“We? You and I? So you’re saying I can come?”

“Slip of the tongue. I certainly don’t mean you.”

“I can help you survive danger,” Karas said.

“You’re a ten-year-old squat!”

“I have more water.”

“She has more water,” Hunter said.

Indeed, having just been healed by the lake water, she seemed especially enamored with it. Two full bags rested over her saddle.

“Where are we going?” Karas asked.

“Nowhere.” Darsal turned her mount, kicked its flanks, and trotted into the desert, begging reason to catch up to the foolish little girl.

“That’s it, show her who’s the boss,” Hunter quipped.

“Quiet.”

Taking a Roush to a Black Forest to find Alucard was one thing. Taking a young girl whom Johnis had risked his life to save—whom Thomas Hunter had taken an inordinate interest in—was madness.

The way Darsal now understood her situation was that she had a two-hour head start on Johnis, who would come after her as soon as Karas returned with the news that she’d headed north. But two hours were all she needed.

“We should head west first to avoid the Horde camping in the north.”

Darsal spun in her saddle and saw that Karas followed ten feet behind, undeterred.

“She’s right; the Horde is camped north,” Hunter said.

“You can’t come! Thomas will have my head!”

“I hope to help you keep your head, Big Sister,” Karas said.

“And stop calling me that. You don’t know it’s true.”

“I do know. I also overheard you talking to yourself about going to the Black Forest in search of Alucard, one of the legendary Shataiki that Witch often talked about. Don’t worry, you’ll grow to appreciate me.”

“Why do you speak like that?” Darsal demanded in frustration.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re a scholar rather than a child? I thought the Horde were stupid.”

“Deceived, not stupid. And I’m not Horde anymore, or didn’t you notice?”

Hunter sat grinning like a monkey. “Amazing,” he muttered. “For all you know, Elyon has sent her to save your skinny neck.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Keep telling yourself that, you might listen,” the Roush said.

Darsal took one more minute to consider her options, which were either to return with the girl or press on in the hopes of saving Billos.

She’d escaped from Johnis’s house thinking that life was hers to risk. Then she’d taken Hunter by force, and now Karas was in her care. The equation had changed. But her desperation to find Billos had not. And she’d already committed herself.

Their lives, all three of them, were on Billos’s head, not hers.

Darsal humphed and galloped toward the sinking sun, followed closely by the little girl who claimed she was her niece and insisted on calling her “sister.”