Maverick and August aren’t running anymore.

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They don’t have anything to run from.

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The architect of their misery has been dead and buried for almost a year—for real, now—and they’ve spent that time productively, if not happily. Crisscrossing the country, honing their respective skills—black market under-the-table necromancy pays well, at the very least, and if it occasionally feels like they’re stuck in some weird no-man’s-land holding pattern, waiting for something else to happen, for something else to go wrong—well, there’s a bunch of other, weirder stuff already happening.

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August, for example. August is acting weird. Mood swings and temper tantrums and unpredictable bouts of sullen, secretive silence; Maverick can’t keep up, but even if he could, August wouldn’t let him.

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When they’re hired to Banish the spirit of a long-dead counselor at an old summer camp in a tiny, sleepy, half-abandoned lakeside town in Idaho, the complications that almost immediately arise are as insidious as they are confusing. As they are weird. There’s Lance Radley, the guy who called them there, who has a psychic sister and a murky relationship to the dead counselor, and there’s the dead counselor himself, Brooks Beecher-Truman, whose own family history and murky relationship to magic ask a lot more questions than they answer.

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And there’s a pretty, distracting waitress and a slyly observant local cop, a thirty-year old murder to solve and a partial Raising to uncertainly prepare for, and the creeping, gnawing suspicion that Maverick and August’s reprieve—from danger, from Gatherers, from running—was always going to temporary, anyway.