The next day wasn’t nearly so peaceful for Thea. She woke up with a start and scrambled to get her tent packed. She ate breakfast walking, an apple she ate all of but the stem and another KIND bar. The reverence that she’d felt the day before for the beauty of her surroundings had waned. She was no longer feeling cosmically connected to her grandfather.

She couldn’t explain the nagging feeling she was having. Other than to say she felt as if she were suddenly in a race that she was losing. She didn’t feel followed. But she felt as if she were getting outpaced by invisible competitors. She picked up her pace. Stopping only for lunch, she was making incredible time. In fact, she was going to be at her grandfather’s clearing well before the sun even went down. The eclipse was scheduled for 10:15 pm. She’d have a few hours to kill just waiting around.

Thea heard a sound in the woods. A rhythmic one, like the sleeve of a raincoat whisking past itself. But then it was gone, either stopped or too far away. She didn’t stop again.

Thea wasn’t worried when the map called for her to veer off the trail. She was well acquainted with compasses. And besides, the old map matched up convincingly well with both the modern map and the topographical map of the area that she’d bought at the airport. She knew she was headed in the right direction, but something told her she wasn’t moving fast enough.

She cursed herself for her stupidity. Why oh why did she have to let that maple syrupy soft spot call the shots and demand she walk in her grandfather’s footsteps? Why didn’t she just hitchhike to the easier entry point? She would have made it there last night! She might have had too much time to kill, but it would have been better than this racing in her chest that told her to go-go-go.

She slugged water as she slogged up a slight incline and then down the other side into a gulch. The terrain had been fairly flat but now, closer to Lake Michigan, it was starting to get hilly. Thea could see that spots of the ground were blonde and sandy, as opposed to the gray and black clay that she’d been tromping through yesterday. They were getting into dune territory.

By the time she was little more than a mile away from the clearing by her calculation, she was flat out running. Her pack, tightened down on her back, didn’t jounce her, but it dug into her shoulders. Sweat ran down her back and between her breasts. Her hair was loose from her bun, but tucked underneath a red baseball cap. Her hiking boots were tied tight and high, saving her from about four different potentially twisted ankles.

The last quarter of a mile was done at an all-out sprint. She knew she was being ridiculous. She just knew it. She was going to get to the clearing, it would be beautiful and peaceful and undisturbed. She’d make camp, relax, watch the eclipse and say a last goodbye to Chet Redgrave. There was absolutely no reason to be running like there were demons on her heels.

She saw a lightening in the woods in front of her and started down the incline that her topographic map had warned her of. At the bottom of the dip would be another creek that fed straight into Lake Michigan. Beyond that was the clearing. It was only four in the afternoon. She’d made it with flying colors.

Thea practically exploded into the clearing, her T-shirt clinging to her skin under her flannel and her hat low on her forehead.

Here it was! So beautiful! A deeper green than she’d thought it would be, there were more shadows than her grandfather had described, but she could hear the creek and—

Hold on. Hold the hell on. There was a man reclining in the middle of the clearing, feet outstretched, leaning back on his pack. Her grandfather’s clearing. HER clearing.

The worn work boots were her first clue, her second was the blue jeans, white at the seams. And the third was the relaxed way his legs were crossed at the ankle. His formerly gray hat was over his face, shading him from the patch of sun in which he was lazing like a lion.

First, she reached for the jackknife in the pocket of the jeans she wore. Second, she charged forward, tossing down her pack.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, stepping close enough to block his sun but far enough that it would have taken two moves for him to grab her.

Jack Warren lifted his hat from his face—his stubble had only gotten worse, she was chagrined to note—and gave her a rather sleepy look. “The exact same thing that you’re doing here, I imagine.”

“You were following me?”

“Pretty sure I got here first, chickadee. Were you following me?”

She tightened her jaw at the absurdity of the idea but she couldn’t argue with his logic. This clearing was well off the marked trail. It had required a good bit of trailblazing and map reading. There was no way he’d anticipated her. She glanced up at him and narrowed her eyes at what she saw behind him.

