Mist, thick and cold, hung heavy over the tips of great pine trees. It stirred up in Ira memories that he hadn’t realized he was still holding onto. Father Pine had told him once that fog were just clouds who had drifted away from the heavens. Ira had thought it infuriating at the time. How could they leave so easily when all of the Progeny had dedicated their existence to joining them?

Now, he looked at the boy sitting in the cab beside him and knew how it felt to question. Was there something worth seeking? Even if it took you far from home, with no way to return?

Birds sang in the branches of the arching fir trees. Warming up as the sun began to slowly creep over the side of Slide Mountain. The driver had insisted on dropping them off at the Catskills Visitor Center, but Ira had slid him a bit more money and bragged of his extensive hiking experience--which did not exist--and managed to see them lifted all the way to the parking lot at the trailhead of the Slide Mountain Wilderness.

The car door shut with a bang. It rattled Ira as thoroughly as gunfire, but he swallowed his fears and inhaled a deep breath of the cool morning air.

Melchior adjusted the duffle bag slung over his shoulder and leaned into the open window of the vehicle. “Thanks,” he said to the driver. The man leaned over his steering wheel, a frown etched into the grooves over his eyebrows.

“You kids gonna be alright out here?” He asked.

“Angels,” Ira breathed. “I sure hope so.”

“Yes, sir.” Melchior quickly chimed in. “We’ll be fine, thank you.”

The man cast Ira a wary look. He sighed and slumped back in his seat. “Good luck, kids.” His wheels spun in the gravel, and then he was gone. Back down towards the city. Leaving Melchior and Ira alone in the mountains.

“Catskill.” Ira punctuated. He set his hands on his hips and craned his neck back to look at the forest ahead. The Catskill Preserve was endless, and they only had three months. He pulled the map from his pocket and trained his eyes on the X scarring the heart of the national park. Would they find answers here, or only more questions?

Melchior cleared his throat. “Shall we begin?” He asked nervously.

Ira nodded. He set the duffle bag down on the pavement and yanked open the zipper. Ira quickly glanced around, but they were alone. In fact, the normally busy trail seemed completely abandoned. The space between the fir trees seemed cast in unnaturally thick fog. A blackness that Ira couldn’t peak into.

It twisted up his stomach with nerves.

“Hey,” Melchior interrupted. “Don’t disappear on me. I need you here.”

Ira blinked. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He almost said so, but maybe it wasn’t completely true. Something was pulling him away, something deep in the thicket of pine.

“Do you. . .” Ira trailed off into silence.

Do you feel that? Feel what? They were alone. There was nothing watching him--no matter how it felt. The tension in his chest was expanding like his lungs.

Melchior trained his bright eyes into the forest. He held perfectly still. He held so perfectly that Ira could see the leap of his pulse in his throat. “I don’t see anything.” He said. Ira flinched. He hadn’t asked him that. He hadn’t said anything at all. Melchior’s veins filled with his lies, beating quicker beneath his skin. “C’mon, grab a weapon.”

Why was he lying? And more importantly, what did he see?

“Okay,” Ira whispered slowly. He moved towards the bag and kneeled next to Melchior in the parking lot. The bag had been filled with granola bars, water bottles, and an assortment of Ossein tools. Ira’s knife had been hidden inside to keep it from the eyes of the concerned driver, along with Melchior’s disassembled bow and full quiver. There was a pair of bone pliers, which they had no use for currently.

There was another small throwing knife in the bag, one Ira didn’t recognize. It was pine, polished black. Melchior’s choice wood. The blade was uncut and unpolished. A single sharp tooth melded into the handle. Melchior snatched the knife and hooked it to his belt.

“We should hurry.” He said.

He pulled the thin strap of pine wood from the bag and bent it beneath his boot. The wood was flexible and did as he commanded. Melchior strung the bow and pulled it taught. Ira watched him work with something he could excuse as curiosity. His thin black Deacon attire clung to his skin so that Ira could imagine he wasn’t wearing it at all--he blushed crimson pink and shook his head. How could his mind bring him to such places when they had much more pressing concerns.

