My head ached from the echo, and I took in every nuance as I looked for a sign, a breath, a wing chirp. Every chip of rock, every shadow stood out in sharp relief as I searched for him, the image of the desert almost scratched on the inside of my mind and built around the faded images of ley lines that no longer existed. They whispered, hinting at a time when there was grass and trees here, and huge animals roaming, living, dying…until they vanished along with the ley lines. I wondered which had disappeared first.

Al had once told me that demons made the ley lines in their efforts to escape the ever-after, but magic was older than that. Was what I was seeing now the faded remnants of lines gone dead? Had the demons destroyed the original source of magic in their attempt to banish the elves? I squinted, closing my eyes and reaching for a breath of understanding, wrapping my awareness around an empty shell of a scratch between the present and the past, finding no energy but only the lingering idea that power had once run here, now gone, leaving only the skeleton, dry and dusty, to hint at what had been. It made me feel so damned alone.

A door slammed shut, and I turned, my last thought heavy in my heart. “Get back in the car,” I said to Trent, and Ivy slowly got out, her head bent over the amulet in her hand.

Trent looked me up and down, his expression closed. “It’s an oven in there,” he said, turning to the map on the brochure. “And besides, it’s a bunch of pixies. How bad can it be? Just go and get him. You’re a thousand times their size.” Irate, he leaned against and squinted at me in the sun. The wind playing with his wispy hair, and the heat, made him look tired. “I’ll stay here unless you scream for me. Promise,” he said sourly.

Yeah, like that will happen. Jittery, I looked at the map sketched on the big brown sign beside a trail, seeing that there was a quarter-mile footpath that circled around a ruin. According to it, about four hundred people had once lived here, almost a thousand years ago.

Ivy shut her door with a backward kick, the thump not going on for long before the silence soaked it up. “You should listen to Quen more,” she said, looking up from the amulet to frown at the slight rise of land before us. “Pixies are deadly.”

Trent frowned at the sky, and I ran a finger between my ankle and the heel of my boot. “A clan of wild pixies kidnapped an experienced runner,” I said. “They live in the desert. What does that tell you?”

“They aren’t smart enough to move?” Trent said, and I made a noise of disgust. Ivy headed for the narrow footpath of paved asphalt, and I turned to follow. According to the plaque, archaeologists had begun to reconstruct the village site, but there were no walls higher than my knees.