Jace
The fire burned down to coals and I let it. Too much light was a liability, and my eyes were better in the dark than anything that might be following us.
I sat with my back against a birch trunk and listened to the forest and tried to think about the trail.
I thought about the trail for approximately four minutes.
The problem was the wind direction, which was coming off the creek and carrying her scent directly to me with a persistence that I was beginning to find unreasonable. The masking potion was gone entirely now, washed away in the creek along with two days of road dust, and what was left underneath was — a problem. A significant and ongoing problem that I had been managing with diminishing success since she had grabbed my neck and fallen into my chest and made that small so
