The word hung in the air between them for half a heartbeat.

  Then the ground shook.

  The boy felt it through his boots first—a deep thrumming that climbed up through his ankles and rattled in his knees. The wolf's head snapped toward the south. Its hackles rose in a stiff ridge from skull to tail. The lizard's feathers flared and it dropped low, claws scraping stone.

  The dying man's eyes went wide.

  "They're back," he rasped. "God help us, they're—"

  His voice cut off in a wet cough. Blood bubbled at his lips. His hand fell from the step and went still.

  The boy did not check if he was dead. He was already turning.

  The shaking grew. It came from the south, from beyond the smoke line, from the direction they had not gone. It sounded like thunder dragged low across the earth. It sounded like hooves, but wrong—too many, too heavy, too fast.

  Lily's face had gone pale as ash. Her hand found the wolf's fur and held.

  "Brother," she whispered.

  Mary stood frozen with Ember pressed to her chest, the silver cross tangled in the doll's cloth arm.

  The boy reached inward.

  [Bestiary].

  He grabbed the tethers and yanked them back before either beast could bolt or fight. The air tore twice in quick succession. The wolf vanished in a rush of dark fur and pale eyes. The lizard's feathers flashed once and then it was gone too, leaving only claw marks in the soot.

  Lily stumbled as her handhold disappeared. "What—"

  The boy didn't explain.

  He moved.

  He crossed the plaza in four long strides and scooped Lily under one arm. She yelped and grabbed his coat. He bent and caught Mary around the waist with his other arm before she could scream. Her fingers dug into his shoulder. Ember bounced against his ribs.

  "Hold on," he said.

  And then he ran.

  His boots hit stone, then dirt, then broken cobbles. The girls weighed almost nothing in his arms—sacks of flour, bundles of cloth, things he could carry without slowing. His legs drove him forward with a strength that did not belong to a body his size and much faster than any of his beasts. The muscles in his thighs burned once and then settled into a rhythm that ate distance like fire ate dry grass.

  He cleared the plaza. He cut through an alley where a wagon lay tipped. He vaulted a low fence without breaking stride. Lily's hair whipped against his jaw. Mary's breath came in sharp, terrified gasps near his ear.

  Behind them, the shaking grew louder.

  The boy glanced back once as he rounded a corner.

  Dust rose at the edge of town—a wall of it, brown and thick, climbing into the smoke-streaked sky. Through it he saw shapes. Movement. Too many shapes to count. The thunder wasn't hooves. It was something else. Something heavier. Something that hissed.

  He didn't look again.

  He ran faster.

  San Antonio's edge came up like a ragged wound in the land—streets giving way to scrub, scrub giving way to open prairie, the blackened bones of burned fences marking where the town stopped pretending it could hold anything back. The boy's boots hit grass and kept moving. He angled south and east, toward higher ground, toward the rise of hills that would break the line of sight.

  The girls clung to him and didn't speak.

  The land climbed. His calves burned. His breath stayed steady. He felt his heart working in his chest like a slow drum, unhurried, unworried, as if his body had decided this was just another task to complete before resting.

  He crested a ridge and kept going.

  The smoke thinned. The air changed—salt in it now, the distant taste of the Gulf carried on wind that came from somewhere beyond the hills. The boy's nose caught it and his mind filed it away without slowing his legs.

  A large boulder sat at the top of the next rise, gray and weathered, half-buried in the hillside like a fist pressed into the earth. It overlooked the land behind them in a long, clear sweep.

  The boy dropped behind it and set the girls down.

  Lily's legs buckled. She caught herself on the rock and gasped, face flushed, eyes wild.

  Mary fell to her knees and clutched Ember so hard the doll's seams strained. Her lips moved without sound.

  The boy crouched low and pressed his shoulder to the boulder's side. He inched his head around the edge and looked.

  San Antonio sat below them now, a dark smear of ruin against the pale grass. Smoke still rose from it in lazy coils. The plaza was visible from here—a pale square surrounded by darker buildings. The church tower stood like a broken finger.

