We spent the day trading stories, each one a little truer than the last. She told me about the river, how she used to sneak away and watch the salmon leap upstream, how she’d named every willow on its banks. I told her about the club, the endless road, the smell of rain on hot asphalt. She asked if there were horses in my world, and I told her about motorcycles, how they were faster and meaner but had their own kind of loyalty.
She wanted to ride one, she said, and I promised her a ride if we made it through.
As the sun dipped behind the trees, we lay together on the pallet, her head on my chest, her breath warm against my neck.
“If we go,” she said, “will it change me?”
“Probably,” I said. “But maybe not in the ways you think.”
She nodded, as if that made sense.
“I want to try,” she said. “But only if you’re there.”
“Always,” I said.
“Moab,” she whispered. “Will you tell me more? About what it’s like, to be free?”
I pulled her closer, her skin hot against mine. “It’s loud,” I said. “It’s messy. Most people don’t know what to do with it. But if you find someone you trust, it’s worth it. Even when it hurts.”
She kissed me, slow and careful, as if trying to memorize the feeling.
“I want that,” she said. “Even if it burns.”
I smiled in the dark. “It will. But not the way you think.”
“Tell me something true,” she said, eyes fixed on the flames.
I considered the question, then said, “You’re the first person I’ve cooked for since I left the Army. Maybe ever.”
She smiled, the lines of her face softening. “Did you have anyone? In your world?”
“Not for long,” I said. “Didn’t know how to keep people around.”
She turned the question over, then reached into a fold in her dress and produced a small leather pouch. It was worn to near transparency at the corners, the drawstring knotted and unyielding. She worked it open with her teeth and thumbed out a pinch of dried leaves, blue-green and threaded with something that looked almost metallic in the firelight.
“What’s that?” I asked, even though I already knew.
She smiled, sharp and secret. “Insurance,” she said. “For crossing.”
She poured the herbs into her palm, then bent forward, blowing a breath over them, lips parted just enough to make the leaves twitch and dance.
“If we want to know what’s waiting for us on the other side,” she said, “we can ask. The herbs will show us. It’s old magic, but it works.”
I nodded. I’d seen enough to believe.
She arranged the herbs in a circle on the dirt floor, then took a sliver of burning wood from the fire and touched it to the ring. Smoke rose at once, thicker than seemed possible, twisting in a spiral that hovered above the ground instead of dissipating into the rafters. The smell was bitter, not quite pleasant, but alive in a way that made the inside of my mouth water.
She began to chant, words I recognized only as Latin, though the rhythm of them was different—less like the priest at a funeral and more like a mother lulling a child to sleep. With each phrase, her voice gained strength, the syllables growing teeth and curling at the ends. The smoke responded, tightening into shapes, the rough outline of a tree, then a house, then a cluster of houses, then a church with a bell tower taller than the rest.
Scarlette’s eyes went wide, the pupils swallowing what little color they had left. She kept chanting, and the church in the smoke melted into something new, a building of glass and steel, too many stories to count, each window ablaze with light. The structure shifted, became a corridor, then a door, then a room filled with a hundred people, all dressed in black, all looking straight ahead with the blankness of a congregation.
She faltered, the words catching in her throat. I reached for her, but she shook her head, gritted her teeth, and kept going. The smoke thickened, turning from gray to blue to a deep, bloody red. I caught the shape of a wolf—my wolf, the head thrown back in a howl, eyes bright as coals—then a woman’s face, not Scarlette’s, but kin to her in a way I couldn’t explain. The images blurred, overlapping, spinning faster until the hut itself seemed to shudder.
Then the smoke vanished, leaving only the faintest taste of copper and the echo of Scarlette’s breath, ragged and shallow.
She collapsed against my shoulder, the strength gone from her limbs. I wrapped an arm around her, holding her upright. For a moment, neither of us spoke, too wrung out to bother with language.
Finally, she whispered, “Did you see it?”
