Osric gave her the location the following afternoon — not an address, exactly, but a set of directions handed down the way old pack knowledge always seemed to travel, half memory and half instinct. "Follow the river road north until the pavement ends," he said. "There's a footpath after that, unmarked, easy to miss if you're not looking for it. I haven't walked it myself in thirty years. I can't promise it still leads where it used to."
"It's the only lead we have," Mia said. "I'll take the risk."
She went alone, against every protest Kade and Lucas both raised, though she'd finally worn Kade down with the one argument he couldn't fully counter — that whatever waited at the end of that path had been built, according to Josephine's letter, specifically for a Callahan seeking it in genuine
