The road took them deeper into Tucker. He smelled a skunk, raccoons, two roving bands of dogs, feral cats, and a big male bobcat that happily sprayed around. He didn’t smell humans. Nobody had passed this way for quite some time. If Caleb Adams had taken the rock into Tucker, he hadn’t come this way to do it or he’d had a giant bird carry him.

They traveled in silence for half an hour, when Julie turned off the road and steered her horse to the remains of a three-story building. She stood up in her saddle, grabbed the crumbling brickwork, and pulled herself up. He took a running start; jumped ten feet in the air; bounced from some rebar; ran across a narrow, half-rotten beam; and offered her his hand to pull her up. She gave him a look studded with broken glass. Right. Still mad.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re wasting time.”

She ignored his hand and pulled herself over the edge onto the rotten remains of the third floor. He gave her space.

She raised her hand and pointed to an area in the distance. “There. It’s in the center of that place.”

He peered at it. Remains of some industrial complex, and a large one—at least two dozen big buildings, maybe more, some almost whole, others down to broken stretches of walls connecting to nothing. An accidental urban labyrinth. The soil around it was darker, the texture of it different, rougher somehow. Odd shapes rose among the ruins, some glowing with pale pink and blue. He couldn’t quite make them out.

His instincts told him the place was unlike anything he’d seen before. And it felt bad. Pillar Rock made him wary, but this place felt worse. He didn’t want to go in there, but most of all he didn’t want her walking into it.

Like the dark soil around the ruins, Adams was a blight, a corruption that had already cost the Iveses their lives. The blight had to be purged. Curran had told him once, “Every time you see a problem and walk away from it, you set a new standard.” The problem was right there, and letting Caleb Adams butcher a family to get his hands on a magic rock wasn’t a standard he cared to set. They would take care of it. It was time to cut the warlock’s little power trip short.

He still didn’t like it.

They circled the former industrial park, drawing a wide arc around it. Adams would expect them to come from the southwest. They approached from the north instead. The wind blew from the south, and he liked being upwind of his prey. They hid Peanut in the nearby ruins. With her backpack gone, Julie resorted to her backup bag, a small satchel she carried on her back.