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I hated when things got too quiet.
Declan took us west, heading for the Mardale Flyover cutting across Mardale Park—the city’s largest green space. It smoldered below, completely in ruins. Man, it’d been one of the nicest parks in the city, even if it did sit below an elevated road. It had lots of trees, a scattering of cute cafés, and two lakes for boating and feeding the waterfowl. I’d spent some lazy summer afternoons there.
Now those lakes were nothing but oil slicks, bodies floating on the surface, with more corpses littering the ashy ground around them.
Aidan had done more than a number on this city. The toxic stench of ruin burned my eyes, attacking the back of my throat.
Damn him.
Damn him hard.
Declan darted around abandoned vehicles, some of them burned out, too many bodies around us. If he kept this trajectory, he’d take us to the western city limits and then out onto Highway 55, which fed into many other roads snaking across the Human Domain.
We just had to get there first. At a guess, there were three miles to go.
The unsettling quiet gave my brain time to replay every damn second of Silvanus tied to that pole.
He is my constant.
My heart lurched and backflipped, crushed under the weight of possibility.
The possibility of losing him.
What would have happened if he’d died at sunrise? Say the deities had been wrong about him being protected by the curse—would the pain explode out of me in a tirade of grief? Would the reality of him being gone, along with the vampires, provide me with relief? Would the power he held over me be broken, my old self restored?
He is my constant.
Emotions, eh? Who’d have them? If only I’d spent longer at the Executioner Academy. Maybe then I’d have had the capacity to fall for a vampire king trained out of me.
Fall? Careful now…
Part of the highway had collapsed, leaving a gap several meters wide. Rather than slow down, Declan sped up. My lungs hitched, my grip on his fur tightening as he made the leap.
Amazingly, I never closed my eyes. Yeah, my heart was in my mouth, my bladder being put through its paces, but I also had a strong sense of trust. As if I knew Declan wouldn’t hurt me.
Check me out, being an easily trusting dickhead again around good-looking men.
Ugh.
Gap cleared, the alpha wolf chewed up the rest of the distance without incident. When we reached the toll booths at the city limits, we slowed down to navigate a maze of overturned trucks and buses and other smoking vehicles. Bodies were piled high around them, blood and gore and vileness everywhere.
I focused on the road ahead where the highway sloped down to the Willow Junction—a huge roundabout with twenty-one exits.
“Where are we headed?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pick Exit 19 for Cosgrove. The town where my sister died, along with Suzanne, our savior after fleeing the academy purges.
I never wanted to see it again.
To my relief, he took Exit 8 to the southwest.
Man, this was going to be a long journey back to the Elf Domain. Of course, I wasn’t expecting us to go the whole way like this, but we weren’t exactly overwhelmed with transport options right now. Getting anywhere by rail or air or water would be dangerous, especially now that both of our faces had been on TV.
Dammit.
Dammit.
Dammit.
The sun came up over the Southwood Downs, a beautiful vista of rolling hills, with chalk cuttings and a massive forest on the south side. The sky shone a vibrant red-and-pink, as if blood had been spilled along the horizon. I didn’t see many clouds, the April day promising to be fine.
