Page 115 of Incoronate
“Eventually.” He held my gaze. “You don’t want to be in the open when it does.”
Something cold seeped into my stomach and stayed there. I wanted to ask what happened when the sky went dark. I also didn’t want to know the answer badly enough to ask it out loud.
Cael’s gaze lingered on me for a beat, something moving through it that almost looked like pity before he smoothed it away. “I need to get back to my people,” he said, looking between the three of us one final time. “We can give you some supplies. Enough to keep moving.” His eyes cut briefly, pointedly, to me. “Though I’d think carefully about where you plan to move to.”
“Generous of you,” said Dominic. “And if we preferred a roof to rations?”
“Then you’d be asking for something considerably more valuable than supplies.” Cael studied him. “What exactly do you have to offer in return that would warrant such a risk?”
“The risk is negligible,” said Dominic, his dark eyes on Cael. “We have no allegiances here and no agenda beyond getting back to our Realm. But make no mistake of it, we will be returning to our Realm.” He paused. “It seems to me that having a working relationship with the only peoplein Sanguinarium who already have a door might be worth considerably more than the cost of one night’s shelter.”
That piqued his interest. “A door you say?”
Dominic’s mouth curved just slightly. “The details of which we’d be far more inclined to discuss somewhere with a roof over our heads.”
Cael went very still for just a moment. It was brief, barely there, but I caught it. The shift in his eyes when Dominic implied we didn’t come through the seam. Like a piece of information landing somewhere it hadn’t been before and rearranging things slightly on its way down.
Whatever he was weighing, he reached the end of it without letting any of it show on his face.
“One night,” he said. “You can shelter inside the perimeter for one night.” His eyes found mine and stayed there. “And then you’ll be on your way.”
I looked at Dominic. He looked back at me with the expression he used when he’d already made a decision and was simply waiting for me to arrive at it. Walking voluntarily into an enclosed settlement full of Revenants of unknown temperament was, objectively, a deeply questionable call.
It was also the only one we had. Because whatever came out when that sky went dark had clearly given Cael, who did not strike me as a man who spooked easily, sufficient reason to not want to be in the open for it. And that alone was reason enough for me.
“We appreciate the hospitality,” said Dominic smoothly.
Cael turned without another word and started back toward the settlement. Rhen followed a step behind, and after a moment, so did we.
“I really hope you know what you’re doing,” I said quietly, falling into step between Trace and Dominic.
“I always know what I’m doing, angel,” said Dominic, a smirk pulling at the corner of his lips.
“Famous last words,” said Trace, shaking his head.
But neither of them slowed down, and neither did I.
37. THE COMFORTABLE LIE
The settlement was louder on the inside than it had looked from the outside. It wasn’t loud in a way that suggested comfort or ease, but that specific, layered noise of a place that had figured out how to keep itself running despite being in an unsurvivable hellscape. Metal striking metal. Low voices carrying across the open ground between buildings. The sound of movement that had purpose behind it, which was somehow more unsettling than silence would have been, because it meant this place had a rhythm, a routine, and that it had been here long enough to develop both.
The structures up close were rawer than distance had suggested, every wall and roofline bearing the evidence of what it had taken to build them. Score marks and heat scars where the obsidian had been cut and shaped, lengths of stripped bone and dense reddish timber used where other materials hadn’t stretched far enough. Nothing here had come easily. Everything said so. The ground between the buildings had been worn flat by foot traffic alone, paths pressed into the cracked earth by sheer repetition until the ground had simply given up and accepted them.
The people watched us as we passed.
Some kept their eyes down or their backs turned with the practiced disinterest of people who had learned not to be curious about new arrivals. But others tracked us openly, and the ones who tracked us had a quality to their attention I recognized immediately and liked very much less up close. The jaw held slightly too tight. Eyes that moved a fraction too low, catching the line of my throat before sliding away again. The restraint that looked like stillness but wasn’t, coiledand patient and acutely, privately aware of every step I took through their space.
Their clothing matched what Cael and Rhen wore. Salvaged fabric bleached to rust and ash, crude metal reinforcements, and those pale, stretched strips binding it all together that I had already decided I was never going to look at directly again. Because up close, in the red light with nothing softening the details, they looked exactly like skin. Treated and preserved and stitched into place like any other material, worn without apology by people who had clearly long since stopped thinking of it as anything other than practical.
‘There are humans among them.’ Dominic’s voice moved through my mind as we wound deeper into the settlement. ‘I can hear at least four heartbeats. Possibly more.’
I kept my eyes forward and my pace steady and filed that information somewhere I could think about it later, when we weren’t walking through a settlement full of Revenants who could apparently smell me from twenty feet away. Granted, the tension in my chest eased a little knowing that at least these particular Revenants weren’t running on empty and starving for human blood. Because that definitely would not have boded very well for me here.
Trace’s hand found the small of my back as we walked, and I instantly felt the bond humming between us. I didn’t look at him, but I didn’t pull away either, needing that brief contact to anchor me and remind me that we were still in this together. For better or worse.
Cael led us to the mead house at the center of the settlement, which he referred to simply as the Hold, pushing open its heavy door and holding it with two fingers, his posture loose and his expression unchanged, not even bothering to verify whether we’d followed him in.
Inside, the space was mostly bare but seemingly functional. The walls were the same obsidian as the exterior, but the interior surface had been worked smooth, the worst of its irregularities ground away until it reflected the firelight in long, dark ribbons across the floor. A long table ran down the center of the room, constructed from the same salvaged logic as everything else and flanked by benches hewn from what appeared to be red timber. At the far end, a low fire burned in a hollow that had been shaped into a hearth, the smoke threading upward through a narrow gap in the roof above it. The light it cast was the first warm light I had seen since arriving in this place, and despite everything, I felt my shoulders drop half an inch.
