My chest hurt, and I wrapped my arm around my middle, staring out at the whole-lot-of-nothing we were passing through. The sun shifted as we took a slow turn. From the back where Trent sulked, a new burst of blood and cinnamon grew as the warmth found him. Ivy swallowed hard. That we hadn’t stopped to give him a chance to change his clothes told me she was scared.

I exchanged a worried look with Jenks. Trent had tried to clean up, but there was only so much that bottled water and fast-food napkins could do. Dried blood cracked and flaked from the absorbent black cloth he’d tied around his bicep. It looked like a shoe-polishing rag, and I was sure he’d gotten it from his suitcase, thrown into the backseat before we tore out of St. Louis. At least his face was clean. Even his ears where the blood had dripped down. He had been bleeding from his ears! What had they tried to do to him?

I shifted, my foot scraping against the fast-food bag half full of candy wrappers, coffee cups, and water bottles. The scent of fries mixed with that of dried blood somehow reminding me of my prom. I’d be hungry, except my stomach was knotting over the news coming out of St. Louis.

“Experts claim that an adhesive that dissolves in salt water is to blame,” the woman on the radio said, her voice a mix of urgent drama and calm journalism. “This salt-water-dissolving adhesive is routinely used in major road construction in no-frost zones outside the coastlines, and it’s thought that the salt used to de-ice the nearby sidewalks soaked into the soil, eating away at the foundation over the years until today’s disastrous toll.”

Salt-dissolving adhesive, I thought darkly. That was Inderland speak for a magic misfire. No need to scare the humans. Despite all the integration we’d achieved, the equality that we managed, there were still secrets, still hidden ugliness.

Jenks’s wings hummed from the rearview mirror. “Anyone mind if I change the station?” he asked. “They’re just repeating themselves now.”

His tone was heavy, and I looked at Ivy. She was the one who’d turned it on. From the back, Trent sighed, finishing off a bottle of flavored water enhanced with B vitamins and complex amino acids or something, capping it and tossing it to the front for me to jam in with the rest of the trash. Ivy clicked off the radio, her motions just shy of vampiric speed.

I squinted out the window in the new silence as I shoved the bottle in the trash, not really seeing the gently rolling grasslands. They looked hot under the lengthening afternoon sun, and I wished I had my sunglasses to cut the glare. I’d put on Trent’s, but he’d probably want them back, and I didn’t know what to think of him anymore. The third assassin hadn’t been at the car when we’d stumbled back to it. Neither Trent, Ivy, or Jenks had asked what happened, and I wasn’t about to admit, especially to Trent, that I’d almost died. I hadn’t known elven magic could be so insidiously deadly, and a new wariness, or respect maybe, had me quietly thinking.