He was punched with shame. He didn’t know this boy, he didn’t quite trust this boy either--and yet he felt so instantly twisted up by him. From the moment they’d met; Ira believed him to be beautiful on the surface, and kind beneath that. If it was true, it was rare, and Ira wanted to collect him like a treasured gem--and he was disgusted by the idea.

Ira Rule was the soul of the Progeny. He was, for more lifetimes than he could bear to reflect upon, someone owned by the Third Prince of Hell. In every way. His stomach rolled until he thought he might be sick with it. Ira flexed his fingers over the leather padding of his Ossein knife.

“Disgusting.” He whispered beneath his breath. It had welled up inside of him until he couldn’t control it. It coiled and hissed inside his gut. He felt disgusted with himself.

Melchior flinched. He fixed Ira with keen green eyes and tilted his head in a manner that seemed almost dog-like. “What’s wrong?” He asked.

Ira’s tongue was dry in his mouth. He shrugged and kicked the gravel road with the toe of his brown hiking boots. His polished Oxfords had been left to the safety of the apartment on the cathedral close. “Nothing. I’m just thinking.” He dismissed.

Melchior slung his quiver over the broad of his back and slung his bow over his left shoulder. Already at full capacity, he handed the nearly emptied gym bag to Ira, who graciously accepted. He tossed it over his back, feeling with slight discomfort as the water bottles rolled to the bottom. “Care to explain? We’ve got a lot of walking to do, it might help to pass the time.” Melchior said. As if to enunciate his position, he took the first step towards the mouth of the Catskill Preserve.

“I’m supposed to spill all my secrets?” Ira laughed without humor. He could have said a great many things. He certainly didn’t lack questions.

Why did you lie to me? What is out here with us? Why is it your destiny to die? What else are you hiding? But, when not engulfed by the hot spike of anger that he was quick to, Ira was a coward who preferred to follow the path of less resistance, just as Father Pine had raised him.

So he said. “Without my secrets, I’d have nothing left.”

Maybe a braver soul would have refused to follow him into the dark, but Ira was weak enough to want to trust in something--in someone. He tossed his caution to the wind and followed Melchior into the dark canopy of green.

The world fell beneath a blanket of silence. As if, here under the fir trees, nothing else existed but them. If Ira squeezed his eyes shut tight, he might have been able to focus enough to hear Melchior’s heartbeat on the breeze.

“I feel that way, too, sometimes.” Melchior shrugged beneath the weight of his gear. “It helped when I spoke to my brother and my mentor. I never had to hide who I was--or what I felt.”

Ira smiled sadly. “Yeah, I told Father Pine everything.” Well, nearly everything. Not all of his nightmares had been worth sharing, or they were too painful to bring into words--but somehow Ira knew that even if he had, Father Pine would have always treated him the same.

“It’s almost funny.” Melchior laughed. The early morning sunlight dappled across their path, casting Melchior in golden sparks. His eyes reflected the light, shining like high beams in the forest. “We’re probably the most talked about pair in the whole Sect, but I don’t think anyone would ever even consider giving the time to get to know us.”

Ira tipped his head. No one should know about their Pilgrimage, the Cardinal did not consider himself the captain of a loose ship. So, besides Ira’s obvious affliction, he could not think of anything that the Progeny could conjure to say about them--if they did not publically exist side-by-side. “We are?”

Melchior fit him with a strange look.

“The reincarnated soul, and the cursed boy. It sounds like the set-up to a bad knock-knock joke.” Ira’s heart flipped in his chest, Melchior paused in his step. His head twitched as if he was focusing on a sound far away. Ira’s pulse thrummed faster in anticipation. “What’s wrong? I’m sorry I upset you. I say stupid things--just ignore me.”

Ira’s tongue thickened in his mouth. He wished to walk on, to step over this and pretend it had never occurred--but his fear was keeping him locked in place.

“And?” He whispered. “And the cursed boy?”

Melchior turned to face him on the narrow wooden trail. He craned his neck to the side and fit Ira with a pair of too-bright green eyes. “Yeah,” he said, “And,”

He did not speak again. Ira was forced to move, to catch him before he lost sight of him. He didn’t want to be left behind. He knew that there were worse things in the woods than Melchior Brisbane.

