CHAPTER 14DOGWOOD
DAMON
I left the cemetery when it began to remind me of Naomi’s grandfather’s funeral.
Over thirteen years of hunting, I had learned—mostly—how to cordon off unwanted memories. Naomi’s were proving more difficult, and her Grampa Charlie’s death when she was in junior high had featured prominently in a series of nightmares she’d suffered in the last few months. In the nightmare, she entered the funeral parlor with its ghastly choking scent of flowers and approached the casket with trembling grief and horror—only to find her own face, not her grandfather’s, posed in pale mockery of sleep. Waking usually led to her weeping for her lost grandfather, though he was not technically in the dream at all. She remembered standing in the cemetery as they lowered his body into the
