Liam followed my lead and held up the upper half of the body. Though Orion still gazed at us, he seemed to have lost any ability to actually control the body.

“Any last words?” I smiled at him, feeling pretty damn good. Prophecies fulfilled, we’d killed Orion. I could rest easy; the foal was alive, Eve would be fine.

Life was looking up. Please, gods, let it be.

“This isn’t over.” The words were slurred, hard to hear, and strangely didn’t surprise me. Not from a demon.

“Pitiful last words,” Liam said as he threw what was left of Daniels and Orion into the pit. I blinked as the body slid below, eaten by the lava in seconds.

From the pocket inside my jacket, I pulled out the small brown bag Milly had given me. I opened it and poured the spiked demon stone into my hand.

“Lava should do the trick, don’t you think?” I held it up, the spikes pressing into the flesh of my palm. I rolled it to get a better look at it, wondered if I would ever know if Milly really had been enthralled.

Liam bumped my hand and the demon stone fell, landing with a hiss and a gulp as thick lava swallowed it up.

We stared down, the heat curling up around us, drying the sticky mud on our clothes. Thirty seconds passed and Liam stepped back, but I continued to stare, my throat tightening up.

“Does that seem higher than before?” I pointed at the lava as it freaking well surged upward. We fell back, the blast of heat singeing my eyelashes and eyebrows.

“Okay, time to go.” I ran for Calliope. There was no way to set her leg; she’d have to be carried. “Liam!”

“I’ll do it.” The voice was not Liam’s. I looked up at the lip of the overhang, a grey-skinned ogre staring down at us. “You don’t really have a choice, Tracker. You’re going to have to trust me.”

From behind him came a voice I did recognize. Dox.

“Rylee, just let him help!”

Liam scooped up the foal. “I’ll carry her as far as I can.” She rested her chin on his shoulder, trust shining through the threads I still held onto. Keeping pace with Liam, we ran for the stairs, bolting up them as the lava spilled over the lip of the pit, eating up the ground where we’d stood only moments before.

The grey ogre didn’t ask, just took Calliope from Liam’s arms, and she didn’t fight either of them. Fatigue washed through her and I finally let her threads go. I didn’t need to feel that; I was tired enough as it was without her adding to it.

The grey-skinned ogre spoke to Liam. “We have to move fast, and you may have to carry the Tracker.”

Across from us stood ogres in every color possible. Like a bag of skittles, see the f**king rainbow that would like to taste you after roasting you on a spit. This couldn’t be good, yet they weren’t trying to kill us.

“The Roc—” I started to ask, and Grey boy cut me off.

“Time for answers later. We have to move our asses if we’re going to all get out of here alive.”

Dox ran to my side, the distinct imprints of teeth all over his neck and shoulders. At least he’d had some fun. “Rylee, you… .”

I shoved him to get him going. “We couldn’t wait.”

We took off, running blind down the mountain in the dark, night having fallen fully as we’d fought Orion. The ground around us shook, and a blasting spurt of lava erupted out the side of the mountain, three hundred feet to the left of us.

The ogres covered the ground in leaps in bounds, literally jumping and letting gravity taking them further down the mountain with each stride, snow flying up around their feet as they landed. An explosion behind us spurred me on. Out of the frying pan we were, and into the big-ass fire.

A crackling sizzle reached my ears, but I didn’t turn around.

“It’s hot on our heels, get your fat, monkey sucking asses moving!” Dev shouted, and the ogres seemed to find a new gear. Liam didn’t scoop me up, but Tin did, snagging me around the waist and throwing me on his back. I clutched around his neck with my arms, and stood on the thick edge of his belt.

Then I looked behind us, sucking in a sharp, horrified breath. The entire top of the mountain was crumbling inward as the lava burst up and out. Brilliant red and orange geysers of liquid death shot into the starless sky followed by massive billows of black smoke illuminated by the lava that spilled down the mountain toward us. With each passing second the lava drew closer, eating up everything in its path.

“We aren’t going to make it,” I yelled, hoping that their mages had some way to help us.

Two of them turned around long enough to toss a spell, that to my eyes, did nothing.

“They pushed the gases in the other direction,” Tin said. My understanding of volcanoes wasn’t at its peak, but I did recall something about a flow of gas and rock that outpaced even the lava. I looked back, and all I saw was the red flow of death. I suppose that was better than the alternative of choking to death on fumes and then being consumed by the lava.

Grey boy glanced over his shoulder. “Head for the lake.”