𓆙

“Drink,” it was such a simple command, but it lingered in the air with tension. The word shattered the silence they’d fostered and shook Ira out of a daze that he couldn’t recall slipping into. They hadn’t spoken since entering the Catskill. Until now.

They’d stopped for a break at the peak of Slide Mountain. They’d gone because a giant black X had demanded it--but Ira could admit that he’d wanted to climb just to see the view. And he’d found it to be well worth it.

The sun had joined the sky, glistening over the sea of pine with a warm golden glow. Ira could feel it kissing along the surface of his skin, turning him into honey. He was weakened by the beauty of it. It softened the edges of his anger just enough to allow room for his discomfort to make itself known.

His tongue was swollen in his mouth, and his throat was dry. He glared down at the hand extended to him but reluctantly accepted the water bottle offered by the other boy. Ira snatched it quicker than he had meant to, and Melchior perked one curious eyebrow.

“What?” Ira growled.

He cracked the cap and tilted his head back. The water had at some point been cold, but it’d been heated by the walk through the woods, just as they had been. Ira set the bottle between his knees and rolled up the thin black material of his shirt sleeves. Black was Deacon attire, but it wasn’t hiking attire. Ira would wear a T-shirt tomorrow.

“Oh, nothing,” Melchior shrugged. He brushed off the leg of his pants and perched himself on the side of a fallen log. “I’m just wondering what I did to upset you in the time that we never spoke.”

“That’s the problem.” Ira grumbled.

“You want me to talk?” Melchior seemed surprised.

“I want to know what’s going on.” Ira corrected. Although, a part of him had warmed to Melchior’s chattering in the short time they’d known each other. He watched Melchior closely, but he seemed unphased.

“You think I know more than you?” He finally said.

Ira huffed angrily. “Well, you seem to know me, but I don’t know anything about you. I wasn’t raised in the Sect. If you think I’m tuned into the gossip, you’re wrong.” An outsider. Someone who trust could not be placed in. A tool for a task that could not be achieved. That was Ira Rule. The soul of the Progeny.

Melchior turned his hazel green eyes into the task of opening his own water bottle. His fingers thrummed along the side of the cheap and thin plastic. “I thought you knew who I was and for what we were tossed together for. People are always whispering about me, about my role.” Melchior said

quietly. “Or the idea of me, that the Sect has. It’s consumed my family name for six years.”

“The Sect has ideas about everyone. It doesn’t make it true.” Ira prodded gently.

“They’re not true.” Melchior agreed. “The truth is something worse.”

Ira recalled the words that Melchior had left him with before their miserable silent trek through the nature preserve. “It’s about a curse, isn’t it?” The idea of a curse seemed ridiculous to Ira, or it might have if his own soul hadn’t been trapped in a loop spanning centuries of conflict. He knew it was possible, something handed down by slighted angels, but he couldn’t imagine how Melchior managed to anger them. Ira couldn’t imagine that Melchior would ever anger anyone--besides himself, who could lose his temper at anything.

Ira’s pulse quickened beneath his thin skin. What if there was another way to get a curse, and Melchior had found it?

Melchior raised his head. Ira was suddenly frozen beneath his observant gaze. “It is.” They were such little words, but they inflated to the size of the moon. Hanging over the forest, changing the direction of the tides, and crushing Ira beneath their gravity. “And I should tell you, except that I just don’t want to.”

Ira blinked. He laughed stiffly, but Melchior did not, and the sinking fog coating the forest settled into his chest. He wasn’t joking. “What?” Ira sputtered.

“I don’t want the way you look at me to change.” Melchior said shamelessly.

Ira’s cheeks grew hot. He looked away, worried that they might be blossoming into pink sigils of humiliation. “And how do I look at you, Melchior?”

“Like I deserve to live.” He said, and Ira couldn’t imagine how it would ever change. He could have said so, but Melchior looked shaken. More shaken than Ira could soothe away. Maybe he could not fully comprehend the weight of his words, so he did not give them freely. “No one has ever had an opinion of me fully divorced from the things they know about me. Until you.”

