Chapter 36
We had been walking for well over an hour by the time I realized the mountains of incapacitated Revenants behind us were no longer visible behind the red curvature of the horizon. Long enough for the pragmatism of survival to wear off and be replaced with the heavier question of what came next.
Dominic had said we needed to find shelter first. A place to regroup.
A defensible position while we determined how exactly one might escape a realm that looked like it had been carved from the inside of an open wound.
At the time it had sounded like the most reasonable thing anyone had ever said.
It still did. The problem was that Sanguinarium appeared to have no interest in cooperating with us whatsoever.
So we walked.
There was no real direction to choose from, and the landscape gave us nothing to work with.
No trees, no rivers or streams, no rise in the terrain that might suggest something useful was beyond it.
Just the same flat, rust-colored earth stretching in every direction beneath a sky that refused to commit to any particular hour, the red of it too deep for dawn and too saturated for dusk and entirely too permanent to be either.
Nothing that suggested this forsaken place had ever been intended for anything other than what it was: a container.
A place you put things you wanted to forget about.
Even the air had a quality to it that made prolonged breathing feel unpleasant and metallic at the back of the throat, like the inside of something old and sealed.
If this place had ever held life, it had clearly been scraped clean of it a very long time ago.
Dominic moved slightly ahead of us, eyes tracking the horizon in long, measured sweeps the way he always did when he was cataloguing something he hadn’t finished deciding about yet.
Trace stayed close at my side, his posture easy but not relaxed, the kind of loose-limbed alertness that looked casual until it didn’t.
Neither of them spoke much. Then again, there wasn’t much to say when the world around you looked like a barren artery stretched to the edge of infinity.
I had just begun to wonder how long we could realistically keep walking in a straight line before we circled back to nowhere when something to my right caught my attention.
I wasn’t sure what it was at first. A shift in the landscape, something at the far edge of my vision that didn’t match the monotony I’d been staring at for the better part of an hour.
The distance blurred it, the red haze bleeding its edges into the air around it, but it was there.
Something that was too deliberate, too angular to be another split in the cracked earth.
I stopped walking without even realizing it.
“What is it?” Trace stopped beside me, already following my sightline.
“There.” I pointed. “Do you see that?”
Dominic turned. He went quiet for a moment with his eyes narrowed and his head tilted. His expression shifted almost imperceptibly, not alarmed or even hopeful. Just assessing. “It looks like some sort of structure,” he finally said, his tone even rather than reactive.
“Man-made?” I heard the pitch of my own voice and wished I hadn’t.
“It would appear so.” He paused, still looking. “The edges are too defined to be naturally occurring. Nature favors irregularity.”
We stood there, watching it, as if it might dissolve if we looked away from it. The haze shifted, revealing more of its outline. It rose from the earth in fractured, jagged angles, like something unmistakably constructed.
And then I saw it. A faint ribbon threading upward from its center.
“Oh, my god.” My breath caught. “Is that—”
“Smoke,” answered Dominic. He said it the way he said most alarming things, pleasantly, as though the fact of smoke rising from a structure in a vampire purgatory was simply another interesting detail to file away.
“Smoke means fire,” said Trace. “Fire means someone lit it.”
“A stunning deduction, Romeo,” said Dominic, without inflection.
“Well? What are we waiting for?” asked Trace as he started walking backwards from me toward and in the direction of the structure. “Let’s go check it out.”
I didn’t move. “Is that a good idea?”
He halted, frowning at me. “What do you mean? We’ve been walking for over an hour looking for any sign of life. That’s definitely a sign of life.”
“Yeah, but what kind of life?” I swallowed against the knot in my throat as I looked between them. “If there’s anything actually alive in this Realm, I think we can all pretty much guess what it’s going to be.”
“Revenants.” Dominic’s eyes darkened.
“Exactly.” My stomach tightened uncomfortably. “What if they’re ferals?” I asked, the thought already burrowing into me and growing roots.
A structure would certainly provide shelter, but shelter would also draw the desperate. And feral vampires were nothing if not desperate.
