LOGINAllissaTwo men came into the village like they owned the dirt under it.They were big enough to matter in a small place. Leather, bad attitudes, and a swagger that said they had done this a hundred times and nobody had ever told them no.I knew the type before either of them opened his mouth. Every one has seen one. A bully who found a bigger stick.They walked straight to our table, because we were the strangers. Strangers mean coin.The bigger one planted himself in front of Finn and crossed his arms.“Road tax,” he said. “Everyone who eats in this village pays it. You eat, you pay.”Finn looked up at him. Just looked, the way a cat looks at a thing it hasn’t decided is worth standing up for.Then he chuckled, low, and turned back to his drink.The man’s face went red. “I don’t think you heard me.”“We heard you,” Darren said, not even turning around.“Then pay.” He looked around the table at all of us, counting coin in his head, getting bolder. “All of you. Now.”Nobody moved. Nob
AllissaIn the morning I stood at the edge of camp and looked back the way we had come.The cave was still there. A low black mouth in the hillside, breathing out that faint blue-green glow even in the daylight.Damien had walked through that. My relative. My however-many-greats grandfather, give or take a thousand years and a whole lot of watered-down blood.He went into the dark with his own fire eating him alive, and he came back out the other side with a plan carved into the rock. Alone. Nobody holding a lamp for him.Why did he carve the runes there? Was it like a diary?I pressed a hand flat to my chest, over the quiet. The flame sat there, same as it had since I touched his words. Calm. I kept waiting for it to turn on me, and it just … didn’t.Darren's arms came around my waist from behind. I had felt him coming. That warm hum that gets two steps ahead of his hands. Then his chest against my back. Cinnamon and heat … him.“Everything okay?” His chin settled on top of my head.
Chapter 34AllissaWe lost them somewhere in the dark. I could not have told you where. One moment, the tunnel at our backs was a dry thunder of bodies, and the next, it was only the two of us breathing. We slowed, and then we stopped making any sound at all. We felt our way forward through the pale undergrowth of the deep places with our hands out ahead of us. Even with our beasts, it was tough to see down here.“I think we lost them,” Darren breathed against my ear.The next bend was not fully dark down there, which was its own strange mercy. The walls carried a faint light of their own. Old marks, cut deep into the stone and filled with something that still glowed after who knew how many years. A dull blue-green, like the last light in a banked hearth. Runes. Rows of them marked the rocks on either side of us. Most had gone quiet and cold.I was halfway past one when it woke. A single mark, low on the wall. It pulsed as I drew even with it, a slow beat of that blue-green light, as
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.
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
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







