas could show him how to go anywhere, and maybe he’d do just that once he got his license.

“Bobby? Are you okay?”

Bobby wiped a hand at his eye as he continued to stare at the atlas in his lap. So much had happened during the six years it had been in his possession. Had Charlotte known in some way that Bobby would leave her and everything else behind? Had the atlas been her way of saying that it was okay for him to go his own way?

“I’m going to see where we should go for help,” he said.

He closed his eyes, opened a page, and stabbed his finger at it.

“Um, Bobby? Did you do that on purpose?”

He cracked open an eyelid and felt his stomach plummet. He’d opened it to the map of Kentucky, and his index finger was planted firmly on the Ohio River right on top of Eleanor in Southern Ohio.

Bobby’s mouth went dry. “Oh, crap.”