Robert cleared the roof and jumped down, right over the edge. I followed and nearly slid off the icy shingles. A fire escape, ten feet below.

I jumped down, landed with a thud, and slid down the fire escape, trying not to trip over my own clumsy feet. Wind whistled around me and then we were on the ground and next to Robert, who held Cuddles’s reins.

I swung into the saddle and gave her a squeeze. We had to hurry.

Cuddles didn’t move.

“Come on!” I kicked her sides. “Now isn’t the time to be an ass!”

Cuddles planted herself. Not now, you stupid donkey.

Ascanio snarled and smacked her butt. Cuddles shot into a gallop, thudding down the street.

8

THE WARREN FLEW by. We made another right and burst onto Garbage Road. Trash and refuse lay piled in huge heaps against the walls of abandoned buildings, forming a twenty-foot-deep canyon of garbage. If we made it through, we’d reach White Street.

Cuddles began to slow. I let her drop to a canter. A mile of gallop over rough terrain was all I could ask, even with Hugh behind us. It was that or, in another mile, she’d quit on me.

Small scavenger beasts with long tails scampered back and forth on the hills of trash, their eyes pinpoints of yellow against the darkness. The shapeshifters ran on both sides of me, leaping over hazards on the garbage slopes. Garbage Road had come about because of the Phantom River. It flowed through the Warren, invisible to the eye, picked up trash and loose refuse, and dragged it here, to Garbage Road. The Phantom River terminated when it reached White Street, which had its own brand of screwed-up magic. People said that the river’s “waters” pooled here, held back by White Street like a dam, before they deposited all of its stolen treasures and disappeared.

The road widened and we emerged into what must’ve been a roundabout at some point. Now with the side streets choked by debris, it was just a trash bottleneck: one way in, one way out.

Ahead Derek stumbled.

I pulled on the reins, trying to get Cuddles to stop.

Derek tried to keep running, but he stumbled again and rolled down the garbage slope right under the donkey. Cuddles’s hoof missed his head by a hair. She finally stopped, and I jumped to the ground.

Derek rolled up clumsily to all fours and vomited a torrent of gray on the ground. A putrid sour reek hit me. It smelled like someone had sliced open a cow carcass that had been baking in the sun for days. I gagged and knelt by him. The vomit was filled with dark gray slime, streaked with black and red.

Ascanio and Robert dropped down next to me. Desandra landed next to us, shivered, and vomited to the side, the same torrent of slime and blood. Something was horribly wrong with them.