For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. Then she remembered the Hounds, and her parents, and Kelly directing her to the old man’s house. Virgil someone. The van had already been there when they’d arrived, and Amber herself had taken Milo and laid him on to the back seat of the Charger. His pulse had been slow and his breathing shallow, but he was in the Charger and the Charger would heal him. It would. It had to.

Because tonight was Hell Night.

She pulled down the blanket, expecting it to snag on her horns, but it passed easily over her face. She checked her hands in the early morning light. Pale. Flesh-coloured. She hadn’t shifted while she slept. The urge was there, she could still feel it, but it was lessened. Weakened.

She wasn’t surprised. She’d been expecting it, actually. More or less depending on it.

She laid the blanket aside and sat up quietly. The others were still wrapped up in their sleeping bags on the floor of Virgil’s living room. She’d only met him briefly the previous night. Kelly had introduced them and he’d gone off to bed. She wasn’t sure if the other old man – Javier, she thought his name was – was Virgil’s housemate or his lover. The thought of two old gay men living up here in Alaska would have made her heart warm were it not for the town they’d chosen to move to.

She put her shoes on and stood. The clothes she’d been wearing last night, or at least the rags they’d turned into, were now stuffed in a garbage bag. The ones she had on were wrinkled and let the chill in, so she hugged herself as she crept out of the room. Two raised his head, looked at her, yawned and went back to sleep. Amber walked over to the door that led to the garage, but hesitated before opening it. She uttered a silent prayer to someone, somewhere, and slipped inside. The Charger was parked on the other side of the van.

“Please be okay,” she whispered. “Please be okay. Please be okay.”

She rounded the van, approached the Charger, and leaned down to peer through the window. The blanket she’d used to cover Milo was lying on the back seat.

Milo was gone.

Coldness swept through her and she reeled away from the car, that parasitic car that healed and sustained him, but also fed off him. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder what it would do if he was too badly injured, if he died during the night. Would it leave his body be, or would it absorb it, consume it completely and leave nothing, not even bloodstains on the upholstery?

Milo walked up beside her. “What’s wrong with you?”

She leaped away from him in shock, then grabbed him and hugged him. “You’re alive!”