  And beyond the town, coming fast, was an army.

  The boy's breath caught.

  Hundreds.

  They poured across the prairie in a wide line, dust churning around them, shapes resolving out of the haze as they closed the distance. They were not charging blind. They moved in columns. They kept formation. Banners snapped above them in colors the boy did not recognize—dark reds, deep purples, something that looked black from this distance.

  Elves.

  The boy knew it as soon as the first clear figure emerged from the dust. The pointed ears. The height. The way they sat their mounts like they had been born in the saddle.

  But these were not Imrahil's people.

  Their skin was wrong. Different.

  Some had flesh the color of charcoal—deep, matte black that swallowed light. Others were ashen gray, like the inside of a cold fireplace, like the remains of something that had burned out long ago. Their armor caught the sun in dull flashes—scaled leather, dark and segmented, fitted close to their bodies. No leaf-plate. No grown wood. No bright silver mail.

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  And they did not ride elk.

  The mounts beneath them were lizards.

  Horse-sized, long-bodied, with thick tails that swept the grass and heads that jutted forward on muscled necks. Their hides were mottled browns and greens, scaled and rough. Their jaws hung open as they ran, showing teeth built for tearing.

  Lily crawled up beside the boy and pressed her eye to a crack in the boulder.

  Her breath stopped.

  "Are those the same ones you saw?" she whispered.

  The boy's jaw tightened. "No."

  Mary stayed flat on the ground behind them, face hidden against Ember's cloth body, lips still moving in silent prayer.

  The army reached San Antonio's edge and slowed.

  The columns condensed. Riders peeled off in groups of ten and twenty, spreading out along the town's perimeter like fingers closing around a throat. The lizard mounts hissed and stamped. Their claws dug furrows in the dirt.

  At the front of the column, a figure rode apart from the rest.

  Taller than the others. Straighter in the saddle. A woman, the boy realized—her shape lean and hard beneath the scaled armor, her hair cropped short against her skull, pale as bone against her charcoal skin. She carried a staff across her thighs, long and black, carved with shapes that caught the light in ways that made the boy's eyes slide away.

  A magic user.

  The boy's hand went to his Colt without thinking. His thumb found the hammer and rested there.

  The tall woman raised one hand.

  The army stopped.

  For a long moment nothing moved. The dust settled. The lizards shifted and hissed. The woman's head turned, scanning the town, scanning the ruins, scanning the smoke.

  Then she pointed with the staff.

  The columns broke apart.

  Riders poured into San Antonio in a flood of dark leather and scaled hide. They moved through the streets in tight packs, weapons drawn—curved blades, short spears, things that looked like clubs with teeth set into the heads. They disappeared behind buildings. They emerged from alleys. They circled the plaza.

  The boy watched.

  They were hunting.

  It did not take them long to find what they were looking for.

  A man broke from cover near the church—running, stumbling, one arm limp at his side. He made it three steps into the open before a rider cut across his path. The curved blade came down once. The man fell. He did not get up.

  More survivors emerged—driven out, dragged out, flushed from basements and root cellars and the dark spaces under collapsed roofs. Some ran. Some fought. Some tried to surrender, hands raised, voices calling out words the boy could not hear from this distance.

  It did not matter.

  The riders killed them all.

  A woman with a child in her arms went down near the bakery, both of them, in two clean strokes. An old man with a rifle fired once and hit nothing before a spear took him through the chest. A group of three tried to run toward the river and made it halfway before the lizards caught them.

  Mary's prayers grew louder. Her voice shook.

  Lily's hand found the boy's wrist and squeezed hard enough to hurt.

  The killing went on.

  It was not frenzied or wild. The riders moved with a cold, practiced efficiency, like men cleaning a field of vermin, like butchers working through a herd. They checked bodies. They searched buildings. They left nothing alive.

  The boy's teeth ground together in anger until his jaw ached.

