almost everyone. Charity, having shut off her brain to try to ignore the throbbing in her shaking legs, bumped into the back of a yeti built of what felt like bricks.
“Sorry,” she murmured, backing up.
A small outcropping flanked by brambles ended in a bench broken down the middle, each end sticking into the air. Scraggly bushes and spindly flowers—or weeds?—pushed in around it, the least inviting resting spot Charity had ever seen, and that was saying something, given where she’d grown up.
“This isn’t going to fit all of us,” Penny whispered.
Emery walked into the gardener’s nightmare anyway, looking deeper into the brambles and kicking at the skeleton flora around the bench. Apparently satisfied, he went right—and disappeared.
“But…I don’t sense magic.” Penny rushed forward. Charity moved to follow, but Cole lumbered into her way and Steve pushed in behind, blocking her.
She gritted her teeth. What she wouldn’t give for full health.
Penny got to the bench and turned, looking the way Emery went. A big smile lit up her face. “It’s an illusion.”
Emery reappeared. “No, it’s just a little path you can’t see from the main road.”
“This is a road?” Rod looked ahead before glancing behind.
“Thieves’ highway, road, whatever.” Emery gestured them closer.
“How many people know about this little outcropping?” Devon asked. As Charity expected, he didn’t look tired at all. In fact, to the undiscerning eye, he might be gearing up for a marathon. What a faker.
“Enough to ensure I put up a good ward.” Emery motioned everyone in again. “It’s safe enough for us to rest. We need it.”
Devon scanned his people. “Choose whatever form you want. Let’s get settled and get some shut-eye.”
When Charity neared him, he took her hand and peered into her eyes.
“How are you?” she asked to get the jump on the conversation.
A grin ghosted his lips. “Right as rain. Ready to do acrobatics. You?”
“Wondering how fast I can get to sleep.”
He nodded and stood by as his people followed Emery and Penny beyond the bench, disappearing one by one. “I caught a whiff of vampire in that wood,” he said quietly. As soon as he and Charity were alone together, he turned away from the bench, peering through the trees to the wild land beyond. “Yasmine didn’t smell it, though. Neither did Rod. But since Penny…” He slid his hand across the top of her butt and hooked it low on her hip. “My senses are boosted, somehow. The scent was faint—I couldn’t tell the level—but I’d swear it was vampire.”
“Is that unusual?” She leaned against his solid chest.
“I don’t know. I’ll ask Emery about it. It could be nothing. Vampires haunt the dark places like any other creature in the Realm. But here, within the elves’ jurisdiction, they usually mind their manners.”
“So it seems, because it—or they—didn’t attack.”
“So it seems,” he repeated, that grin ghosting his lips again. “I am so fucking tired, I can barely think straight.”
She burst out laughing, not expecting that admission, and especially not with the grin making his eyes twinkle.
“Me too,” she said, turning into him and trailing her fingers down his sides, flitting across his skin. “At one point, I had to stop myself from asking Steve if I could get a lift.”
He cupped her butt and pulled her closer. “I’d be good with finding a secluded corner, lying on my back, and letting you go to town.”
She closed her eyes as his lips trailed down her neck. “I’d be good with finding a secluded corner, lying on my back, spreading my legs, and letting you go to town.”
He growled against her neck, sucking on her skin. “I think I have just enough left in the tank to make that happen.”
“No big deal, boss, but I don’t think it’s the best place for that,” Steve said, just out of sight.
Charity felt Devon’s release of breath. “We can’t get to the Flush fast enough,” he murmured.
“Is this the part where you’re thinking about yourself and not me?” She pushed away from him with a smile, taking his hand.
His eyes were on fire as he stared at her, refusing to budge and head to the campsite. “Yes. I need to pound my love into you.”
“Pound it in? And here I didn’t think you were a hopeless romantic.”
“Pound it, bang it, fuck it—whatever you want to call it, it’s going to be hard and fast, and you will love every minute of it.”
Charity laughed delightedly, and thankfully, she was too low on energy for her magic to surge and ruin the