He was not locked away in that house where his mother lived with the cloying perfumes and noises at all hours and the people coming and going that never included him. He had never done anything but stay. Stay behind. Stay quiet. Stay unseen.

“What are you doing?”

Cruze whipped around and found the girl. She’d followed him, but somehow she seemed less touched by the elements. She wasn’t dry, to be sure, but it was as if she stood beneath a tree that guarded her from the worst of the rain. But there was no more shelter where she stood than he, and he could hear the steady patter of the rain and felt it fall against the back of his neck.

“Nothing.”

“You’ll fall ill if you stand too long in the rain,” she said.

“So will you.”

She did not reply to that, only tilted her head slightly and looked at him with more focused eyes.

“What happened to your neck?” he asked, tired of wondering, and too far from his mother to care what was and was not polite.

She grabbed the collar of her shirt, pulling it up to hide the mark, but then dropped it, as if she changed her mind.

“I made a choice,” she answered.

“What kind of choice?”

She shrugged and did not blink as she continued, “Not to die.”

He did not know what she meant, but she was the only person out here he felt even the slightest connection toward. “What’s your name?” he asked, aware that he had made no effort to get to know any of the others before, while they had all told story after story of their families and lives back home.

“You can call me Kess.”

Kiran Thorne burst out of the smoke-filled inn, his heart galloping at a painful speed.

She was not here.

They had evacuated the inn as soon as it was safe to go outside. Firestorms made for a particularly violent dilemma—stay in the building as it burned or run out into the storm that caused the fire? Usually it came down to guesswork, and most often it led to injury or death regardless of where one stayed. Unless, of course, you carried magic like the firestorm powder he had already taken.

When he had not found Roar in her bedroom on the third floor, he assumed she had already made it out. But when he could not find her with the others, he’d charged back into the burning building, determined to find her. Ransom followed close at his heels, for Jinx was missing too. But no matter how much they searched, the girls were nowhere to be found. When the third floor was smothered completely in flames, they’d finally given up and retreated back outside.