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I coughed, gasping for breath as I dragged myself out of the pool and rested against my pack. I grinned into the darkness.

One less doorway to hell.

Lana

Sometimes I foundit hypnotizing to watch time like a human might. And sometimes, like right now, it was agony.

My body swayed inside the bus as trees and houses blurred by. One hour and fifty-seven minutes had passed since I got inside this hellaciousmachine.

My hands squeezed my thighs, my fingernails digging into the leather. The smell of all these tightly packed bodies, the walls that seemed to close in on all sides, the unnatural speed of this thing—it was all the most acute kind of torture.

Buses could rot in the flames of Abyssos.

Slowly the town of White Sulfur Springs rolled into view. One sad building followed the next. The whole place looked as though it had just given up. I wondered how much of it was my people’s fault. Magic always came at a price.

These people had more than likely paid their fair share.

The bus shuddered to a stop in front of a boarded up store. As soon as the vehicle’s doors hissed open, I fought the urge to jump out of my seat and claw my way past the bus’s other occupants just to get through first. Instead I stood and took my time shuffling into the aisle, pretending I was bored rather than barely keeping my anxiety and the contents of my stomach down. And I tried not to gasp in my first breaths of fresh air once I left the bus.

I made my way between the buildings. Beyond them, the wilderness stretched on. As soon as I hit the tree line, I tightened my satchel, and then I ran.

The wind of this world felt the same as mine, the ground felt the same. If it weren’t for the absence of magic that my homeland was steeped in, I could almost believe the two worlds were the same.

But this one wasn’t war-torn. Not like mine.

So many humans. And they were thriving. So few of us. And we were dying.

I passed a tree shaped like a trident, which marked the end of my run. The portal was just up ahead.

The smell of exhaust pulled me up short.

Wrong.

That smell didn’t belong here.

I continued forward slower this time, sheltering my form behind tree trunks, just to be safe. I was nearly to the caves. So close to home I could almost taste it.

I scented the air again, and again I smelled the exhaust right before I saw the car.

A big heifer of a vehicle. It’d been parked alongside the overgrown dirt road I thought was abandoned.

Apparently it wasn’t.

Infernari didn’t travel by car. Which meant...

Humans.

I hid behinda tree, pressing my chest against the rough bark.

As a human might say,fuck me.

Crossing worlds was hard enough on its own. Now I had a human to deal with.

I’d never encountered this particular issue before.

I could always resolve the situation with magic, but there were those that looked for such disturbances. They’d follow the residual magic left behind like carrion to a kill. And this close to a doorway...

No, no magic.