Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice. Probably because I’d been wrong—the ammo boxes hadn’t all gone off. Or else the fire was spreading and hitting new ones, causing me to keep flinching as random explosions erupted behind us.

But even so, even with spewing lava and magical detonations and running trees, it remained surreal, just walking out of camp. In the space of a couple minutes, I’d gone from hope to horror to despair to acceptance… and now what? I kept looking behind us, as well as I could with one arm around Mircea’s waist and backpacking a goat. But so far, it was working.

We were literally just walking away.

“There!” Someone cried. “There they are!”

Damn it!

But I didn’t miss a step. Make it to the tree line, echoed in my head. Make it to the tree line, and we’ll figure things out from there. Just make it to the freaking tree line, Cassie!

And then the tree line came to us.

My little posse came running out of the night, and if you’ve never seen a herd of trees galloping toward you, you’ve missed out. But this time, they didn’t just surround us. They’d barely reached us before I was snatched off the ground by the hand-like branch of a mighty maple.

And was dropped a second later, when said branch was sheared off by a bright yellow spell that shot by like the whirling blade of a circular saw.

We hit the ground amid a sudden storm of trampling roots and exploding spells. Guess one munitions box made it, after all, I thought, while tugging on Mircea. “Come on! It’s just over there!”

“What’s… over there?” he gasped.

“The tree line!”

“And that helps us how?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. But it was better than being here. “Stop talking and start crawling!”

“A master vampire does not crawl,” he informed me, with a damned good attempt at dignity, all things considered. And then another of those yellow blades came whirling by, sheering off the top of his hair, and he crawled—fast. Because masters are also highly pragmatic.

And so are Pythias, I thought, dragging the goat thing after me.

I didn’t see Arsen in the chaos, or Pritkin, because I couldn’t see much of anything. Except for smoke and colorful explosions and slinging yellow spell blades that were now whirling everywhere, because somebody had figured out that they worked better than the torches. Which meant that, on top of everything else, we had to contend with falling tree limbs.