Ira stared down at his hands in his lap. The silence became heavy between them. He knew how it stung, to be human and whole, and completely trapped beneath a mantle you could not shed. He wanted to say so. His tongue was unmoving behind the cage of his teeth. He knew how Melchior flinched at any comparison between them. Except now for the first time, the glaze had cleared. Ira could see it for what it was. Shame. Fear. Melchior hadn’t been demeaning him, but lowering himself. And somehow, that twisted Ira up worse.

Ira turned his blue eyes to watching, with great manufactured interest, as condensation collected on the side of the water bottle. “You won’t tell me?”

“If you ask me now, I’ll tell you everything. I will tell you the entire truth, more than anyone knows about me.” Melchior’s words tumbled into the space between them, filling a distance that Ira hadn’t known how the bridge. He stared over the grass patch between them and wondered what would happen if he crossed, if maybe the words would shatter beneath his boot and Ira would tumble into the abyss. “Or,” he said in a whisper. “You can toss aside better judgment and just trust me.”

“Trust you?” Ira repeated. He’d asked for the same his whole life. All he’d ever fought for was recognition as Ira Rule. A new man, trying desperately to pay for old mistakes. He rolled his tongue over the taste of the suggestion.

“Are you lying to me?” It was a stupid thing to ask because a liar would just lie again, but Ira felt deep in the space behind his ribs that Melchior wouldn’t. He knew that if he asked, he would tell him. All of it. All the secrets he protected behind his laid-back disposition. The tattoo he kept sealed behind cotton, even beneath the blistering hot summer sun. The reason they’d been pit against each other, doomed to chase a goose to the cusp of destruction. The curse, the sins, the shame. And all the whispers he’d picked up from a childhood in the midst of the Sect. Everything.

“I won’t lie.” Melchior said, his voice was steady. And his statement held like a promise. He did not say that he had never lied. It soothed Ira in a way completely separated from rationality. Because it meant it could be true.

“But you will hide things from me?” Ira could have laughed, except that he did not find this humorous. He wanted to say so much. All of it built up in his throat, choking him as heavy as fog. Melchior had lied. He’d hidden things. There had been something behind the trees, Ira had felt it there. A sight trained on his back, leaving heat from the little red laser.

“I won’t stop having your back. I will protect you. As your partner. If you’d have me--as an equal.” Melchior did not waiver as he looked at Ira. His voice beat as strongly as the pulse of the earth. Ira knew he meant it. They could be the same. Selfishly, Ira recognized that he could have something for himself. “I’ll look at you as you look at me.”

“And how is that now? As someone flailing through the forest, desperately vying for more time?” Ira scowled.

“As someone that was never given the chance to prove that they deserve to be something other than what they were born into.” Melchior corrected not unkindly.

Ira rolled the cap of his water bottle between his fingers. The ridged edge was sharp against his skin, and it helped drown out the noise buzzing in the back of his skull. When he finally met his gaze, he found that it had never left. “I’ve lived a great many lives. Trusting someone, it always leads to trouble.”

“Oh, I promise, there will be trouble.” Melchior smiled.

His lips flickered quickly back down into something carefully neutral, like a mask he’d crafted just for dealing with Ira’s quick and unpredictable temper. Yet, now, when he needed it most, Ira couldn’t find his anger. He reached in the spot behind his ribs and found something he hadn’t expected.

“Okay.” He sighed. He bowed his head, resting his face against his palms so that he could not see Melchior’s keen green eyes as he spoke. He thought he might stumble if Melchior kept him pinned beneath his gaze. “I want to.” He choked. “I will trust you.”

Melchior smiled, unshackled by neutrality. He ran his fingers through his dark curls. His shoulders slumped with fully recognized tension. Ira wrinkled up his nose to contain his own emotions. He was amused. Melchior seemed akin to a child, who’d just performed in front of his parents to convince them to let him host a sleepover. The persona of someone who knew what they were doing was quickly vanishing beneath the true relief.

“Thank you.” He whispered. He cleared his throat and tapped his thighs. “Well, shall we head out?” Melchior stood, extending a hand to Ira. He took it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet. Ira did not stumble. And yet, he had the sensation that he was falling head first into an abyss. He gripped Melchior’s hand tighter.

