Riley fidgeted his way through the production meeting, barely listening to anything anyone said, depending on Julie to bring him up to speed later.

His fingers twitched with the need to get back to his laptop, to start finding the truth about Logan’s grandfather.

The instant Scott stopped nattering on about the budget, Riley launched himself out of his chair. As the crew filed out, he caught Julie’s arm.

“Jules. Something’s come up.”

“To do with the show?”

“Yeeess.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Not really. Logan’s reaction told Riley he’d missed something in his preparation for this episode. Something big. Sure, it might end up having more to do with Riley’s battered heart than Danford Balch, but his scholar’s instincts pinged like crazy, telling him to dig deeper, find the clue, make the connection. The answer’s out there, and you can find it.

After all, wesearch was his middle name.

Julie pulled her top lip between her teeth, like a hellhound with an underbite. “I don’t like it. You need to remind Scott of your value. If you’re not in his face at least once every three hours or so, he’ll forget who you are and why he should listen to you.”

“I know. But this is critical. Anyway . . .” He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “Are you telling me you can’t handle Scott?”

As he’d hoped, she rose to the bait. Nose to nose with him, she growled, “In my sleep, with no hands and a hangover.”

“Excellent.” He fumbled in his messenger bag and pulled out the map of the site with the boundaries of the ghost war clearly marked in signature HttM neon-green marker. He hesitated for an instant, smoothing a crease in the paper. The expression on Logan’s face had been so bleak earlier. What would it hurt if Riley fudged a little, redrew the lines so the crew set up in the wrong spot, or let Scott film a day or two early? He would give Logan what he’d asked, yet give the show’s audience exactly what they expected: Max Stone strutting around some creepy scenery in his fedora and bomber jacket while precisely nothing supernatural occurred.

When he thought of it that way, the fans might be outraged if a real ghost did show up.

No. Absolutely not. Riley never freaking ever falsified his findings. He hadn’t abandoned his professional ethics when he dropped out of school, and he wasn’t about to start now, with so much more at stake.

A few days ago, this story had been nothing but a way to prove himself in a job he wasn’t sure he wanted. Now? It was personal. He needed to get it right for Logan’s sake, whether Logan admitted it or not.

He thrust the map at Julie. “Here. Make sure they don’t get distracted by pretty camera angles or spooky atmospheric shots. This is where we need to film.”

She peered at it, tracing the green line with one finger. “The Witch’s Castle is barely in the picture. Just that one little corner. Scott won’t like it.”

“If Scott wants ghosts, he’ll pay attention to the map.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Jules. You trust me?”

“Of course.”

“Then engage those UPM superpowers. Do your job and let me do mine.”

She rolled her eyes and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Fine.”

As soon as she left, he raced back to his room and booted up his laptop. Saturday. God, so little time to figure this out, especially since his schedule was already packed with Production Bitch errand-running and preparation for his first time at the shoot location.

So he’d better channel Hercules and get on with the labors.

It was almost too easy. With the right name, Riley found what he was looking for immediately.

Sean O’Connor and Joseph Geddes had been trapping rabbits—illegally—in Forest Park on the night of October 17, 1952. O’Connor had been seen running from the park near midnight, but Geddes was never seen again.

In the sensationalist journalism style of the time, reporters had trumpeted foul play, but xenophobic, not supernatural. With the country in the early throes of the Cold War, they’d been quick to blame the disappearance on conspiracies by agents unknown.

Then Logan’s grandfather had been arrested, and the shit had well and truly hit the fan. The newspapers had been merciless, launching a positive feeding frenzy with Logan’s grandfather as hapless chum. They’d torn him apart.

Logan’s grandmother had been a schoolteacher before her husband’s arrest. She’d lost her home and her job, and from what Riley could discover, had lived the rest of her life with her sister, as a house cleaner, sometime seamstress, and eventual unpaid caregiver for her brother-in-law.

But as rabid as the reporters had been about Sean O’Connor, his arrest, and subsequent institutionalization, none of them had spared an inch of ink on the family of his alleged victim. Joseph Geddes had had a wife and two children, who’d been mentioned in the reports of O’Connor’s arrest, but Riley couldn’t find a single story that mentioned them afterward.

The death rolls told their own tale.

The youngest child died not six months after her father’s disappearance. Their mother later the same year. Of the eldest child, he could find no trace at all, as if with no adult to care for him and protect him, he’d ceased to exist.

God, Logan’s grandfather hadn’t been the ghost war’s only victim.

But if Sean O’Connor hadn’t been a delusional homicidal maniac, if his claims were correct and the ghost war had somehow captured a living man . . .

Holy shit.

Riley leaned back and clutched his hair with both fists. What if the Witch’s Castle legend was more than a ghost story? What if its mythic roots went even deeper?