“You can’t set up your tent here. I’m staying here tonight.”

He noted that her voice was not bossy or argumentative. She was merely presenting the facts to him as if they were simple and should be taken note of. She was telling him a concise and immovable truth. He could appreciate that quality in any person, but it was especially impressive in a woman, whom he knew were often pushed around as if their thoughts and feelings didn’t matter.

“Tent’s not mine,” he frowned. That had been a real kick to his ego. He knew he’d outstripped the black-haired beauty at about midnight last night, while she slept soundly in her one-man tent. He’d already been here two hours. But so had the tent behind him. Someone had gotten here well before him, long enough to set up a respectable camp.

He didn’t like being beaten at his own game.

“There’s someone else here?”

He nodded, still looking up at her from the ground, the sun haloing around her head. “Yes and no. They haven’t come back yet. Not sure who it is.”

“Huh.” Thea turned to face the tent but didn’t turn her back to him. “Huh.”

She walked back to the edge of her clearing and grabbed her pack. She looked around, choosing a spot, and tossed it down. She made herself comfortable and sat down, appearing to do nothing more but sit and think.

“You alright?” he called over to her. She’d chosen a spot maybe fifteen feet from his. He thought that was interesting. He considered himself a bit of an observer of human behavior, and seeing as he was clumped over by the tent, he figured that’s where she would also situate herself. Nobody liked being the odd man out. But there she was, on the outskirts, her face gently pursed in thought.

She grunted in response. She obviously wanted some quiet. But he couldn’t help himself. He rolled up to one elbow, balancing his head on his palm. His hands played with the bits of moss in front of him. “Care to share?”

She looked up at him in exasperation and he held his hands up, palms out. “Come on, now, chickadee. You want quiet, there’s a whole wide forest just waiting for you. I have to think that you don’t mind talking if you chose the fifty square feet of these woods that happen to be ocupado.”

“I didn’t choose this place because you’re here…” she trailed off and Jack wished that she’d finish that thought. I chose it because… But she didn’t. She cleared her throat. “I’m just waiting for the two others.”

“Two others?” That was interesting math. “How’d you figure on two?”

“The cashier at the store had said that I was the fourth person to ask about that unused trail. I assumed he wasn’t counting you, or else he would have said so. So that makes one,” she pointed to the tent. “Two,” she pointed toward herself. “And now I’m just waiting on three and four. Whoever they are.”

“Funny,” Jack called back. “I’m thinking there might be four others.”

She stared across the distance toward him. He figured, once again correctly, that she wasn’t about to ask him to elaborate. So, he took the liberty of elaborating.

“I’m thinking there’s bound to be seven of us. Now that I know there’s more than just me, myself and I.”

Seven! thought Thea. Well, it made a sort of sense. Considering that the number seven was said so many times in the verse on the back of the map. The truth of it slowly sunk down onto her. He must know about the map, then. He must even have a copy of it? But how to ask without giving away too much? There were so many unknowns. She didn’t want to reveal that she also had one. Something flipped in Thea’s stomach. This was so strange. She’d never really believed her grandfather when he’d explained all of this to her. But to see that tent. And this strange man here. The man who seemed so strangely familiar to her.

Thea cleared her throat, but didn’t rise up. Even though she wanted to. “Show me.”

“I’m sorry?” he asked in that low, lazy drawl. Texas, probably, Thea decided. Though she was shit at placing accents, always had been. Languages and accents were two of the few things that she truly had no talent in.

Something about the way he hesitated told Thea that he already knew what she was talking about. Well, she couldn’t pretend that she wouldn’t have evaded a bit at the beginning if she were him.

“Show me what brought you here.”

He grinned at her. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

“Pass. Hard pass.”

He laughed at that, flopping back onto his back. “I can play this game all day, beautiful. But I’d settle for your name.”

She wasn’t to be deterred. “Show me.”

