“You want me to be grateful?” Anton bit out, shoving Jude back a step. “Grateful that you throw yourself into danger the first chance you get like you don’t care what it would do to me if—” He cut himself off, shaking. “I want to keep you safe, Jude. How do you not get that?”

Jude’s jaw clenched. “That’s not your job.”

“Then whose job is it?”

Jude had no answer because the question had never crossed his mind before. He searched Anton’s face, his heart thudding. Beneath Anton’s fury, there was a dark shadow of something else. He wasn’t just worried—he was haunted. Jude had seen flashes of it before, in the nightmares that plagued Anton as he slept. Jude had been so desperate to make things right between them, he had let himself believe it was just the same fear they were all shouldered with—the god, Pallas, the Witnesses. The Age of Darkness.

But the truth was staring him in the face, and Jude couldn’t look away anymore. Anton was hiding something.

Jude raised a trembling hand to cup Anton’s face, anger bleeding out of him. “What is this about?”

Anton bit his lip, shaking his head. With a fierce gleam in his eyes, he grabbed a handful of Jude’s shirt and yanked him into another furious kiss.

Unbalanced by Anton’s sudden move, Jude stumbled. His foot slid on the slick mud and he went splashing down into the shallows of the river. Anton followed him down, climbing dangerously closer and pushing Jude back against the rocks to seal their lips together again.

It felt like a challenge, one Jude didn’t know how to back down from. River water soaked through his pants but he didn’t care, dragging Anton closer, one hand curled around Anton’s wrist, the other sliding to his waist. Like if he could just hold on to Anton, keep him close enough, then he’d be safe.

It was only later, after they’d picked themselves off the ground and dried off as best as they could, that Jude even realized Anton had never answered him.

A cloud of grim hopelessness seemed to follow them down the mountain. They reached the valley the next morning, the mountainous terrain giving way to the hilly lowlands. Every evening, Jude watched the sun sink behind the ridge of the Unspoken Mountains, the silver ribbon of the Serpentine gleaming on the other side of the valley. The distance between them and those jagged peaks only reminded Jude of how far they had to go.

Witnesses lurked in nearly every town. Each morning, Anton scried to see if there were Witnesses close by, and they did their best to avoid the farms and villages dotting the prairie.