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The question shouldn’t have come as any surprise, but it was jarring, nonetheless. I couldn’t very well tell them the truth—that this was all a huge mistake. Loving Samael sometimes hurt, but leaving him was an entirely new type of anguish.
It was like purposely severing a vital organ because you were too damn stupid to realize you needed it to live. I told myself that time would make everything better, but that was complete and utter crap.
My heart was chained to his. Going one way as it was pulled in another was killing me. I could do nothing but soldier on. Poet and Takara had risked too much for me to do an about face because I was selfishly indecisive.
“Really trying not to think about that right now,” I muttered, swatting at some tiny brown bug that was trying to hitch a ride on my shoulder. “What’s the deal with him?” I nodded to Travis. I needed to change the subject and was genuinely concerned about this strange man traveling with us.
He was as tall as Poet, yet skinnier than me. His brown hair was thick and wavy, going all the way to his nape.
The fact that he was wearing a damn jean jacket was seriously grating on my nerves. It was too hot for all that nonsense. I was eighty percent certain he only had it on to try and cover up the nasty scar on the side of his lower neck.
The skin looked as if it had been burned, a tell-tale sign that the faction he once belonged to had exiled him with enough respect not to kill him. That, or he’d run away and done it to himself. Probably the latter was more likely, now that I thought about it. Most factions wouldn’t let you keep breathing if you wanted out.
“He knows how we can get in touch with your family,” Poet replied, pushing through another tuft of brambles.
Your family. Those two words had my nerves fraying more than they already were. I wasn’t sure if my family considered me an enemy or not these days. I supposed I’d find out soon enough….
“Considering I have no clue how to do that, can someone share those details with me?”
“Once we make it to Phobos, I’ll give you a hint,” Travis answered.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Who is Phobos?”
“Phobos is the town he’s leading us to,” Takara answered.
“Never heard of it.”
“We’ve got about thirty more minutes until we get there.”
Thirty more minutes of this? That would need to be a swift twenty. I was beginning to itch in places that shouldn’t itch, and I seriously had to pee. Not to mention there was a whole damn faction about to be searching for us. We needed to haul ass and get as far away from them as possible, regardless of how badly I wanted to do the opposite.
“Can we cut that down any?”
Travis twisted at the hip and looked back at me with a wry grin.
“If we run, sure.”
If I never set foot in the woods again, it would be far too soon. Where we wound up wasn’t leaps and bounds better.
Phobos was a husk of a town that looked completely out of place, located directly on the other side of the woods we’d just spent too much time in. We first emerged onto a road that offered us only one direction. The other was blocked off.
“I don’t remember this place being here when Samael brought me to the lodging site.”
“I reckon you came from the other direction. There’s another small town just before you hit the roadway to Camp Lazarus. This got—”
“Camp Lazarus?” I interrupted. “Since when does it have a name?”
Travis glanced at me from the end of our horizontal line, his gray eyes narrowed. “It’s been called that for as long as I can remember.”
“Why are there no tags anywhere?” Poet motioned to the derelict buildings situated on either side of the road.
Travis cleared his throat. “I haven’t known them to leave many visible marks. They seem to tag random buildings, old cars. Things like that. Then when they catch someone in their territory, like me, they can claim you trespassed.”
“Sounds like something Mal would do.”
“Somewhat,” Takara agreed. “But that places us in our own backyard, and there aren’t any proselytes here standing guard, which doesn’t sound like Samael at all.”
“There’s also that.” Travis pointed in the opposite direction, referencing the blockade.
A mess of cars and upheaved rubble with a manhole a few feet in front of it were back that way. The middle of the street looked like a giant mouth, ready to eat anything that got too close to it, effectively prohibiting anyone from going that direction.
“With the only other road going to the camp blocked off, someone would have to retravel the path we just took to get here or there.”