  He could summon his beasts. He could charge down there. He could kill some of them. Maybe many of them. With the [Blue Dragon], maybe even all of them.

  He looked at Lily's face, pale and streaked with tears she hadn't noticed.

  He looked at Mary's back, shaking with silent sobs.

  He stayed where he was.

  The last of the killing finished.

  The riders regrouped at the town's edge, columns forming again, lizards stamping and hissing as their riders pulled them into line. The dust they had raised was beginning to settle. San Antonio sat silent behind them, darker now, emptier, the smoke rising from it thinner.

  The tall woman rode forward until she was clear of the column.

  She stopped in the open ground between her army and the town.

  She lifted her staff.

  And the sky changed.

  It happened slowly at first—a dimming, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. The boy looked up and saw nothing but blue. But the light kept fading. Shadows stretched. The air grew heavy.

  The woman's staff began to glow.

  It started at the tip—a point of red that swelled and brightened until it hurt to look at directly. The boy's eyes watered. He blinked and kept watching through the blur.

  The red light climbed.

  It rose from the staff in a thick column, straight up, punching through the air like a pillar being driven into the sky. The column widened. It spread. It took shape.

  A hand.

  The boy's breath stopped.

  A hand made of fire hung in the sky above San Antonio—massive, burning, fingers spread wide enough to span the entire town. It glowed white at the center and red at the edges. Heat rolled off it in waves that reached the boulder even from this distance, pressing against the boy's face like an open oven.

  The woman's voice carried across the distance, high and sharp, words in a language the boy did not know. Her voice reverberated in the wind.

  The hand began to fall.

  It dropped like a hammer.

  It came down in a rush of heat and light, fingers closing, palm pressing toward the earth. The air screamed around it. The ground shook. The grass for a hundred yards in every direction blackened and curled without being touched.

  The hand struck San Antonio.

  The boy turned away.

  He grabbed Lily and Mary and pulled them down behind the boulder, pressing their faces against his coat, shielding their eyes with his arms.

  The light came anyway.

  It washed over the boulder in a white flood that turned the world into a single blazing sheet. The boy's eyelids burned red even through flesh and bone. Heat slammed against his back. The air itself seemed to catch fire.

  Lily screamed into his chest.

  Mary's cross dug into his ribs.

  The boy held on.

  The light held for what felt like forever—one heartbeat, two, three—and then it began to fade.

  The heat ebbed. The pressure eased. The white became red, then orange, then a dull glow that pulsed against his closed eyelids.

  The boy opened his eyes.

  He turned and looked.

  San Antonio was gone.

  Where the town had been—the plaza, the church, the general store, the streets they had walked through an hour ago—there was only a crater. It glowed at the edges with heat that made the air shimmer. The center was dark, smooth, glassed over like the prairie after the blue dragon's breath. Smoke rose from it in a single thick column that climbed straight up into the sky.

  Nothing remained.

  No walls. No roofs. No bodies. No rubble.

  The town had been erased.

  The boy stared at the crater for a long moment. His hand stayed on Lily's shoulder. His other arm stayed around Mary's shaking back.

  The army of dark-skinned elves remained at the crater's edge, their lizard mounts shifting and hissing. The tall woman lowered her staff. The glow at its tip faded to nothing.

  She turned her mount and raised one hand.

  The columns began to move again, flowing north, away from the crater, away from the coast. Banners snapped. Dust rose. The thunder of their passage faded slowly into the distance.

  The boy watched until the last of them vanished over the horizon.

  Then he let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.

  Lily lifted her head. Her face was streaked with tears and ash. Her eyes found the crater and went wide.

  "It's gone," she whispered. "It's all gone."

  Mary did not look. She kept her face pressed against Ember's cloth body, fingers white around the doll's seams, lips still moving in prayer.

  The boy looked at the coastline beyond the hills—the distant glint of water, the salt wind, the long road ahead. He did not understand what he’d just witnessed. The scale of it boggled his mind. An entire town, not even a small one, vanishing in what was essentially an instant.