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“The trail’s that way.” I pointed north. “Follow it out.”

She blinked. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I tugged my sleeve further over my wrist, where the welts had started to itch in earnest. “I clear storm damage, I don’t chaperone. Permits are a council matter. The administrative office is on the square, next to the bakery. They close at four.”

“I have an appointment there this afternoon.”

“If they approve access, they’ll tell you where you’re allowed to go.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then you stay on the trail.”

“Right.” She adjusted the strap of her bag, then looked back at the moss she’d disturbed. “It really takes two years?”

“Sometimes longer.”

She nodded once, like she was filing it, and turned for the trail.

She was an academic. She would be gone in a few weeks. People always were.

I stopped inside the tree line, remaining out of sight until I heard her boots hit the gravel of the public path and the birds started up again behind her. Turning back toward the damaged cedar, I picked up my chainsaw.

By lunchtime, Hazel Morgan would be nothing more than an inconvenient interruption to an otherwise ordinary morning.

Chapter 3

Hazel

By three-fifteen that afternoon, I’d learned two important things about Screaming Woods. The first was that the town administrative office employed a receptionist with lavender skin, four arms, and reading glasses she kept pushing up with whichever hand happened to be free.

The second was that Barrett was apparently going to ruin my life.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

The woman behind the desk peered at me over the top of her glasses. Her nameplate read DORIS, and she’d been remarkably pleasant right until the moment she’d slid my approved research permit back across the counter with a yellow form clipped to the front.

“Then you won’t be able to access the protected zones,” she said.

“I have authorization. State conservation approval, university liability clearance, a completed risk assessment. I submitted everything your office requested.”

“You did.” Doris turned one of the pages with her lower left hand while another reached for her coffee. “You also listed poison ivy as a significant environmental hazard.”

“It is.”

“You didn’t list carnivorous moss.”

I opened my mouth, paused, then conceded the point with considerably less grace than I would’ve liked. “I wasn’t aware carnivorous moss existed.”

“Which is rather the point.” Doris smiled sympathetically and slid the yellow sheet another inch toward me.

I looked down at the heading again.

PROTECTED WOODLAND ACCESS—LOCAL SAFETY ESCORT REQUIREMENT

The words were typed in bold, presumably because whoever designed the form had anticipated researchers like me trying to argue with it. Beneath the heading, a paragraph explained that all non-resident researchers entering designated conservation zones had to be accompanied by a locally certified woodland specialist familiar with supernatural flora, unstable terrain, and post-Frankenpunch environmental anomalies.

I read it twice, searching for the loophole that surely had to be there. There wasn’t one.