I was scanning through the reports my crawler program had collected over the last twenty-four hours when, someone knocked on my door, breaking my concentration. I sighed. The program gathered up all the articles, public social media posts, and police reports (some of those not exactly public) that matched the keywords I was currently feeding it. As I scanned, my brain intuitively built a web of connections, but that one knock had scattered my concentration, meaning I would have to start from scratch. There was no going back and fixing it.

"Yeah?"

"It's me," Ryan said. "Can I come in?"

I had to standup to unlock the door. I knew enough about security to always lock my door with physical means, reliably without any kind of external access. Keys could be copied. Digital keypads could be hacked.

Not like I had anything other than my program that anyone would want to rob me for. I was just... cautious. It came from growing up in a household full of tougher, older siblings who didn't give a lick about anyone else's sense of privacy.

I slid back the three bolts that I engaged when I was in the room. Only one had a key, and I kept that on me at all times.

I held the door open and Ryan slipped into my room and took a seat on my bed without so much as a how-do-you-do.

"What do you think about all this Ancient bullshit?" he asked.

I shrugged. "It's as plausible as Caspar being able to see the future, right?"

"That's ridiculous," Ryan scoffed. At my flat expression, he added, "You don't really think that, do you?"

I shrugged. "Caspar doesn't seem like a tall tales kind of guy. And he's been right about the babies every time."

Ryan dismissed that with a sniff. "That doesn't mean he can see the future. And really? Dragons and phoenixes? Is everyone out of their damn minds?"

A cold fire was simmering deep inside Ryan, a deep anger I'd never seen a hint of before. "What's with you, man? You're normally... chill."

Ryan leaned forward to grab a stress ball off my desk and began tossing it back and forth. "It's just... so you know this land was my grandmothers, back a while ago, right?"

"Sure."

"Well, we all used to live here. Mom, Dad, Grandma, all the aunts and uncles and cousins."

When we'd arrived, there had only been the one house, and it had been falling apart. "Where did they all live?"

Ryan's eyes glazed over as his memory slipped into the past. "Mostly on the far side of the property. You been out to the field that's all sunflowers?"

"I haven't gone out to see it, but Simon told me about it."

"Well that was where the houses used to be. But then one of my uncles, he started claiming he was getting visions—messages from god. Convinced a lot of the family, too. A lot of lion supremacy bullshit and most of my family bought into it. That was bad enough, but then he started talking about ascending to a higher plane..."

He had my full attention. "And...?"

Ryan smashed the stress ball between his hands. "And then he convinced half of the family that the way to ascend was through death and they lit all the houses on fire and offed themselves."

"Oh, shit. what about you?"

"We were gone when shit really went down. We were visiting my dad's family for the summer. Looking back, I think it was his way of getting us all out of the crazy. We heard about it a couple days afterward, and Dad went back to check, but he said by the time he got there, everything was gone. burned to the ground."

I had thought my family was bad. "How old were you?"

"Nine. I'd only been back here once before, the year after everything went down. That was when those who were left of the family planted the sunflowers. And then we scattered. Too many memories, I guess."

I scratched my head, at a loss as to how to respond to that kind of story. "What about now? Is it painful?"

Ryan shook his head. "It was weird as hell, especially at first, but now, there's more good memories than bad. But you can see why I've got an issue with people spouting off about visions and magical beings."

"No shit." It definitely explained things. "But I do think you might consider giving Caspar a chance. If you don't trust him, at least trust Asher? He's a cautious guy, and he's never steered us wrong. You don't have to follow blindly; I don't think anyone is asking for that. But..." I couldn't believe I was the one trying to convince someone that their skepticism and paranoia was out of line. "I've got your back if anything does go sideways, okay?"

Ryan's wide shoulders relaxed a little, as if a burden had just slipped from them. "Sorry. I didn't mean to throw all that on top of you."

I shook my head. "It's not a problem."

Ryan stood and tossed my stress ball at me. "Don't stay locked up in your cave all day, man. I've got ribs in the smoker."

"Then you know I'll be out at some point. Just stand in front of my door and waft it in, and I'll follow like a hungry kitten."

I turned back to my screen when he'd left. Maybe Ryan had taken some of his burden off by giving it to me. It was a little uncomfortable, but not many people felt comfortable enough with me to do that. It left a warm feeling in my chest. But enough of that. 

I shoved thoughts of Ryan's past away as I started from the top of my list, even more reports having been picked up by my program while I'd been talking to Ryan. I scanned through them, letting the connections visualize in my mind as I tried to predict where our enemy would appear next, or uncover where he'd been.