The Sweetest Burn

“What’s with the dirt?” I asked.

He tucked the knife into his pants. “It’s hallowed.”

I hadn’t felt anything from it, but with my hallowed sensor being out of shape, that wasn’t surprising. Plus, it was only a bag. Not an entire plot of ground. “Grave dirt?” I guessed.

He shot me a quick grin. “Not just any. It’s dirt that’s tossed onto caskets as relatives say their final goodbyes. All that emotion plus being blessed soil turns it into a weapon, so to demons, it’s like little grains of dynamite.”

I gave the bag an admiring look. “Do we have any more?”

He tossed it at me. “Nope, so if you need to use it, make it count. Now, let’s find our way out of here so we don’t have to use any of it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE CHALLENGER HAD a flat tire, but Adrian didn’t use manna to fix it. Yes, manna worked on everything. Since we were low on our supply and didn’t know if we’d need more for future injuries, we just drove at a slow pace, the flat wheel causing us to thump-thump-thump our way across the desert playa.

Adrian kept one hand on the wheel and the other outside the window, feeling the air as if it could provide us with directions. For him, it could. I wanted to look for Jasmine and Costa first, but Adrian said that finding the exit took precedence because without it, we were all stuck here.

He was right, but I was still worried over whether they’d made it out or not. If they had, we only had ourselves to hustle out of here, and we’d made it out of demon realms under worse circumstances. If Adrian was right and this place was currently empty, we weren’t even in any real danger yet. Well, if you overlooked the fact that we were in a now frozen desert with no water, food or shelter aside from a windowless car, anyway.

Because I had nothing else to do at the moment, I kept texting Costa to see if he’d respond. It was possible he’d get them since Jasmine’s cell had briefly worked after she’d been pulled into a realm. It was how I learned that she was in trouble all those months ago, when her frantic texts of help and trapped had put me on a collision course with my fate.

After well over an hour of driving, Adrian turned, and a paved road was revealed in our headlights. We must now be clear of Racetrack Playa. We’d left the bus parked near the Grandstands off this road because no one was supposed to drive onto the Playa. Adrian had ignored that when he took me on our ride, but Costa had followed the rules. Minutes later, I held my breath as we drove by the Grandstand area. So far, no familiar tour bus, but headlights from other vehicles lit up the parking lot, and when I saw large shapes moving around, I was horrified.

“There are people here!”

Adrian kept driving after casting a single, grim look at the Grandstand area. “Tourists. They would’ve gotten dragged along like we did when this area was sucked into the realm.”

Horns began to sound behind us, and I thought I heard shouts. “We have to turn around,” I stated. “Those people have no idea what just happened. They must be terrified!”

“And you think telling them they’ve been pulled into a demon realm will help?” he asked sardonically. “Even if they did believe you, that would only make them more hysterical. Only finding the exit will help them, Ivy. If the gateway’s gravitational fields haven’t settled yet, it might even be weak enough that they’ll be able to cross through on their own without me needing to pull them through.”

What he said made total sense, yet I was still bothered by the way he said it. I looked behind us, not able to see the cars’ headlights anymore even though we hadn’t driven that far. That was how complete the darkness was. It swallowed everything—and everyone—within it permanently.

And Adrian sounded as if he didn’t care about the people we drove away from. Was that by practicality since there was nothing we could do? Or was it another indicator of the coldness that resided in him from spending the first hundred-plus years of his life as a demon prince? He cared about me, sure. And he cared about Costa, I believed. But when push came to shove, did anyone else matter to him? At all?

“You’re right,” I said at last, depressed by the thought. “It still feels wrong, though. They don’t know where they are, what’s going on, or what’s coming for them.”

That was the worst part, because I did know what was coming for them, if we couldn’t get them out. Then again, if we didn’t find the gateway, we’d be worse off than any of them. We’d been number one on the demon’s most-wanted list for months, and how ironic if they ended up nabbing us after something as random as a new land grab...

“Wait, why would demons want to absorb a desert?” I asked abruptly. “They use their realm absorbing for showing off, but there’s nothing out here except sand, more sand and rocks.”

Adrian gave me a thoughtful sideways glance. “They might not want the repercussions of swallowing a populated area. They’ve gotten away with that for millennia, but it’s the information age now. Thousands of people suddenly disappearing would make worldwide headlines and cause mass panic. Still...”

“Demons don’t much care about freaking people out?” I supplied. “In fact, it’d probably amuse them to see governments scrambling to come up with an explanation as to why entire cities became ghost towns in a blink. Plus, if demons get their way and the realm walls crumble, then everyone will be able to see those dark, icy realms spill out into our world, and then they’d know for sure that demons exist.”

Adrian began to slow the car. “Then, the only other reason they’d use their power to absorb a hunk of desert is if they thought there might be more here than just sand.”

“The staff,” I whispered, the pieces falling into place. “You said yourself that they’ve been looking for it so they can use it to tear down all the realm walls, but they can’t feel it. Only I can, so what if their new tactic is to absorb places with natural phenomena to force me to look for it on their territory, just like I had to do with the slingshot?”

He parked the car and got out, taking the manna with him. When he came back, the bag was empty but when we started driving, the thump-thump-thump from the flat tire was gone.

“Then they’ll be coming for this realm sooner than I expected,” he finally answered, his tone hardening. “In fact, they might already be here.”

* * *

OF ALL THE things I least expected to see in the middle of a desert, a castle had to top that list. Yet there it was, sprawling across a couple acres, with a watchtower that loomed majestically over one corner. The fact that I could see it at all meant the castle had battery-powered emergency lights, and they showed off white walls, Spanish-style tile roofs and multiple curved archways. With its size and opulence, it would be the first place that demons picked to set up their headquarters. Say what you will about evil fallen angels; they weren’t a pitchfork-and-brimstone crowd. Instead, they liked to live in style, and the fancier, the better.

Which begged the question, “Why are we here?” I asked.

Adrian killed his headlights, using the faint illumination from the castle to drive off-road. The sand was much softer here, with the peaks and valleys you’d expect from a normal desert. It was slow going, and I thought we’d get stuck a few times. It took almost twenty minutes to go a hundred yards, but Adrian finally parked the car beneath a Joshua tree jutting out from the hill. We’d be invisible here, unless you went trekking through the sand, which must be what we were about to do.

“The gateway’s here,” Adrian replied. “Makes sense. Whoever absorbed this realm would want it by the castle so they could keep pulling in tourists from the other side.”

Anger burned through me. That’s similar to what had happened with Jasmine. She and her boyfriend had stayed at a bed-and-breakfast that had a realm gateway in the innkeeper’s office; a place no guest would feel wary about entering, and one they’d rigged so that select guests wouldn’t be able to leave.

I chased the memory away as we got out of the car, closing our doors quietly. We’d seen other cars parked in front of the castle, but who knew if they all belonged to innocent tourists? One of them might be from the same demon that had dropped this realm onto this place. He or she had to be here somewhere. It took incredible power to make a realm, Adrian had told me, and that power couldn’t be harnessed from long distance.