As one, the ogres turned, angling toward the lake that surrounded the base of the mountain. Though it had taken us hours to climb Mt. Hood, riding ogre-back on the downhill took mere minutes. We were out of the snow now, but the ground was sloppy and wet, thick with ash, and a red ogre to the right of us lost his footing, tumbled and fell.

The lava caught him, swallowed him in one gulping wave, leaving behind his hand reaching up for a second, the fingers blackening before the lava even touched them.

I swallowed hard, heart pounding, my adrenaline racing and there wasn’t a damn thing I, or anyone else, could do.

The sharp incline leveled out and the gang of ogres thundered into the forest. Like a living thing, the lava flowed ever onward, devouring everything in its path. This was what Orion did, with a few words? With a gesture and a single spell when his host’s body had a broken neck? Son of a f**king bitch, he was as bad as all the prophesies made him out to be.

Maybe worse.

Thank the gods he was done.

Tin leapt over a downed log, and my feet slid off his belt, leaving me dangling from his back. All thoughts of Orion fled as I fought to hang onto the bounding ogre, the vision of what had happened to the red ogre who’d gone down seared in my mind. That would be a seriously bad way to end this salvage.

“Tracker, if you fall, I can’t stop,” Tin puffed out.

“Got it,” I barked out. Shit, I was sliding; there was nothing I could hang onto, his slick bare skin giving me no traction whatsoever.

There was nothing for it. I either fell from his back in a heap, or I leapt and had a chance at keeping my feet under me. As I slid down his back, I pushed to the side and hit the ground running.

In seconds, the lava was at my heels, kissing the backs of my boots, heat rolling up and around me, stealing the air I needed. Liam dropped back to my side, grabbed my hand and jerked me forward as a gulp of lava rolled ahead of the rest of it.

We burst through the bush into the parking lot where Dox’s truck sat waiting for us. But the trail ran parallel to the edge of the flow of the lava; the truck was going to be toasted. The lake it was.

With the searing heat behind us, the multi-hued Gang of ogres dove into the lake, swimming out into the open water. I caught sight of Calliope being floated between Dox and the grey boy.

And then I dove in, the icy water sluicing over my head. I floated for a minute under the water, looking back the way we’d come. The lava hit the shoreline, flowing into the lake, lighting it up from inside.

A pair of red swirling eyes hardened in the lava, as the water cooled the deadly flow.

“We are not done yet, Tracker. I will have your soul yet. Yours, and the souls of all you love.”

I kicked myself to the surface, anger searing my synapsis. “And that’s your mistake, Orion. You can threaten me, but threaten those I love and you will regret it beyond the grave.”

Chapter 13

THE OGRES WERE in high spirits, having no problem with the winter-chilled, glacier-fed lake. I, on the other hand, was freezing. My eyes drooped with each breath I took, fatigue dragging me down.

While the ogres splashed and played, exultant from having outrun the lava, I swam to Dox, each movement of my arms and legs causing shivers of cold-induced pain to ripple through me. Liam kept pace with me, seemingly as unaffected as the ogres by the cold. Before I could speak, Dox slung an arm around my waist and gave me a hard squeeze.

“Thank you, Rylee.”

I looked up at him. Even through my wet clothes and the water, I could feel his body heat, which I was intensely grateful for. “Thanks for what?”

“I would never have come back without you needing to be here for a salvage, and I would have missed out on this. On the fight, and seeing the triplets again. On Sas. For the first time, I finally belong, I’m finally home. I don’t know if you can understand what that means to me.” He grinned down at me, a new light in his eyes. I understood what it was to want to belong, to finally find that place. I glanced at Liam over my shoulder. Yeah, I really did understand. I gave Dox a nod.

“I’m happy for you. And glad you came too. Our asses would have been fried up there without your help.”

Teeth chattering as a wash of cold water thick with ash swirled between us, I pointed at the shoreline. “But we have to get me and Calli out of this lake, or it won’t matter that we dodged the hot sauce.”

He nodded, gave a holler, and the triplets swam over to us, helped to get us across to the far side. Ash floated down around us, coating the lake’s surface. It stuck to my face and neck, and as we stepped out of the water it clung to every piece of us.

As much as I wanted to complain, I didn’t. We’d survived something that should have taken us out. Would have died without the help we’d received. Which still made no sense, but I wasn’t going to remind them that they were on the hunt for us.

The triplets got a fire going within minutes and I crouched beside it, peeling out of my jacket. Calliope lay beside me, her legs tucked under her and as close to the fire as she could get. The firelight flickered and danced against her white coat. I ran a hand over her back, and she turned to look at me, gold nubbin catching the light.