Page 111 of Incoronate
“Precisely.”
I pressed my knuckles to my mouth, swallowed the sound trying to climb out of my throat, and looked around. The cracked ground. The bleeding sky. Those distant shapes I could not stop seeing for what they were. The silence that wasn’t quite silence, I realized now, if you listened past your own fear. There was something underneath it. The faint, barely-there suggestion of movement. Of presence. Of something in this place that breathed.
Or had, once.
“But if they were able to port us here and then leave,” said Trace slowly, his eyes narrowing as he put it together in his mind, “then there’s a way out. Alford came through. Alford left. That means—”
“There’s a door,” confirmed Dominic. “We just don’t know where it is yet.”
He said it the way he said most things: with a certainty that didn’t invite argument, as though the door’s existence was simply a fact to be filed and acted on, and the not knowing where it was amounted to a minor logistical inconvenience rather than the most terrifying sentence I had ever heard spoken aloud.
I decided, right then, to borrow that certainty. To take it and hold it the way Trace had told me to hold his handand just breathe. Because the alternative was looking at those shapes on the horizon again, and I had looked at them enough.
It wasn’t much. It was barely anything. But I felt it anyway, some small, stubborn thing kindling in the center of my chest, pushing back against the weight of everything pressing down on it.
A way out existed.
We just had to find it.
36. HORIZON OF BLOOD
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 itsoutline. 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.