“I’m ready.” He promised. The words slid over his tongue as smoothly as ice. He’d sworn much more to this boy, and he would give more if he was asked. Following Melchior now was the easiest thing he’d been asked to do since climbing from their Uber at the Catskill trailhead parking lot.

Ira bent to grab their duffle. Awkwardly, with one hand fully entangled in Melchior’s warm grip, he slung the bag over his other shoulder.

“Then, let’s find the rip between worlds. How hard could it be?” Melchior turned on his heels and began to march them through the thick wall of fir trees. He didn’t let go of Ira’s hand. Ira knew he’d turned pink. Childlike embarrassment coursed through him, and he struggled against the urge to stare down at his shoes against the soft mulch.

Instead, Ira trained his eyes on the curve of Melchior’s neck. In the skin there, bleeding down from his cheeks, he was changing colors, too. Ira couldn’t help it. He laughed.

They didn’t speak much, but the air had changed. It had lightened. Ira no longer struggled for air beneath the heavy atmosphere of their hostility. It was peaceful, until very suddenly it wasn’t.

Melchior paused, and because he was still holding onto Ira, he froze, too. “What?” Ira pressed, with his voice and with his body. He leaned into the broad length of Melchior’s back, pressing until they fit together as snuggly as building blocks. Ira rested his chin on Melchior’s shoulder, working with difficulty to see past the boy.

Melchior was holding very still, but Ira couldn’t imagine why. The clearing laid before them seemed completely normal. The boys stood on a heavily planted slope, beneath them, and the thick brush was a shallow ring cut from the thickest pine trees. Sunlight fell freely here to cast the green grass in a golden glow. It was beautiful, and Ira was almost bitter that they’d taken their break perched on fallen and rotting logs on the trail a few yard behind.

“Wait, what is that?” Ira asked. His arm slackened at his side, and with a heavy thud, the duffle landed on the crisp grass beneath their boots.

He slipped free from Melchior’s loose hold, embarking bravely into the small meadow. In the center of the pitch, the dirt had been churned. Clumps of grass laid upside down, roots exposed to the warm sky. Ira kneeled in the dirt, running his flat palms over the lawn that remained untouched. It was stained a deep purple. “Is this-” what he had meant to say hardened in his throat, drying from clay to brick. He couldn’t speak.

Melchior joined him at his side. “Yeah.” He agreed. His words had held Ira in much stillness that day, but the ones he spoke now truly crystallized Ira to his very core. “It’s blood. And there’s more. The air is choked with it.” He raised his arm, pointing beyond the trees. “Whatever it is. It’s coming from over there.”

Ira stood. The blood had dried long ago, but Ira still wiped his hands along the fabric of his pants.

“Alright.” He said, aiming with great difficulty to keep his voice casual. “Then let’s go.”

“Towards the blood?” Melchior asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yep.” Ira popped. “Towards the blood.” He gathered his fear and held it tight. It expanded, creeping up the back of his throat. To soothe away the ache of it, Ira flicked his fingers to his pocket. His fingertips moved over the fabric concealing his Ossein blade.

Melchior cursed, he swung his bow off his shoulder, letting it rest in correct form in his hands. “Never a dull moment with you.”

“Ah, you like it.” Ira shrugged. He trudged over the churned earth, stepping carefully between the dried pools of blood. Ira’s heart thrummed in his throat, his fingers flexed, burning with live-wire electricity. His fists clenched. And released. He slipped a hand into his pocket and withdrew the blade, holding it steadily over his heart.

The white bone shimmered as brilliantly as opal when it caught the light streaming in between soft pine needles. Where the sunshine wasn’t absorbed in his weapon, it fell in a thick coating across the forest floor, casting it in a golden dapple.

The beauty laid clear before them couldn’t mask the odor hanging heavy in the air. Melchior twisted up his face in disgust. Ira snorted in agreement. The stench of rot was growing firmer as they wandered deeper into the woods. Ira’s stomach twisted in protest. He held his shirt sleeve to his nose and kept moving.

“I have a bad feeling about this.” Melchior mumbled unhelpfully.

“Yeah, I do too-”squelch. Ira froze, trying to keep his full weight from continuing in its path, but he was helpless as his boot sunk deeper into the soft mess he’d stepped into. It was slippery and squishy beneath his foot. He tilted his head towards the sky and prayed to his angels that it had just been mud.

