Chapter 203

AllissaDayanara sagged. Lyle caught the whole of her weight.“He went in,” I said. “Under the mountain. He went in.”“Then we go in after him,” Darren said, and there was no arguing left in his voice.We found a way down that didn’t kill us.By the time we reached the gorge floor, the light was going. The seam stood in front of us and cold river air poured out of it. The water ran in and disappeared. There was a lip of dry stone along one side, just wide enough for feet, and we took it single file with our hands on the wall.Finn went first now, because Finn sees where the rest of us can’t, and suddenly Hollis was there too. She came up behind him withou

Last Updated : 2026-10-04

Chapter 204

AllissaWe made camp upwind. Very far upwind.Ivan sat downwind of the rest of us, which was nobody’s choice but his own body’s. He had found a place to rinse off but the smell was still there. Dayanara had collected herbs for him to sleep with that would absorb the scent. Then she started the fire. Lyle continued to pop out a few jokes, which Finn was loving. Darren settled behind me with his legs on either side of mine and his chin on my shoulder, and for a little while it was almost easy.Then Dayanara reached for my hands. “Palms.”She turned them over in hers and read the heat off them like other people read a page. Tonight she was quiet longer than I liked.“Climbing,” she said at last. “Slowly.&rdqu

Last Updated : 2026-10-04

Chapter 205

AllissaWe came down out of the mountain the next afternoon, and there was a town.Warmwell sat in a green fold between two ridges, and it steamed. That was the first thing I saw. Steam, rising off a dozen places at once, because the whole town was built over hot springs and had long since made its peace with smelling faintly of eggs. After the ravine and the giant and a night on cold rock, it looked like the finest city in the world.Ivan saw the bathhouse before he saw anything else.“There,” he said. It was the first thing out of his mouth all day that wasn’t about his own smell. “That one. I am going there. Do not follow me. Do not speak to me until I am clean.” He was already walking.“He’s going to boil himself,” Lyle snickered, watching him march off like it was a pilgrimage. “He’s going to get in and never come out. We’ll have to leave him here. A monument. Here lies Ivan. Finally clean.”“But in the end he will still smell.” Finn laughed.Finn got us rooms at an inn called th

Last Updated : 2026-10-08

Chapter 206

AllissaI woke warm, loose, better than I had any right to feel, with Lyra’s pebble a hard knot of heat under my cheek. Darren was already up across the room, half dressed, half packed, watching me with a tender look in his eyes.Hollis stood in the open doorway. That was the first weird thing. Hollis did not come to our doors. She kept her distance like it cost her to lose an inch of it. And here she was, over the threshold, staring at me like I had sprouted a second head.“What did you do?” she said.“Good morning to you too.” I sat up and dragged the blanket with me. “Do about what?”“Last night.” She came a step into the room. “Last night you were a bonfire. I felt you through two floors and a wall. I lay there and listened to you burn, and I thought, this is the night it gets away from her. This is the night she takes the inn down with her inside it.” Her eyes went over me like she was hunting the trick in it. “And this morning there is nothing. You are banked down to coals. You

Last Updated : 2026-10-13

Chapter 207

Allissa“He took my coin and gave me riddles. That is what has me sour.” Finn had been chewing on it since we broke camp, and from the look of him he meant to keep chewing the whole day. “A whole purse, Allissa. Handed to a toothless old man who looked me in the eye and told me the door was south. South. The fire strapped to your ribs tells me that much, and it has never once asked me for payment.”Hollis laughed. It was not a warm sound. Nothing about Hollis ever was. “He knew more than south.”“Then why did he not say it?”“Because he is not a fool, vampire. You walked into his shop smelling like people who mean to find the one door the rest of the world bled to seal shut.” She trotted ahead of us, light over the loose rock, as though it could not touch her feet. “Of course he knew. He was simply never going to tell you. We cannot lose our door. It is the last one standing. He does not know what you mean to do with it, and a door you cannot vouch for is a door you keep quiet. That i

Last Updated : 2026-10-14

Chapter 208

AllissaFinn flicked a fleck of black off his cheek and considered the carcass. “Well,” he said. “We just killed dinner.”Ivan, still a bear, swung his head around and made a low, unhappy sound.“Fire salamander,” Finn went on, cheerful now, as if the smell were not trying to climb down all our throats. “Good eating, if you boil it three times over, throw out the first two pots, and you do not mind that the third still tastes like a chimney swept it.” He looked it over one more time. “Okay … nobody is going to eat that.”“Nobody is going to eat that,” Dayanara agreed from the back, flat as a plank.That was when the ceiling answered.