“Spit it out. We don’t have all night,” Sel warns. “Or should I say you don’t have all night? You’re going to die here—or did you miss that, too?”

“Not myyyyy Gate,” it rasps.

Sel’s jaw clenches. “What do you mean, not your Gate?”

The creature laughs again, the sound atonal and wrong. Sel’s eyes flick to Tor. Still aiming at the isel, she shakes her head, shrugs. Neither one of them knows what it means. “Not my Gate. Not my Gate—”

Without warning, Sel clenches his hand into a tight fist in one hard motion. The glowing pins draw together. There’s a quick flash of light and a bone-shaking scream, and the creature’s flickering shape explodes into green dust.

My feet are glued to the earth. They’re going to find me, I think, because I’m too terrified to run.

“There could be more.” Tor pulls her bow to rest. Sel’s head lowers in thought. “Sel?” Silence. “Did you hear me?”

His eyes cut to hers. “I heard you.”

“Well, we huntin’ or not, Kingsmage?” she huffs.

He turns to face the woods opposite my hiding place, tension radiating across his back and shoulders. He comes to a decision. “We’re hunting.” He mutters a word I don’t understand, and the silver smoke from before returns, swirling around the campfire until the flames die, sending the clearing into darkness. “Move out.”

I hold my breath, but Tor and Sel don’t turn my way. Instead, they step into the section of the woods he’d been scrutinizing. I wait until I hear their voices recede. Even without the fear of what they’d do if they found me, it takes that long to get my trembling limbs under control. Finally, they’re gone.

A beat of silence, two, and the crickets begin singing again. I hadn’t realized they’d stopped.

From a limb overhead, a bird releases a quiet, uncertain chirp. I exhale in kinship. I’m pretty sure I know how they feel: the isel was an impossible monster that somehow fed off humans, but Selwyn is something else… something worse.

Every living thing in the forest had hidden itself from him.

I stand there one more beat, still frozen, and then I run. I run as fast as I can through the shadows and don’t look back.

3

WHEN I BURST through the trees, I slow down, all thoughts of the impossible disappearing.

Lights flash blue and red against the night sky, and dread, heavy and sour, fills my stomach. A Durham County Sheriff patrol car has pulled into the lot, and my friends are standing beside it talking to a deputy holding a notepad.