Page 36 of The Bonds of Indigo

I glance over at him, catching the twitch at the corner of his eye.

“Fine.”

He grabs his phone, and the next thing I hear is the navigation’s flat voice: “You will arrive at your destination in fifty-eight minutes. Continue straight for twenty-two miles.”

Alright, maybe this will be quick. Maybe I’ll finally have something to bargain with.

Vendra, please, if you can hear me, let me send this crazy bastard to the Beyond successfully so he can get who he’s looking for.

If he dies…

I wonder if I’d still get what I wanted. If my God would answer me, maybe I could ask her about the bond.

Vendra? Are you there?

Chapter 10

She doesn’t say another word after that. Not when the road narrows, not when the trees thicken around us, and even as I pull up to the barricade blocking the end of the trail, she’s silent. Her door opens before I can tell her to wait, and it slams shut before I even get one foot out.

Seems we’re both eager to get this over with.

It makes me wonder why she is. Maybe the person she wants dead is enough motivation.

I shouldn’t be curious about her. All I should be thinking about is getting to Lucifer.

Being here, at a recently-closed gate to the Beyond, feels like a step forward. I’m not naïve enough to believe it’ll work on the first try, but hope is a hard habit to kill.

I circle the car and stop a few feet behind Amarah. She’s got her arms wrapped tight around herself, and from here I see the tremor that runs through her.

“Warmer back in your cell?” I ask, mostly to provoke her. I can’t place why, but I want to get under her skin.

Her head jerks toward me, her mouth opening but quickly closing again.

“I can sense it,” she mutters, voice low before turning away and stalking toward the lake.

We’re standing at the split where Opal Lake divides into two narrow branches that wind toward the mountains. A border that connects five states. The air here is sharp with pine and cold water. The sun’s long gone, leaving only the faint shimmer of starlight on the surface. No hikers, no campers; the last Mundane scent is hours old.

I follow her at a distance, taking in the clean air—the smell of earth and the lake is grounding. It’s the one thing that’s ever been simple for me. Maybe that’s why I always preferred militia life to anything else. I was built for the outdoors, for dirt under my boots and blood on my hands, not a desk.

My buddies used to call me the rugged type. I’d tell them the only downside to sleeping in your car was that nobody wanted to fuck a homeless guy—even if he was as good-looking as I am.

I shift my attention from the trees to Amarah, who’s walking barefoot ahead of me. It pisses me off more than it should. The ground’s covered in sharp rocks and branches, and people leave all kinds of trash out here. There could be glass, needles, anything. It’s like she doesn’t care, not even a little, because she’s not watching where she steps.

She’s a psychopath. This just confirms it.

I push my hair back and tie it up, following her through a cluster of bushes. The silence stretches, too thick for my liking.

“How old are you?” I finally ask.

“Twenty-seven. You?” She swats a branch out of her way and lets it snap right back at me. It nearly smacks me in the face.

“I stopped counting after a thousand. Seems pointless.”

“Do you remember what year you were born?”

“2025.”

She huffs. “You’re one thousand, one hundred and one, depending on your birth month.”