“Well, it’s about four o’clock now. Your blood sugar’s probably low, besides everything else. We’ll hit a drive-thru.”

Lara’s stomach, reminded of something as mundane as food, rumbled loudly enough for Kelly’s tension to break into sharp laughter. “Yeah, me, too. All right, we have a plan. Fast food, then a waterfall in western Massachusetts where there’s a weapon of unimaginable power.” She added “Tally-ho” in a mutter, and Lara squeezed her shoulder.

“You’re a rock, Kel. Thank you.”

She got a crooked smile in return. “Don’t thank me. I’m … what’s that kind of rock that breaks off into a million slivers? Shale? I’m like that. I look really solid but any minute now I’m going to fly apart. I just want to get somewhere quiet and safe before that happens. David, do you have a hideout anywhere?”

“I never thought I would need one. I had always thought if I couldn’t return home, if I was in danger, that I’d go …”

Lara turned to look at him when he trailed off, catching a grimace marring his features, though he smoothed his face as she frowned in turn. “To a great wilderness,” he said. “Even in this world, the wild places are kind to my people. I could have remained undetected in the Catskills forever, if necessary, but that was alone, and with all my skill.” His voice hardened at the end, hiding nothing from Lara: he was denying fear, denying so much as considering what it meant that he was cut off from the Barrow-lands.

Kelly, though, startled and straightened, looking at him in the mirror again. “You know, that’s a brilliant idea. It’s a thousand miles from Wales—”

“Three thousand,” Lara said pedantically, as mistruth shivered over her skin.

“Okay, fine, three thousand, whatever, but my point was aren’t the Catskills haunted? Like Rip Van Winkle plays ninepins up there and stuff. If there’s anywhere on the East Coast that’s got any kind of connection to David’s world, doesn’t it seem like it might be them? So we get the staff, we head for the Catskills, and you two figure out how to power it up and get David home by sunset.” She made her lips thin, scowling down the two-lane highway they were on. “Well, if we could take the interstates, anyway. It’ll take longer on the back roads, especially since I have to find one that’ll get us pointed west. I was kind of going to Canada.”

“So we could be arrested at the border?” Lara wondered. Kelly turned an injured look on her and she shook her head apologetically. “No, you’re right, it was a good idea. There must be some little roads you can cross over without border patrol noticing. Or at least we could abandon the car and walk across through the woods.”

“Perhaps as a second choice,” Dafydd murmured.

Kelly flashed him a tense smile in the rearview mirror. “Second choice, not last resort?”

“As you say. Let us hold making our way to Wales as the last resort, and for our first choice, explore the Catskills.” His voice wavered and he closed his eyes, suddenly more fragile than he’d been. “Though, Lara, even if we should find the staff, my magic—”

“You have royal blood, and I have the ability to find a truthseeker’s path,” Lara said fiercely. “We’ll make a world-road if we have to.”

Deep bells rang through the words, carrying, for the first time, the weight of prophecy.

“Okay, where are we?” Kelly wolfed down a cheese-covered hot dog and slurped at a soda as Lara unfolded the map Kelly’d bought along with the food at a local grocery store. Lara’s own meal was cooling, but she’d argued that she could eat it while Kelly drove, whereas eating and driving invariably turned messy. Dafydd, still in the backseat, ate a green salad straight from the bag, alternating with long draughts of bottled water.

“Here’s Peabody. We’re …” Lara tapped her finger just below a green spot on the map. “We’re about here, because I just saw a sign for this forest.” She drew a line westward across the map. “If you head due west, the only reference to a waterfall I can find is Turners Falls.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s dammed up, Lara. I don’t know if there are any major falls on the Connecticut River that aren’t.”

“No, it’s this one.” Confidence jangled over Lara’s skin, its music imbuing her with hope. “If it’s dammed up, there must be a way to get beneath or behind or inside it. Something,” she said with less certainty.

“You’re the navigator. Okay, let me see that.” Kelly shoved the rest of her hot dog into her mouth and took the map, studying the thin road lines. “The thing is, we know they’re looking for us in Boston,” she said around her mouthful. “We don’t know if they’ll have spread out. Still, I don’t want to take the direct route. If we drive north a little ways farther we can get onto one of the smaller roads and come around and head south. Nobody’d be looking for us from that direction.”

“Your friend has the makings of a criminal mastermind, Lara.” Dafydd’s color and humor were both improved, though Lara thought it would take escaping the vehicle’s metal frame to really see a difference in his health. “Did you know this about her?”

“I had no idea.”

“C’mon,” Kelly muttered. “It’s the kind of adventure everybody dreams about, right? You think of all the ways you’d prepare. You just don’t expect a cop to end up dead and your fiancé to dump you along the way.”

“Oh, God, Kelly.” Lara reached for Kelly’s shoulder and was shaken off, though not rudely.

“No, forget I said that. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

“We don’t know Detective Washington’s dead,” Lara offered in a small voice. “The news hasn’t said so.”

“Yeah, well, Dickon didn’t technically dump me, either, but I’m kind of thinking we should consider this a worst-case scenario situation. Anyway,” Kelly said ferociously, “I thought everybody made up melodramatic plans about how they were going to survive the plane crash or how they would disappear after stealing a hundred million dollars from Wall Street or whatever. Don’t they?” She looked up and Lara gave her an uncertain smile.

“I never did, but you’re the one who was always telling me I never took any risks.”

“Start smaller next time,” Kelly suggested, and twisted to pop her back. “If we go the long way around we’re probably not going to get to Turners Falls until after dark, but that might be to our advantage. It’s easier to sneak at night. And then whether we find this staff or not …” She looked in the rearview mirror. “The car makes you worse, doesn’t it, David. Can you handle us taking the long way?”

His silence was more telling than the answer he gave: “I’ll manage.”

Kelly shot a look at Lara. “Is he telling the truth?”

Lara shivered, listening to the resolute notes lingering in Dafydd’s answer. “He’ll manage, but you don’t need my power to know it won’t be good for him.”

“Yeah.” Kelly blew a raspberry and gave Lara the map, then put the car back in gear. “Hang on till we get there, David. Then you can get out and go lie down in a forest or something while Lara and I do the heavy lifting.”

“I would be grateful.” Dafydd spoke quietly. “I don’t need shelter, but I think even a few hours under the moonlight, in a green and growing place, would restore me greatly.”

“Okay.” Kelly pulled back onto the road decisively. “Lara, you navigate. Keep us off the blue roads, even, if you can, and push us west.”

The dam blocking the river at Turners Falls was massive enough to make Lara laugh. Despairing humor, she thought, but humor regardless. Three enormous walls—levies, blockades; she didn’t know what to call them—pooled the river behind them into a glittering black lake. The grounds around the lake, at least where Kelly had found parking, were well-kept lightly forested greenlands. Dafydd had gratefully stumbled from the car to sit beneath a tree while the women got out to study the dam in dismay.