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Sabrine and Logan were standing at the gate, truck idling. Sab jumped in place and waved her free arm above her head, as if he couldn’t see her perfectly well from right here.

“Is she alive?” Sabrine panted, still jumping.

“Hold on, I’ll buzz you in.”

“Don’t leave me hanging, Darien!” Her voice was audible not just through the phone, but also from the short distance between them. It was like he was hearing her twice. “I need to know?—”

“Yes, she’s alive. And don’t shout when you come in, she’s sleeping.”

Sabrine stopped bouncing, her labored breathing rattling the phone speakers. “Coma sleeping or normal sleeping?”

“Normal.” And thank fuck for that. He hung up and buzzed the wolves in.

64

South Coastal District

YVESWICH, STATE OF KER

Citizens of Terralived by a set of stringent rules designed to keep them alive for as long as possible in a world honed to kill. A survival code, so to speak. That code was tweaked depending on where a person lived and the dangers that were unique to that particular region.

In Yveswich, there were three rules you never,everbroke. Not unless you wanted to be chewed up, digested, and shat out by a hungry monster, that is.

Keep out of the fog.

Don’t swim beyond the buoys.

Stay away from waterfalls after the sun sets.

The first was, obviously, the most crucial. It was easy enough to avoid waterfalls, and unless you were boating and fell in it was equally as easy to steer clear of the deep end of the ocean. Fog, on the other hand, was a little more random, a little more unpredictable, a little harder to avoid.

So leaving the safety of a spell-protected building at night, when the streets were smothered not just by darkness but alsoby dense fog, went against the code. But desperate times called for desperate measures. And right now, Travis was desperate to find a phone.

He stayed close to Jewels as they navigated the streets of the South Coastal District, wind that tasted of blood, sulphur, and ocean salt wending between the buildings. There were no pay phones in the hotel, and reception had a strict policy against letting guests use their phones.

And so here they were, forced to walk. In the brutal cold. In the near-blinding dark.

Malakai was heading the group—speed-walking down the icy sidewalk, turning corners sharply, and simply looking beyond pissed to be out here. But what else was new? The guy was deranged, but at least he could annihilate anything that dared to breathe on them. Only for that reason would Travis tolerate him.

The monsters were beginning their evening hunt, their howls slashing apart the night. Some soft-hearted god must be taking mercy on them, because none of these creatures were from the Void. Those they passed were breeds they were familiar with and had hunted their entire Darkslaying lives. Smart enough to recognize when something with bigger teeth came along, these creatures stayed away from their group and stuck to the shadows and alleys, where they ate their fill of rodents and stray cats. In these parts, Darkslayers were the predators with the biggest teeth.

For now. Travis hoped that by the time that changed they’d be back at the hotel—and Darien would be on his way to ask for Roark’s help with breaking them the hell out of here.

“What do you think of everything we learned about Onyx?” Jewels asked him as they walked, numb hands bundled in their pockets. The streetlights in this area were still working, though they buzzed and flickered more often than not. Light-starved moths flitted around the fuzzy halos of white.

“I think it’s freaky,” Travis admitted, his breath puffing in the air like smoke. “And I’m not convinced about the drugs thing,” he added. He’d done a lot of thinking since Scarlet and Magenta had told them about Onyx. While Dominic made a decent point that it was unlikely that the test subjects had been given street drugs, theywereexactly that: test subjects. Who’s to say Onyx hadn’t been given doses of Venom as a part of the experiment? If the people who ran that facility were desperate enough to enhance the abilities of their lab rats, why would street drugs be out of the equation?