I blame my nearly crippled body for taking so long to get me to the forge, and even longer to stop feeling like one large pulsating sore spot. There’s a settlement around the forge, old houses and rickety offices, all temporary and weather beaten by dust and sunlight that’s dyed their drywall bone white. All I’ve got left is my backpack and my body, and that’s just about good enough for my second day wandering the Barrens. Right now, I’m hunched over behind an old brick wall that’s toppled over, puking my guts out as my organs feel like they’re shifting around inside of me. Just how badly I hit the asphalt was a surprise to me, if it’s taken half the day for Andrea’s magic (if that’s what it really is) to heal me entirely, and tell you what, kids, healing isn’t like in the fairy tales or in those fancy picture shows that Angels put on in Salem Central Park—it hurts, it takes a while, and you feel exhausted.

  But hey, at least I’m still alive, and as I drag my forearm across my mouth and spit, it’s just about all I can ask for this time around. Every day I keep living is a message to all of the people who want me dead—you can keep trying, but I’ll just keep livin’. I’d just really appreciate it if everyone could just give me a moment to catch my breath first. I slowly straighten and stretch my back, using the wall to stretch my arms, then my legs, before I pick up my backpack again and shoulder it. I’m in the center of the settlement, but that’s about all I can tell you about it.

  Every building I walk past whispers in the dying orange sunlight, the sky a bruised purple above me that darkens shadows and leaves me feeling on edge. Wind whistles through empty hallways and gushes out of empty windows, buffeting hole-filled curtains and rattling loose frames. The occasional kid’s toy is on the ground, right next to a bullet casing here, a shotgun shell there—score. I head toward a corpse leaning against the short stairwell leading up to a raised office building. It’s got a sword in its bony hand, the flesh papery thin and hanging off its bones in sheets. A poor bastard, poorer than me. Unlucky, I guess. I take the sword from him, then whack the side of it against the building. It shatters. Of course. He’s been here too long for his sword to still be in good shape. Must’ve been some kind of adventurer, because not even bounty hunters have any kind of business wandering the Barens.

  The Forge, though, looms over the entire settlement. This massive monolith of a factory that devours light and hides the sun behind it, casting nearly everything in a quickly cooling shadow. “Gonna be a cold night,” I mutter to myself. I weigh my options, because the Forge feels…odd, harsh—it’s difficult to explain how magic can be abrasive, but everything has its own stench, it’s own feeling; Andrea might think I can’t tell, but my nose, my eyes, they’re trained for this kind of thing. I’ve hunted Gremlins for days on end with nothing but their smell in the wind, and this place? This place reeks of Dark Magic. The kind that was outside my apartment. The rancid kind that makes you want to vomit, because it stinks of sulfur and cow dung and the kind of rot that comes from dead bodies.

  Whatever’s going on inside the Forge, or the mine shaft that leads into the rock face behind it, Gods only know, because I, for one, am not dealing with Monsters in the pitch dark with nothing except my hands. I’ve still got the gun. It’s a nice piece, and I owe May for letting me keep it after I nearly killed one of her friends with it.

  But finding bullets for this thing is the kind of luck that only Angels and Pixies have.

  With my kind of luck, I’ll probably trip over a rock and smash my head open soon.

  The sound of dirt crunching underneath feet stills me. I stay still, hand on my backpack’s strap, listening to the wind, to the groan of aging buildings and the wind quietly whispering through the sunlit settlement. I turn to look over my shoulder, and catch a glimpse of a shadow disappearing behind a building. Small, quick—I smell the air and catch the faint scent of urine and filth and sweat. Ripe and nasty, baked by the sun. I turn around and keep walking, because the shadow behind me is darting from building to building, dirt crunching under their feet, stopping when I stop and going down the same avenues I take. I pass burnt out cars, old factory equipment, apartment buildings families once lived in, and offices people once worked out of. Telephone poles have their wires still attached to them, but they’re limp and weak and dragging across the dirt, because most of the poles are down.

  The shadow bumps right into my legs when I turn a corner and wait for it. They stumble, shake their head, then look up at me and— What the hell am I looking at right now? I’ve got the AngelWeight pointed at their face, the tip catching sunlight and glinting in the faint light. They whimper and cower, putting their tiny hands up to their head. And before you cry foul for me pulling a gun out on a child, the first time I committed battery was when I was around their size. I beat a Pixie half to death with a tire iron because he kept trying to steal my lunch money.

  Okay, maybe I killed him, but nobody ever found his body in the garbage dump I left him in, so it doesn’t count—don’t look at me that way, things are different out here, and the creature I’m looking at should know that.

  Because the last time I checked, little girls don’t have red scales, a single broken horn, and thin red wings that push against their filthy sack they’re wearing. I grab their wrist and lift them up, gun under their jaw as I shake them, making them look up at me. They whimper, and then a trickle of something foul and dark splatters onto the ground. Gross. I drop the kid in the muddy puddle of their own urine and look around, seeing nobody watching.

  “A Dragonborne, huh?” I say quietly. “You’re fuckin’ rare, kid. I could make cash out of your bones.”