He sighed, rolling his head to keep looking at her. She was trouble, this one, he could already tell. He’d spent a lot of time in lots of corners of the world. Spending time with lots of kinds of women. He’d always had a soft spot for the fun ones. The silly ones. The ones laughing for the sake of laughing. But this one? He could already tell that she was purposeful. She didn’t do shit for the sake of shit. She was strong and driven and screw you if you got in her way. He could respect that.

But that wasn’t what had him pulling the map from his pack. No. It was the truth of why he’d come here. He was a treasure hunter by trade. He’d followed many maps just like this one. He’d gotten to the bottom of clues tied up in wills, buried at the bottom of the sea, left in ancient runes. It took a whole lot of finding for him to realize that it wasn’t the treasure he really cared about. It was the finding itself that he cared about. The mystery of it all. The big reveal. The answer to questions. That was really what he wanted. That one, glorious moment, when there were no more questions, when all was perfectly answered. Because, of course, there were always more questions. But there was the moment. The perfect moment, when the earth pulled between the sun and the moon and the eclipse was total and there was no before or after. That’s what he lived for.

He reached behind him with one of those long arms. He didn’t have to dig around in his pack for long before he pulled out the parchment, letting it catch the sunlight for a moment before he set it on his belly.

She was on her feet in a long, fluid line. Dang, she was tall. While he’d reclined, she’d taken off her button-up flannel and underneath was a sweaty, green T-shirt that showed her arms and clung to the lines of her stomach, soft and strong at once. Jack felt his mouth dry up and observed the phenomenon in a good-natured manner. Didn’t it just feel good to want something? To want somebody? Like a good, hard run in the hot sun. It got his system pumping, banged on the hood, made sure everything was in good working order.

She took two purposeful steps toward him and then paused, just as purposefully. Her eyes were trained on the map. Then she was next to him in a flash, just a few steps on those long legs of hers. She snatched the map off his belly and Jack forced himself to lay still. He’d fought hard for that map. Had some stories to prove it. It went against every fiber in his being to let someone whisk it right off his stomach, no matter how pretty she was.

But his patience paid off. She stared at the map, her eyes wide for just a span of a breath before her calm exterior resumed. Another skill in her that Jack found himself admiring.

“Damn it, Chet,” Thea mumbled under her breath. Either her grandfather hadn’t known that there was more than one map to this place, or he hadn’t seen fit to tell her.

“Who’s Chet?” Jack asked, still peering up at her from where he lay, using his pack as a pillow.

“None of your damn business,” Thea replied, letting the map flutter back down to his stomach and making Jack grin at her manner. “Damn it.” She cursed again because it felt good. And because she didn’t like being off-kilter. “If there’s two maps…” she looked pointedly at the tent, heard the cashier’s words in her head. The Seventh Soul…“Then there’s likely—”

“Seven maps,” Jack finished her thought for her.

“I really didn’t think I was going to have company for this,” Thea grumbled.

Jack sat up fully and watched her walk back to her pack and fish out a granola bar. “That’s what you’re worried about? Company? You’re not worried about finding a way to split treasure seven ways?”

“Treasure?” she asked him. For the first time since he met her he saw some real animation. Incredulity looked beautiful on her. “What the hell makes you think there’s treasure at stake here?”

“What else do people quote unquote ‘seek’?” he asked her, just as confused by her confusion as she was by his statement.

“Wow,” was her simple response.

“You mean you’re here for something other than a reward of some kind?”

She said nothing, but he saw the flicker behind her eyes. Still waters run deep, he reminded himself. There was something here that had dragged this woman out to the middle of nowhere. “Who’s Chet?” he asked one more time.

This time, she completely ignored him. But that might have been because her eyes narrowed in on movement through the trees. Jack sat up as well and both of them watched a woman step from the trees, a beach towel around her shoulders, a pair of beat-up, vintage shorts on over a bathing suit, and hiking sandals. She froze the second she saw them, as if she’d walked into her living room and caught intruders. It gave both Jack and Thea a second to really take her in. She had a septum piercing that caught the light and tattoos across her collarbones. Her hair was in a tight fade that led up to hair at the top of her head that went both up and flopped to the side. It was dark at the roots but dyed what appeared to be a grayish silver. Her cheeks were high and peachy and the rest of her features a bit large. Big nose, big eyes, big lips.

