I took off running in that direction, his curse blistering my ears. I didn’t slow down. Dez was right behind me. We crossed the blissfully empty intersection, my heart jumping around as the brick walls of the park came into view. I kept running until I saw the entrance.

The entrance was closed—gated from the ground to the ceiling of the stone archway.

Swallowing a shriek of fury, I backed up toward the edge of the sidewalk just as Dez arrived. The wall was maybe nine or ten feet.

Doable with a bit more room. Glancing into the street behind me to make sure it was empty, I rushed out to the middle.

“Trinity—” Dez started.

Pushing off the ground, I ran hard toward the wall, arms and legs pumping. Muscles throughout my body tensed. About four feet out, I launched myself off the ground, rising into the air. There was a moment where I felt like I was flying. Weightless.

I’d judged the distance right.

Sort of.

I cleared the wall and went right over it.

Crap!

Preparing myself for a hard landing, I hit the ground below on both feet. The impact vibrated up my legs and throughout my hips, and along my spine. That kind of fall would’ve surely broken a bone or a spine in a human. If I was in tiptop shape, it wouldn’t have even fazed me. I, however, was not in the best of shape, so the landing stung. A lot. But all the important bones were intact. I rose from the crouch just as Dez came over the wall, his landing way more graceful and light than mine. Without even looking, I knew that meant he’d shifted into his Warden form.

There was another curse from behind me as my sneakers pounded off the stone of the pathway. Following the solar-lit walkway, I raced past the kind of trees that reminded me of Christmas, bursting out into a brightly lit clearing. The sound of running water from a huge fountain seemed to move in the tune of my pulse. Beyond that was... I squinted.

You have to be kidding me.

There were like a million steps on the other side of the fountain, and even though I could make out the shape of them, they were nowhere near as lit as this area. Damn it all to—

“Stop!” Dez shouted.

Skidding to a stop, I looked down to see I had almost walked into a lumpy mass on the ground. A lumpy mass that was definitely a body.

“Damn,” I whispered, jerking back a step.

It was a man on the ground. I couldn’t make out what he was wearing, because of the...the blood that was coming from—I squinted. Oh. A whole lot of blood had poured out from where his eyes had been.

My stomach twisted. “Does, um, it look to you like his eyes were, like, burned out?”