“It’s possible,” conceded Dominic. “Though the presence of a sustained fire suggests coordination.”
That gave me pause. Ferals were violent. Instinct-driven. Not exactly known for long-term planning.
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Trace, his gaze bouncing between me and Dominic. “Whatever’s in there, we can handle it. It’s not like we’re unarmed,” he said, shifting the wooden stake at his back.
He wasn’t wrong. All three of us were armed. They had the wooden stakes I’d pulled from their chests, and I had the Sword of Angelus tucked neatly against my ribs. Still, the idea of walking toward unknown inhabitants in a Realm like this made my skin prickle.
“He’s right, angel.” Dominic turned his gaze to me, measuring. “We do require shelter,” he reminded evenly. “And information. Wandering indefinitely through open terrain benefits no one.”
Trace nodded once. “We approach carefully. If it’s bad, we leave.”
If it’s bad.
As if leaving were that simple.
“It’s your call,” said Trace as the two of them watched me.
I looked back at the structure in the distance.
The haze shifted across it, briefly clarifying its outline before swallowing it again, and for just a moment I could make out the suggestion of walls.
A roofline. Something thin and dark curling upward from it into that relentless red sky. It was definitely smoke.
I stared at it for a long moment and thought about all the things that lit fires, and whether any of them were things I wanted to walk toward voluntarily. Hope and danger looked dangerously similar from a distance.
“All right,” I said finally, forcing the tightness from my voice. “Let’s find out who else survived,” I said and then jabbed my index finger at the two of them. “But if something tries to eat me, I’m holding both of you personally responsible.”
* * *
It took twenty minutes to close the distance, and with every step the structure became harder to look away from.
We watched as it shifted in and out of focus, the haze thinning and thickening in uneven waves, revealing more of itself with every step we took.
The closer we got, the more we were sure that what we were seeing wasn’t some trick of the eye or a mirage conjured by this barren wasteland.
It was definitely man-made.
Up close, it was nothing like anything I had ever seen built.
Not in the way buildings were built in our world, with symmetry and purpose and materials meant to last against weather and time.
This looked assembled. Salvaged. As though someone had scavenged whatever Sanguinarium had to offer and forced it into submission.
The walls were constructed from something dark and glassy, almost like volcanic obsidian cut and stacked in uneven slabs, its surface catching the red light with a cold, liquid sheen that almost made it look alive.
Certain sections had been cut and fitted with obvious effort, others appeared to have been shaped by heat, the edges softened and fused where the material had been forced into place.
It was the tallest structure in view, but it didn’t stand alone.
As we crested the slight incline leading toward it, an entire settlement revealed itself in stages.
A dozen structures at least, smaller than the central one but built in the same desperate, resourceful manner, connected by low perimeter walls of stacked red stone and more of that black, glassy material that formed a rough perimeter around the settlement.
Everything looked reinforced and intentional.
The kind of intentional that only came from people who had been here long enough to stop thinking of it as temporary and to start making it their home.
And there was sound too. Movement. Chatter. The low buzz of a place that had learned to function.
“I’m not sure this is such a good idea,” I murmured, my steps slowing without my permission.
“Probably not,” agreed Dominic, his tone and expression undecipherable.
There were more of them than I had anticipated. Figures moved along the perimeter. Silhouettes passed between structures, unhurried, going about whatever passed for daily life in a place like this.
“There’s too many of them. I think we should turn around.”
“Too late,” said Trace, ticking his chin toward the entrance.
Two figures had already broken away from the entrance of the settlement and were walking toward us with the unhurried purposefulness of people who had done this before. As though they weren’t even half as surprised to see us as we were to see them.
Well, so much for hauling ass out of here.
I watched them as they closed the distance, their gait cautious and controlled.
For a brief instant, I felt relieved because I knew ferals wouldn’t have walked like that.
Ferals would have closed the gap in seconds, all instinct and momentum, no calculation behind it.
These two walked like they were thinking about where they were going.
Like cognition was still something they had access to.