I walked up to it and clutched the handle. Yes, it had been locked.

“I’m going to try to call my grandfather,” I said.

I picked up the handset from the coffee table in the living room and dialed my grandfather’s cell number. I bit my lip as I waited.

The ringing continued until I reached voicemail.

Damn.

I could try my mother’s cell phone. Though the number I knew by heart was a US SIM card. I didn’t know if she would have the same one while in Cairo, and just suck up the roaming charges, or whether she would’ve gotten a local SIM. In any case, I tried dialing the number I knew. Voicemail again. In a last-ditch attempt, I reached for my grandfather’s phonebook in the chest of drawers and paged through it until I found Bashira’s number. When I dialed it, I was also unable to reach her.

Shayla was eyeing me, a look of concern on her face.

“Maybe we should wait here for a while,” she said. “It could be they are in a meeting or something… They might return soon. This house doesn’t feel like it’s been unoccupied long.”

“Okay,” I said.

But I didn’t want Ben to leave without me. He didn’t want to take me to The Oasis in the first place, and if I had not arrived back by the time they were ready to leave, I was sure they would not wait for me.

“Let’s wait for an hour, and see if my family returns,” I said. I doubted Ben and the others would leave before then.

Shayla nodded and took a seat in an armchair. I was too antsy to even think about sitting down. I paced up and down the entrance hall, my heart jumping at even the slightest of noises coming from the road outside the house.

I kept looking up at the clock, watching the minutes go by. Ever. So. Slowly.

Shayla didn’t say a word to me, leaving me to brood in tense silence. After we had waited forty-five minutes, I was beginning to lose hope.

“For all we know, they could return at the end of the day,” Shayla finally called from the living room. “I don’t know why you’re assuming that something bad—”

Her sentence was interrupted by my scream. Something had scuttled across my feet. Looking down, I was alarmed to see a huge black rat. It had gleaming yellow eyes and a creepily long gray tail. It had frozen a few feet away from me and appeared to be staring right up at me.

Backing away, I calmed my racing heart and looked toward Shayla, who had appeared in the doorway of the living room.

“It’s just a rat,” I said, my voice still uneven from the fright. “Just a rat,” I repeated to myself as I looked back down at the creature, still frozen in the same position.

In all the times I’d stayed in my grandfather’s house, I’d never been aware that he had a rat problem. Perhaps the creature had crept in just today through the back door they had left open.

Shayla let out a soft chuckle and returned to the living room. I was about to look up once again at the clock when the rodent jolted. As if in a hurry, it scurried across the floor and, to my surprise, leapt about four feet in the air, landing on an ornamental chest of drawers by the staircase.

It turned around to face me again, its small yellow eyes looking right at me. Then something drew my attention a few inches to the right of its front feet. An object I hadn’t noticed before. An object that made my heart skip a beat. I rushed forward, barely believing my eyes. When I picked up the object in my palm, it was cool, round and heavy. I was staring down at a golden coin—identical to the coins I had in my backpack. Identical to the coins that were gifted by The Oasis.

My mouth agape, I looked back toward the rat.

But it was nowhere to be seen.

Then, for the first time, I experienced the same voice Ben had. Whispery and bone-chilling, it echoed through my head:

“Come back, River Giovanni.

“We know who you are, and we know what you want.”

Chapter 4: Corrine

A cool wind caught my hair as I walked among the shadowy dunes. I had known of The Oasis’ location since the hunters had attacked the Maslen coven, but this was the first time that I had actually visited it. Now, of course, there was a spell concealing its entrance. This would make it harder for me to detect it… but I did not need its exact location.

Once I sensed that I had neared within a hundred feet of its boundary, I stopped. Parting my cloak, I unhitched the long wooden staff that I had attached to my belt, along with a brass container of potion I’d prepared in my kitchen and a clear glass cup. I set the last two items down on the sand while I eyed the length of the staff. Positioning the pointed end of it above the ground, I dug it into the sand, pushing it down until it felt secure in its upright position. I picked up the glass cup and, with my magic, made it balance atop the tip of the staff. Then I reached for the brass container and emptied its dark blue contents into the glass.

I watched the potion settle into the cup, watching as it began to stiffen. I had expected to need to manifest some light to see what I was doing, but the sky was clear and the moon was full tonight.

I looked down at my watch and noted the time. Now I must wait.

My mind wandered back to the tattoos I’d seen on River and Ben’s upper arms. Even as I thought of them, the same fear gripped me. I hadn’t wanted to speak a word of my suspicion to anyone, not even Ibrahim, until I was certain. So I’d headed straight back to the Sanctuary, locked myself in my library, and pulled down all the books on the subject that I could find. It had become clear to me after half an hour of paging through the dusty manuscripts that the only way for me to know for certain if my fear was founded was to come out here and see if I could detect the presence of these creatures myself.