  She says nothing, only looks at me, her black and red eyes almost stupid. Maybe even dumb.

  I crouch and meet her eyes, still aching all over, but I’m not gonna show a Monster that I’m hurting. I look at her, then take her chin and turn her head left to right. The scales are in patches, because some of her skin is still there for the world to see, a soft brown that’s covered in dirt and tiny scratches. She’s thin, and when I use my thumb to part her lips, her teeth are like tiny white daggers forced into her swollen gums. Fat tongue. Dry saliva. But her breath is hot, and not the normal kind—the kind that feels like you’ve got your face up close and personal to a car’s engine after you rip it through the city. I wipe my hand on my shorts, then look at her the same way she’s doing to me. She crouches there, both hands in the dirt, looking at me, face pinched and eyes wide and cheeks very hollow.

  She’s got a Rune carved into her forehead, dark and black and rugged. She backs away when I reach for it, but I grab her arm and pull her close, putting the gun between my teeth and using my free hand to lock her in place. She grunts and struggles and fights me, and damn, she’s strong—like a tiny ball of tense meat and stringy muscle. But I smack her across the jaw with my fist, and she stops. Tears don’t swell in her eyes. She just looks stunned.

  That means I can finally look at the Rune on her forehead, squinting hard at it. “Looks like the one from the Fallen Angels,” I whisper, except…no, not really. I rub my eyes, get the dust and dried blood out of them, and look again. I don’t know my Runes offhead. It’s almost like trying to learn another language, except Witches have their own version, and so do Mages and Monsters and hell, you can smack a few together and come up with your own, but that’s only if you want to risk either Summoning something that’ll kill you, or start an eternal fire you can’t put out. It’s like playing with a car battery and using a fork to take it apart—it might go fine, if your very, very lucky, but most times you’re gonna get fucked in some kind of way. But this one? It’s simple—it’s a Holy Cross.

  Christian, from what I can tell. I’ve only seen these things a few times. Sold a few pendants like this to a Witch once for my rent money. She wanted them so badly she nearly killed me for them. All you’ve got to do is rob a grave and there, you’ve got a few—but they’re old, rusted, and none of them are ever new. Their God stopped being a thing the moment…well, it’s not important now, anyway. Not my problem either. I stand up and let her go.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  She rubs her forehead and her jaw, sniffles, then looks up at me, not tilting her head to do so.

  “What?” I ask. Silence. The sun keeps sliding through the sky, darkening shadows. “If you want food, I’ve not got any for you, so go back to wherever you were hiding before you tempt me enough to sell your body.”

  The little brat stands in front of me, unmoved, staring at me with those black eyes.

  I decide I’ve got other things to do right now—I’ll make camp for the night, find a building that’s high up, stay somewhere on the middle floors, and use curtains and whatever else I can find for blankets. I spend about an hour doing just that, ripping curtains off their railings from one building to the next, and I even get lucky and find a shotgun—sawed-off end—in one office, held to the chest my a skeleton that’s gotten the back of its skull blown into bits and pieces scattered onto the floor. The gun clicks when I test it, and I find shells littering the floor and in several desk drawers. Not a crazy amount, but just enough to know I’ve got a few get-out-of-jail free shots if things get messy. No food, though. Cans are busted open and rotting. The one convenience store I found is bone-dry.

  And like some kind of puppy with a broken horn and scales, the little kid follows me everywhere, hiding when I look over my shoulder and pretending to be interested in files and stacks of papers I know she can’t read. I settle for an office space filled with desks, and I hate the noise they make when I shove them against doorways to block them off. My heart is in my throat, because this is Monster country. I’m a light sleeper, but my skin is still crawling the longer I spend in the darkness, moving around with moonlight as my guide, as I stack chairs and tables over entrances, check the sturdiness of the drywall, and check for anything else I can use to defend myself.

  Magic is great and all, but I’m no Sorcerer, and I’m no Witch—I’m a Knight Pledge, or I will be when I get the chance. It usually means weaponry, and the best of them learn how to do every discipline in magic. End of the day, though, I’m a street kid from New Salem. I know a handful of spells, and most of them are simple lock picking whispers, some that turn water into odd-tasting alcohol, and one that can rig a game of dice at least two out of ten times. Not very useful at a time like this. So all I can do now is sit by the window, hidden in the shadows, and lean my pounding head against the wall. It’s the silence that’s killing me. The sound of my heartbeat. The echo of every tiny movement and rush of wind through the settlement. I swallow and cradle the shotgun, and force myself to—

  A sound. My eyes fly open. I startle and have the shotgun pointing dead ahead of me.

  It’s the little Dragonborne on all fours, her eyes luminous in the darkness. I’ve got a blanket draped around my shoulders—well, curtains, but you get the picture—and the little kid’s got nothing underneath her potato sack.

  “Gods,” I whisper, putting the gun down. “How the hell did you even get inside? I check everywhere.”