Hot, was Jack’s immediate, knee-jerk appraisal of this woman.

“Uhhhh,” the woman started, seeming halfway caught between indignation at having her space infringed upon and wanting to slink back into the woods.

“Hello,” Jack called to her and decided leaning forward, elbows on his knees, might make him seem a little less large. “We assume that’s your tent?”

“Yeah. I… just went swimming but the lake was farther away than I… I’m sorry. Who are you?” She looked back and forth between Jack and Thea.

“I’m Jack Warren.” He turned his head to Thea, genuinely curious to see if she was as withholding of personal information from everyone, or just him.

“Thea Redgrave.”

Ah. Just him, then. Well, that was fine. He got to find out her name either way, and it was a good name. Suited her. Old fashioned and fierce at the same time.

“Okay.” The silver-haired woman looked uncomfortable, as if knowing their names didn’t answer the question she wished she’d asked. Her hands tightened on the towel at her shoulders. “I’m Celia Lamplighter.”

“Hell of a name,” Jack commented.

She shrugged, as if there wasn’t much to be done about it either way. “I’m sorry. What are you doing here?”

Thea looked to Jack this time and the simple act, the turn of her head, set something off in him. It meant that they weren’t quite strangers anymore. They’d figured something out together. The seven. That meant something to her. And though he’d been through things like this before and the big reveal wasn’t an almighty surprise to him, the fact that it meant something to her meant something to him.

“Probably the same thing that you are,” he supplied helpfully, the same words he’d supplied to Thea not twenty minutes before.

“Uhhhh,” Celia looked between them. “Doubt it.” Unless these two randos also had cryptic, semi-ancient maps with hand-written verse on the back that led them to this exact clearing on this exact day—“Oh.” All the breath puffed out of her as Jack simply held up the piece of parchment that had apparently been resting on his stomach.

It looked extremely similar to the one that was currently pressed between the pages of a book in her tent.

Unless…

Celia skirted around the two of them, and keeping her eye on them, unzipped the back door of her rather large tent. She knew she was being weird, but also, all of this was pretty weird. She ducked in without another word and instantly scrambled for the worn murder mystery where she was keeping the map. And there it was. Her map. They hadn’t stolen it. Which meant that they had one of their own.

“Fudge me,” she murmured under her breath, not at all cognizant of her long-taught habit of not actually swearing whenever she wanted to. It had been one of her mother’s only strict rules in a house with ten other siblings, and one that they all still pretty much abided by.

Feeling suddenly exposed and off-kilter, Celia grabbed a sweater from her bag that was also in the tent with her. She pulled it on over her bathing suit and instantly felt a little better. A little more protected.

When she came back out of the tent she still eyed them with caution, keeping quite a bit of space between her and them.

“How did you two find yours?” she asked.

The woman, Thea, seemed to clench her lips closed but the man, Jack, leaned forward on his knees, pivoting to face her. “Mine? I won it in a game of poker that lasted damn near three days. Her? I have no idea.”

Both Celia and Thea eyed Jack. Neither of them particularly believed his story.

“So, you’re not together?”

Thea’s loud, rude snort was answer enough.

Celia meant for that question to be as broad as possible, ‘together’ in any sense of the word they wanted to take it. She was trying to acquire a hell of a lot of information all at once here. She hated being out of the loop. And in this case, being out of the loop meant being by herself in the middle of nowhere with two strangers she knew nothing about. Yeah. Not exactly Celia Lamplighter’s cup of tea. Why had she left Brooklyn?

“Ah, no,” Jack answered, raising a scarred eyebrow at Thea. “No, we’re not. We’ve pretty much just had this same exact conversation with one another.”