Folklore annals had tons of instances of humans lured or forcibly abducted to places outside the normal plane of existence. Hades, Faerie, Annwn—the lists went on. The flow of time in the alternate world frequently tracked differently than the real world, so that when the victim returned, years, decades, even centuries had passed.

Although the odds were that Geddes was dead, and had been since the night he disappeared, what if he wasn’t? What if he was trapped in the ghost war in a kind of supernatural stasis? What if he could be released? No matter what Logan had said about burying the story, it would have to mean something to him to clear his grandfather’s name. Joseph Geddes, freed from ghostly captivity and able to bear witness, could do it.

Riley plunged back onto the net, searching for every ballad, myth, legend, or folktale with a “rescue from the other world” scenario. As he cataloged each of them—and a depressing number ended in spectacular failure—he discovered a disturbing motif: the odds were heavily weighted against the rescuee, either because the rules governing their imprisonment were fricking secret, or because the boneheaded rescuer knew the rules but screwed them up anyway.

For Persephone, it had been eating six lousy pomegranate seeds when nobody had told her it meant she’d be stuck in Hades for one month per seed. How was that fair? For poor Eurydice, it had been a husband who couldn’t wait another five freaking minutes before he turned around to look at her. Sure, all the odes were for poor bereaved Orpheus, but he was the one who had screwed up and Eurydice had paid the price by dying—again. Orpheus just mooned around demoralizing everyone with his dirges until the Maenads finally got fed up and had him for lunch.

If the ghost war followed the classic pattern, it could have a number of its own booby traps, and tripping any of them could cause the rescue to fail, sending Geddes down the path of Persephone, Eurydice, or even Orpheus, if the ghosts decided to take exception to outside meddling.

Crap, crap, crap. If there was an answer to the Witch’s Castle riddle, he’d never figure it out with so little data. He needed more, damn it. A single verified incident wouldn’t cut it statistically.

He got up and paced the narrow alley between the foot of his bed and the dresser. Was he limiting his options because of invalid assumptions? He’d tracked every recorded witness account when he’d prepped the pitch for Scott. But what if he’d been looking in the wrong place? He’d been treating the ghost war as the effect of the Balch–Stump feud—but what if he turned it around and viewed it as the cause of real-world problems, like the fate of Geddes’s family?

If he wanted to find other incidents, maybe he needed to look at the response, not the stimulus—not only on October seventeenth in that year or any other, but in the days and weeks and months afterward, when the fallout began to affect the people left behind. That’s when atypical behavior would surface, when the pattern would begin to emerge. Once he had more data to analyze, he’d stand a better chance of discovering why a man could be caught in a supernatural snare, and clues about how to release him.

He plopped back onto his chair and pulled up a new browser window, modifying his Witch’s Castle search criteria to include any crimes, disappearances, or anomalies that mentioned Forest Park since the date of Geddes’s disappearance. Scrolling down the list of stories, he discarded all the standard DUIs, domestic disturbances, and misdemeanors.

Ha! There.

Seven years ago this month, Trent Pielmeyer, a nineteen-year-old PSU student, vanished without a trace. The official story was frustratingly bare of detail. Trent’s car had been abandoned near the Lower Macleay trailhead. The police had discovered blood at the intersection of the Wildwood and Lower Macleay trails—the location of the Witch’s Castle—but it hadn’t matched Trent’s type. With no body or motive, the story ended with nothing but a request for any information leading to the whereabouts of the missing man.

But then, buried at the end of an article published two weeks after Trent’s disappearance, Riley discovered an account of police questioning Trent’s PSU roommate, an architecture student.

Logan Conner.

Fingers numb, Riley slumped in his chair and stared sightlessly at the door. How likely was it that Logan knew nothing about his own freaking roommate’s disappearance at the same place his grandfather had witnessed a ghostly kidnapping?

Exactly zilch.

Was this why Logan had rabbited this morning? Not because of his grandfather, but because he was afraid the show might link him to the later scandal? Riley had always assumed Logan never touched him in public because he was ashamed—either of being gay or being seen with someone as dorky as Riley. Could it have had nothing to do with Riley at all?

After public testimony, public outcry, and public reaction had destroyed his grandparents’ lives, maybe Logan had overcompensated, adopting an obsessively low profile to avoid similar danger.

Or maybe . . .

Riley’s fingers stilled on the keyboard, his stomach suddenly hollow. Could Logan be complicit in Trent’s disappearance?

No. Not my Galahad. But odds were even that Logan knew more than he’d let on about the ghost war, and Riley intended to ferret the rest out, one way or another.

Before he faced Logan, though, he needed to do his homework.

As he started to type, to cross-reference source material and plan his attack, his nerves settled, his breathing deepened, panic sloughing off and leaving confidence and certainty in its place.

No matter how awkward he was with people, how often he screwed up his social life, this he could do. This was his life, his blood, his purpose.

He pushed up his sleeves and settled his glasses on his nose. “Move over, Production Bitch. Folklore Boy is in the house and ready to throw down.”