  She doesn’t answer, of course, which means I’ve got to get up again and check everything all over again. She’s managed to push aside the stacks of rickety tables and worm through the doorway, and that means another hour of sweating and swearing and grunting as I get it all back in place. She watches from the window, sitting beside my backpack. When I return, she holds her tiny legs to her chest and watches me sit down and cradle the gun. I sigh and look at her. She looks at me, blinks slowly, then looks away into the darkness, shivering a little.

  If you expect me to give her my well-earned curtains, you’re absolutely wrong—she takes them from me with her Monster strength, and I’ve got half the heart in it to fight a little kid for warmth. I can’t sleep right now, anyway, so I decide to finally look through the contents of my backpack again. The vials are all broken from being smashed around earlier today, and the vial of Nectar is missing—must’ve fallen out of my bag when the Fallen Angels were smacking me around the sky. Shit. I’ve still got the tiny dagger and the parka, and I guess that means some reading material for tonight, starting with… So You’re A Hero Now, What Next? I set it on my lap and open it up, skimming through the table of contents, but the only thing that sounds interesting to me right now is the very last chapter, the one that reads: Go Well and Go Proud, Hero of Arcadia. I shift, using the moon as a reading light.

  “…and because of your new status,” it reads, several lines down the page, “Monsters, Mages, and Humans are going to be attracted to your magic abilities. You’ll often find that Monsters are naturally more welcoming to you than before,” the Dragonborne scoots a little closer and looks at the page, but I think she’s just following my finger as I use it to track the words, “and that’s because your magic appears ‘warmer’ to them than a Mage’s normal magic. You’ve got two scents now, but as time progresses, your old magic will wither and be replaced by your Blessing’s magic. Don’t be alarmed. It’s a non-allergic process, and you shouldn’t feel a thing. Warn your loved ones about your new magical scent so they can always find you, but don’t be alarmed if people start coming to look for you purely for help and nothing else, even if it’s in their basic instinct to kill you and eat out your heart.”

  “Huh,” I mutter. That’s why the Fallen Angel brought me the Angel baby? ‘cause I ‘feel’ nicer?

  I personally think that’s a brilliant way to make money. I can trick more Monsters into coming for me, and the next thing they know, their heads are rolling and their skin is getting peeled off their bodies in sheets I can sell to a Warlock who wants them for who knows what? But… I tap my fingers against the page, not liking that idea so much either. It also means Monsters can find me more easily, doesn’t it? Heading into the Forge tomorrow, into the mineshaft they used to dig for Mana Crystals and Dread Titan remains, like bone fragments, maybe even bits of their heart if they were lucky—but judging by the state of this place, I doubt it—only means that I’ll be making my life a whole lot harder. It would’ve been easier doing this on that first day, that period of time Judy had told me about when the magic was flowing and the spells would come easily. Now all I see when I look at my hands are scars and blisters and cuts. The magic I’ve got has never been the strongest, not like the rest of my family, too.

  But magic or not, I still want to get better at this, and not because I want to save the world.

  It’s because I’d get to kill bigger Monsters for a lot more pay, and that means I won’t have to rely on other people and their screw job ideas on how to make money, like relying on Ricky for a quick job or a group of girls who’ve got problems with gangsters and Elves. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” I say quietly. The Dragonborne looks up at me as I rest my head on the wall, the moonlight coming through the window a patch of blue-ish light in front of us. I sigh, because the ground is hard underneath me, my feet hurt, my stomach is empty—I want to go home and take a shower and scrounge through my empty fridge for something to eat. For the first time in days, I kinda just want to…quit. Stop. I swallow and run my hands over the shotgun, flexing my toes and rolling my shoulders.

  “Isn’t it weird?” I say to the Dragonborne, “that kids my are right now are in fancy academies doing homework and learning about all of this stuff in classrooms? And here I am, about to commit suicide tomorrow.” And for whatever reason, she giggles—it’s a tiny sound, harsh and dry and scratchy. But it makes me smile because of how absurd it is that, of course, a Monster finds it funny that I’m planning on nearly throwing my life away soon to save a baby that probably won’t even remember me after I save him. I shake my head and look at her. “That funny, huh? My uncle used to tell me I’ve got a clown’s nose when I get sick, big and bright red. I punched him for that and he started calling me a bitch instead.” She listens tentatively, hugging her legs close. I look her over, at the filth, at the stench, at the scars and the single Rune on her forehead. “But I guess you don’t know what that is, kid.”

  She says nothing, only leans her head against my shoulder, her neck at an awkward angle. I hate when people touch me, and hate it even more when it’s a Monster—but she’s warm, and the night is cold, and I guess it’s not my fault that I put my arm around her and pull her a little closer so I don’t freeze to death in the next hour.

  I’m not going soft, and I’m not taking it easy—the shotgun is still primed on my lap.

  But I move it aside when she lays her head on my thighs and falls asleep.

  I look at her softly rising shoulders, at how she’s curled herself and slotted her thumb into her mouth. I slowly shake my head, a silent thought lingering in the back of my mind. Mom saw this and threw me away.

  But I don’t blame her—it makes me uncomfortable, almost jittery, because now what, you know?

  I pull the blanket over her body and raise one leg, shotgun in one hand, my other on her shoulder.

  Morning can’t come soon enough, don’t you think?