“Uh, you might want to take a step back.” Melchior prompted.

Ira sunk his teeth into his bottom lip to contain his whimper. “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

He amended his prayer to his angels, that he would even accept stepping into a pile of wild animal exhaust. Anything other than what now held his shoe in a gel-like trap. Melchior joined him at his side, placing firm palms against his shoulders. He gently pulled, untangling Ira with a sickening wet slurping sound.

Ira pressed his knuckles into his teeth and faced the gore sliding down the side of his boot. Slick red blood and small chunks of gray flesh clung to his brown leather. Ira’s stomach flipped, his throat filled with sick. “Angels, what is that?” He choked around his bile.

“It’s a carcass,” Melchior answered slowly. He lowered himself into a carefully balanced perch. With the end of his bow, he cautiously pushed the slightly squished lump of flesh. Ira saw that he’d stepped on a smaller piece of a larger whole. A slab of rotting meat the size of a pillow extended out from the larger corpse.Beneath Melchior’s investigating, the chunk rolled, turning from gray to pink as the inside was exposed.

“Of what?” Ira asked. The smooth ash skin was featureless. There remained no limbs or head to aid in identifying the mess left behind.

“I don’t know.” Melchior admitted, he turned green eyes to Ira’s equally green face and cracked a small smirk. “Roadkill?”

Ira rolled his eyes. “I think it would have to be on an actual road to qualify.”

“Or an animal.” Melchior added. His tone lingered, implying that what laid before them was not of this world.

Ira quirked an eyebrow. “Not necessarily.”

Melchior laughed, a dry bark from the back of his throat. “That’s dark.”

Ira dropped down onto his knees to sit next to Melchior, offering a simple shrug. “So is this,” he pointed, “so, what do you think?”

Melchior blinked in surprise, blowing a hot breath from his nose. Ira flushed as it ran over the skin of his cheeks. He cleared his throat and turned his face away. They’d been pressed together between the foliage, and Ira had sat much closer than he’d meant to.

“Well, uh,” Melchior stuttered. He averted his eyes back to the chunk laying in the grass, oozing fluids and reeking of sour rot. It served as an adequate distraction. “Is it a seal?” The skin beneath the pink tissue was sleek and rough, a muted gray in color. It was hairless, with enlarged pores filled with yellow pus.

“Seals have fur,” Ira said. “Besides, seal season is over, and they’d have trouble coming this far inland.” He could have continued, endlessly chattering to drown out the horrible sinking feeling crushing his insides. Yet it would have been pointless because the suggestion was never serious. As most things uttered by Melchior tended to not be.

This massive scrap of flesh, a mound half the size of a subaru, was merely a small chunk removed from a larger creature. If it had come from the sea, it could only be explained away as a whale. And there was no way one had gotten into the Catskill National Preserve.

Melchior looked at Ira quizzically. “Seals don’t have fur.”

“Yes, they do.” Ira laughed. “You think they’re just fleshy?”

“You know a lot about seals.” Melchior mumbled.

“I did a project on Swinburne Island in the second grade before Father Pine began homeschooling me.” Ira shrugged. “Because the teacher made us do a presentation on state parks--and I wanted a reason to write a paper about seals.”

Melchior laughed before sobering. “Well, lucky for you and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, I agree. I don’t think this is any animal we know of. It smells. . .off.”

“Great observation. It’s rotting meat in the middle of summer.” Ira scoffed.

Melchior sighed, pushing himself back on his heels. “Have you ever hunted Ze’ev?”

“Of course I have.” Ira said. He prickled in anticipation, half worried that Melchior was about to imply he’d hitched his fate to an unexperienced hunter and more worried that he would say something worse.

“Then you know the way the air feels when they’re around.” Melchior said. Ira scowled down at his bloodied boot. He’d never stopped to admire the sunset, not when his blade was warmed by fresh kill. Melchior nodded at Ira’s pause and changed his tone to one of explanation. “They change our world around them. It tastes like electricity, and it smells like. . . fear. No, that’s not it. It’s anger.”

“They smell like anger?” Ira echoed slowly. “You’re not making sense. Are you saying this is a Ze’ev?”

