I let Rikki walk out the door and then had to keep myself from throwing my fist through something. I knew I had no right to keep her from protecting her family legacy, but I had every right to worry about her working on that damn boat. She had thrust her sweet little chin up to assure me she could handle herself in the underworld. And she was right, to a point. She had worked that ferry for months, on her own, all the while fretting about her dad. But none of us had ever suspected anything was amiss. She'd transitioned smoothly into the role of Trex. It couldn't have been easy. The underworld wasn't exactly a walk in the park. But Rikki had stepped seamlessly into her dad's shoes.

I took some comfort in knowing that most of her work day consisted of time on the river. As disgusting as the river was and as creepy and unpleasant as her passengers were, it was easy to categorize the River of Souls as the least dangerous, most hospitable section of Feenix's realm. After her adventure into Wynter and the hike through Vapour's realm, Rikki had had a good taste of the horrors that lay beyond the river. I hoped that would keep her from wandering away from its banks.

I stopped the motorcycle in front of her parents’ house. Walt was sitting on the front porch eating an apple as I walked up.

"Max, how are you? Would you like an apple? I have another one here. I thought I could eat two, but my stomach seems to have curled in around itself from lack of food."

I took the apple from his hand and pulled a second chair across the porch to sit down with him.

We both took bites of our fruit.

"Boy, I was sure craving something fresh from a tree down there in that hole."

I casually glanced around at the other houses. Aside from a big brown dog stretched out on the neighbor's porch, gnawing eagerly on a soup bone and a group of seagulls scouting out a trash can, the neighborhood was quiet.

Walt caught my quick scan of the area. "Most everyone is out on their boats. Kathy, Rikki's mom, is taking a nap, but then there isn't anything I have to say that she doesn't already know." He took another bite and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I realized as I watched him, with his weather creased face and hazel eyes that matched Rikki's in color, that I was talking to a man I'd spoken to thousands of times. But this was only the second time I'd seen his face and heard his real voice.

"I guess my stubborn kid went to work on the ferry."

I nodded. "I couldn't talk her out of it."

He laughed. The sound was weak, but it seemed he had recuperated quickly from his ordeal. "She got that stubborn streak from me." He seemed to notice how tense the subject of Rikki working the ferry made me. "She'll be all right. She also got her tenacity and her brains from her old man. But we need to talk, Max. I think there's a lot more to the story than my kidnapping."

Even though we were alone, I scooted my chair closer. I rested my forearms on the arms of the chair. "I'm listening."

Walt put the half eaten apple on the wobbly table next to his chair and leaned forward. "I think Vapour is up to something big. Now, I'm just a ferryman, and I don't see much of what goes on past the river. But Catch puts little nuggets of gossip in my ear. He's heard that Vapour is tired of watching over the worst of the lot. He wants Feenix's realm."

"How the hell does he think he'll get it? Feenix has been sitting on that big gaudy throne for centuries. I don't think Vapour would have an easy time of it."

"No, no you're right. Especially when he has the Boys of Wynter guarding the border to make sure nothing seeps out into the mortal world. But what if something gets through? Then Vapour could cause a lot of havoc out in the human world. Feenix would be made to look incompetent."

I relaxed back. "Nothing is going to seep through Wynter. We've got it under control. If Vapour wants to wreak havoc, he's going to have to come up with some alternative plan for getting his troublemakers out. I still don't understand what you had to do with it all."

"No idea." Walt combed his thick salt and pepper hair back with his fingers and picked up his captain's hat off the table. He pressed it on his head. It was strange to think I was talking to Trex when he looked just like a middle-aged, sun-weathered fisherman. "But they wanted me alive. They made sure of it. When I threatened not to eat, they forced my mouth open and shoved pieces of meat into my throat. Nearly choked to death."

"So they kept you there in the cave, gave you food and water and that was it? No interrogation? Did you see Vapour at all?"

"Nope. No sign of the creep."

"Maybe they thought you knew something that would hurt their plan."

He shrugged. "Not sure what. You know me. I keep to my job when I'm on that river. Nope. And they didn't ask me a damn thing. They just brought me the meat and water every day. Then once a week, a hunched over figure, dressed in a mirror image of my own disguise, came into the cave to cut off a piece of my hair and scrape the inside of my cheek with a stick."

He said the last part so casually, it seemed it was just an afterthought. But it was far more significant than he realized. I sat forward. "Why the hell would they do that?"

"No clue."

"Did you talk to the person or get any sense of who it might be? Any glimpses of them at all?"

Walt got distracted by a pigeon strutting across the porch railing. He reached over for his half eaten apple and tossed it onto the front yard. The pigeon torpedoed off the railing and went straight for the apple. Seconds later, at least a dozen more pigeons came down off the roof to fight over the fruit.

Walt had been alone in a dark cave for months and it seemed right now everything was entertaining, even pigeons battling over an apple.

"Walt," I said sharply to regain his attention.

He was wearing an amused grin when he turned back to me. "Yes?"

"The person in the disguise, can you remember anything about them that might give us a clue to their identity?"

The long scraggly beard he'd grown during his captivity had been trimmed to a short goatee. He reached up and ran his fingers along the edges of the beard as he thought back to the mysterious visitor.

"It was always so damn dark in that cave, and when the person arrived, they had a bright light on the end of a stick. It wasn't fire or a candle, but it glowed so brightly, it blinded me." He pointed at nothing in particular. "Although, there was one visit when the person dropped the scissors before cutting off my hair. I glanced down and caught a slight glimpse of his hand." Walt closed his eyes to picture it again. "Yes. The fingers were long and gnarled." Walt's eyes popped open. "A ring. A big silver ring with a three sided knot."

"A three sided knot? The witch's knot?" Witches, who had their own realm, complete with leaders and powerful councils, all wore the silver rings with three sided knots as a sign of solidarity. Nessa, the woman who raised Stryker, Flint, Wilder and me until we were carried off to become Boys of Wynter, was half witch and half mortal. She kept her ring in a glass box on her dresser but she never wore it. She always said the ring didn't really belong to her and she didn't really belong to it. Growing up, we had no idea what Nessa meant because we had no idea that witches or ghouls or even a place like Wynter existed anywhere but in books and our imaginations.

"Yes. My gosh, I had that in my head all this time and never put the clues together. It must have been a witch."

"Hair and a swab from your cheek—sounds like ingredients for a spell of some kind. What the hell is Vapour up to?"

"Who knows. I wonder what he did when he found out I was no longer chained up in his cave? I'll bet he was mad as hell."

I thought about his last statement for all of a second before I pushed to my feet. "I don't know, Walt, but I'm not going to wait to find out what the second part of his plan is. Take care of yourself. I'll see you later."

"Thanks again, Max, for pulling me out of there. I admit I was trying to figure out how to take my own life using just my shackles and the rocks surrounding me. I can tell you after a few longs weeks in that crevice I was feeling a good shade past depressed. Suicide seemed like the only solution out of a truly grim situation."

I smiled at him. "I'm glad we got you out of there too. Now I need to find out just what the hell is going on."