Page 47

I lifted my free hand. “Still snackless, so absolutely not.”

Guy did not smile. His gaze went to our joined hands. Then to Knox’s face.

“Don’t make me lose you twice,” he repeated.

The air went very still. Knox’s fingers tightened around mine.

“You won’t.”

It wasn’t a promise he could guarantee. Everybody on that porch knew it. But it was one he meant with everything left in him.

Guy nodded once, sharp and grim. Bernie lifted her hand, and silver-lavender Magic rippled across the air, forming a thin glowing thread that stretched from her palm to the satchel over Knox’s shoulder.

“A communication tether,” she said. “Short range. Inside Arrhythmia only. If it snaps, I’m coming after you.”

“Noted,” Knox said.

Bernie looked at me. “If he tries to do something stupidly self-sacrificial, hit him.”

I brightened. “With what?”

“Whatever is available.”

“I like you more every minute.”

Knox sighed.

Then we walked.

The house fell behind us, warm light shrinking through the darkness. The farther we got from Guy’s porch, the more Arrhythmia opened around us.

At night, the ruined little prison-state looked even less like present-day Texas and more like a forgotten ghost town. I could see lights and hear the happy chaos of nighttime activities in the distance. Was there actually ‘real life’ in Arrhythmia?

“Maybe you’ll live long enough to find out,” NeyNey snickered sarcastically.

I refused to acknowledge her nasty comment, but I made a mental note to give her a rash of shit when all this was over.

The road to the old Warden cabin wasn’t much of a road. It was a pale track cut through gray dirt and thorny scrub, winding between low clay ridges and broken stone. The purple Wards shimmered high overhead in distant, geometric pulses, faint enough to pretend they were stars if a person was desperate, drunk, or actively lying to themselves.

I was only one of those things. Desperate, obviously.

The tether remained blurred as long as I held Knox’s hand. Unfortunately, holding Knox’s hand was doing terrible things to my ability to stay professionally sarcastic.

His palm was warm. Rough. Steady. Too big around mine, calluses brushing my skin every time the ground shifted under our boots. He walked slightly ahead of me, but not dragging. Not commanding. Matching. Adjusting his stride so I could keep up without making a whole production of it.

I hated that I noticed. I hated even more that I liked it.

“You’re quiet,” he said after a while.

“I’m conserving oxygen in case I have to scream later.”

A beat.

“Do you scream often?”

“Only when emotionally necessary or when bugs touch me.”

His mouth twitched. Progress.