“No,” Melchior shook his head, “I’m saying it’s not. It’s nothing you or I have ever seen.”

Ira’s stomach rolled. His fingers tightened over his knife. “No, it’s just something you’ve never seen. I’ve. . .dreamed of things like this. It’s a monster.” He swallowed hard, forcing his thickening tongue to move behind the cage of his teeth. “It’s a Beast.”

Melchior blew a long sigh from his nose. He ran his fingers through his hair, Ira imagined, trying to keep his nervous energy from bursting out of his skin. “Then the Trammel really is ripped.” The words sunk between them, falling as rapidly as bricks through water. They hit the bottom with a thud, sending up a cloud of mud that Ira wanted to hide in. Maybe if he lived a simpler life as a trout, but he was still stuck in this one as the soul responsible.

It seemed that Melchior did not want to dwell on this earth-shattering revelation either.

He pulled a bone-tipped arrow from the quiver on his shoulder. He poked the flesh, prodding at it until he could peel the edges of it up off the forest floor. Ira winced, placing his palm back over his trembling lips. “What are you doing?” He asked. Melchior seemed to be accomplishing nothing but spilling more sour fluid into the atmosphere around them.

“It’s been picked clean. Do you see these pockets? I think someone pulled the bone right out.” Melchior pressed the tip of his arrow into the beginning of a fleshy tunnel, holding it open for Ira to see.

Ira was greener than the pine over their heads, or grass beneath their boots. “Super informative. Thanks for that.”

Melchior rolled his eyes, taking a play from Ira’s book. “It was them, don’t you think? The Sect.”

Ira creased his eyebrows together. “The Sect wouldn’t leave this behind. We harvest everything we can use in our tools and burn the rest with holy water. That’s the rule.”

“The rules have been changing.” Melchior noted instead. He stood, extending a hand for Ira to climb to his feet. He accepted it, too sick from the Beast to blush about it.

“Then why?” Ira questioned. “They must have had a reason. The Cardinal gave us this map. Do all these markings just lead to. . .disposal sites?” Ira’s heart stuttered in his chest. “What if the map means nothing.” It was the only hope Ira had, and it dissolved in his hands. Just cursed flesh beneath a stream of blessed water, boiling away into cold steam.

“It’s bait.” Melchior whispered.

Ira flinched, holding Melchior in the cage of his crystal blue gaze. “How do you know that?” He asked, and then thought better of it. He’d already come close to stepping on their arrangement. “I mean, does that really work? Are Beasts. . .drawn into each other?”

“Yeah,” Melchior grunted. He ran fingers through thick curls and shut his eyes to block out the carcass. He turned away from the rotting lump of flesh on the side of Slide Mountain. “That’s how it works. Monsters seek monsters.”

“Where are you going?” Ira asked. He followed him anyway, not wanting to be left behind with the lure.

“We have a ton of other spots on the map.” Melchior pointed.

Ira slumped his shoulders, tilting his head back to stare up at the warm blue sky. “What if they’re all just dumping sights?”

“We won’t know until we go.” Melchior shrugged.

Ira sighed. He shook from his mind the sight of gnarled gray skin and followed Melchior back down the mountain trail. He knew that he’d follow him to every black X on the paper, but he couldn’t stop the little voice, warning him in the back of his mind. They were running out of time, more with every dead end they followed. No, Melchior was running out of time. And it was all Ira’s fault. Or it was his fault. The only one with enough power to tear a hole in the Trammel. Behind it all, the Third Prince of Hell.

“Okay, I’ve really got it this time.” Melchior tore Ira from his spiraling thoughts.

“What?” Ira raised an eyebrow.

“Your new nickname.” Melchior teased.

“You aren’t supposed to tell me,” Ira laughed. “You’re just supposed to start using it.”

Melchior tilted his head to the side in thought. He nodded and shrugged his broad shoulders. “Alright, fine. Then, when we reach our next spot, I’ll say it.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.” Ira rolled his eyes, but he followed him just as he knew he would. They advanced to the next marking on the map, but Ira already knew they’d just made a choice. And they’d wasted their first month.

9 | Ira Faces The Great Outdoors

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