“Hm,” Celia said shortly, still sticking tightly to her tent. Why did the fact that she was the only one who’d set up a tent make her feel stupid? It was a perfectly logical thing to do, seeing as how she’d come to see the total eclipse, and whatever came directly after it. What was she supposed to do? Hike back out in the dark? No! She took a step in front of her tent, perhaps in an attempt to make it look a little smaller, a little less ‘just-bought’, but seeing as she wasn’t much over 5’2”, she only succeeded in making the tent look even larger. “Are there others?”

“Good question,” Thea said thoughtfully, her head cocked to one side as she studied the curious woman in front of her, seemingly a perfect mixture of confidence and self-consciousness. “We think there might be seven of us, total.”

Celia nodded her head thoughtfully. “Huh. I guess it makes sense that if there’s three then there’s seven. Considering the verse on the back of the map.”

“Smart cookie,” Jack said, watching her thoughtfully.

“That’s what they tell me,” Celia said, shrugging. “But there was no one else here and it didn’t occur to me there could be more than one seventh soul. Got used to the idea of finally being the only one,” Celia muttered the last part under her breath in a way that told Jack that she was also used to muttering things under her breath.

“Well, we mean no harm,” Jack assured her. “We’re only here for the big show.”

Celia, her eyes on both of them, finally eased her way to the ground. “You,” she pointed at Thea, “I have no idea about. But you, Tex, I can only assume that by ‘big show’ you’re not referring to the eclipse.”

He grinned at her. “Got that right. Except for the Tex part. I’m from Louisiana.”

“Ah. Well, your accent is muddled enough you must have spent a lot of time traveling around.” Celia said this with certainty. She wasn’t asking, she was telling. They seemed to have found a subject matter that she had some expertise on. “So, what’re you expecting to have happen tonight?”

Thea, though interested in Jack Warren’s answer, whirled around to face the woods behind her, jackknife in hand. There was that noise again. That raincoat swish. And pretty soon, there was a man to match that swish.

A very large man. As he came through the brush, Thea might have wondered if he wasn’t two men walking side by side, if not for the inherent grace in his movements. Each of his biceps were the size of one of her thighs and he had to be over six and a half feet tall. He stepped out of the trees into the clearing, blinking in surprise to see other people standing there.

Thea got a good look at his face and, to her surprise, immediately trusted him. His features were plain, but well ordered, he had high cheekbones and a full beard that she knew, instinctively, was a new addition to his personal style. His hair was light brown and so were his eyes.

“Hello,” he called, in a surprisingly deep baritone.

She was about to call back when she felt Jack’s warm presence beside her, and then slightly in front of her. “Afternoon.”

Thea blinked in surprise at Jack Warren’s back. He suddenly was looking every inch of his 6’2”. She realized, with something akin to good will, that Jack must have been doing his best to look smaller and less intimidating to the two women. That was probably why he’d been lounging on the ground like he was on spring break. But now, with this strange, extremely large man joining them, Jack was no longer hiding his natural size. Interesting.

Thea stepped up and stood shoulder to shoulder with Jack.

Celia, on the other hand, had taken two sharp steps backwards, one of which had crumpled and muddied the corner of her tent. Her hand was over her shocked mouth for one second before it snaked around to the back of her neck, which was hot with mortification and shock and ohmygod.

Holy guacamole.

Jean Luc LaTour, former star quarterback for the New York Empire was standing thirty feet away from her. Wearing all Nike everything, looking gorgeous as always and big as a house and… Jesus, she needed to sit down.

Jean Luc scanned the clearing. Let’s see. To his calculations he was looking at a hobo cowboy, an outdoorswear model—if that was a thing—and a punk rocker looking like she wanted to sprint into the woods and never come back. Weird.

As a very famous man, he’d learned to be on guard about unexpected situations with strangers. But as a veritable giant, he’d also learned that generally, he needed to be about six times as friendly as other people in order to keep people from being scared of him.

“My name is Jean Luc.” None of them said anything. “Anyone mind telling me what’s going on?”

The hobo cowboy smiled and sighed, turning toward the tough little black-haired model. “Your turn,” he told her.