When Cormac returned, I was still sitting on the floor, holding Rory’s hand. He reached down, grasped my elbow, and pulled me to my feet. I snarled at him, but he ignored me and walked us out to the garden. Strands of smoke were rising from the kitchen and hallway, but the flames had died away.

  “We need to plan,” he said.

  “Plan?” I could feel my eyes burn, and tears start to flow. “What about our friends?”

  “Listen.” His eyes were hard. “They are dead. All of them. Elandra. Summer. Ranish. Rory.”

  I was sobbing. “We have to bury them.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Circe—think. How did they find us?”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “They tracked us somehow,” he said. “How?”

  “An artifact,” I whispered.

  “Just so. And if they can do it once, they can do it again.”

  “Good.” I felt my lips pull away from my teeth. “Next time we’ll be ready.”

  He sighed. “How many will come next time? How many Mages can you take on at once? How many Blades can I beat?” He watched me in silence for a minute and nodded. “We need to break contact. We must be better prepared. Killing a few collared will not achieve our goal. We need to slaughter them in job lots.”

  I stared out across the fields and woods. In the valley below us, I could see the gleam of the yellow sun off a river. Smoke rose from a distant village.

  “Cormac,” I said. My voice was just above a whisper. “We will leave here today. But we will come back with an army. And we will drive these monsters into Chai’Noch. Find their lair. And I will burn them to ashes.” I held his gaze. “Not with a fireball. I will bring the surface of the sun down to scour them from this earth.”

  He nodded slowly and held out his hand. I grasped it.

  “I swear.” I said.

  I searched the body of the Mage I killed first. Luckily, she had stored the tracking artifact in a belt pouch, rather than around her neck or chest. It was a nondescript piece of dull silvery material with two inset emerald gems. Pushing on the jewels did nothing, but when I fed in a trickle of mana, the left gem closest to me began to glow. When I rotated the object towards my body both lit up.

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  “Crude, but effective,” said Cormac. “Can you spoof it?”

  I grunted and began to study the spell woven into the fabric of the device. After a moment, I motioned Cormac over and pointed in front of me. He sat down obediently. I studied his mana pattern. Unsurprisingly, it resembled mine more than Elandra’s. I walked over to Rory’s body and blinked tears from my eyes. I studied his mana pattern and looked back to compare it to Cormac’s. I sighed, closed my eyes, and laid a hand on Rory’s chest. I slowly rearranged the fibres surrounding his heart. When I looked down, the pattern was now a duplicate of Cormac’s.

  “This may feel a bit odd,” I said. I carefully rearranged Cormac’s mana so it matched Rory’s original pattern. He tensed but was otherwise quiet.

  I activated the tracker again. Now it pointed at Rory.

  “I’ll go and do Elandra and myself,” I said.

  “Need help?”

  “No.”

  When I returned, Cormac had prepared two backpacks.

  “Two days rations. Blanket and tarp. Some light rope. Pan and cutlery. Canteen with water. Flint and—oh. You don’t need a fire starter, do you?”

  I shook my head. He laid the items on a blanket and then loaded the packs. I retrieved my notebooks, mini-grimoire, and map. Then I headed back to the bedroom and wrapped up a package containing the sanitary pads.

  “We have to pick a destination,” he said. “I’m OK with—”

  “We’re splitting up,” I said. “You head to Darthan. I’m to Vandoran.”

  “Oh, no.” He was shaking his head. “You need a Blade.”

  “Really.” I raised my eyebrows. “You think that a woman can’t cope on her own?”

  He had the grace to laugh. “Point. But you are—”

  “Slight? Squishy?” I pointed at the bodies of the Blade and Mage I had killed. “What do you think happened to them?” I pointed my thumb at my chest. “I did.” I leaned forward. “If we stay together, I can guarantee that we’ll be back in our original bodies within a month, if not a tenday. And if that happens—”

  “We’re done.” He was silent.

  “Also,” I said, “I can handle myself in the bush.”

  “Unless you run into something worse than a moose.”

  “Heh.” I looked around the clearing for what was likely to be the last time. “See that flat rock? That’s our dead drop. Expect a message from me in a year with an update.”

  He nodded.

  We shouldered out packs and walked down the path leading towards the nearby forest. Cormac looked at the house as we passed the first bedroom.

  “Summer and Ranish were unknowns,” he said. “But if one of the collared knew Elandra or Rory before being turned—”

  “They could be recognized. I know what I must do.” I gazed at Cormac. “Do you know if cremation is a thing here?”

  “Haven’t a clue.” He shrugged.

  I flicked a fireball through the bedroom window. I could hear the bedding catch fire with a dull thump. We walked on, and I threw spells into the other bedroom, and then the kitchen. Flames began to curl from the windows, and the wooden shingles started to smoke. As we walked on, I heard the crackle of multiple fires erupt from the building.

  We separated at a junction of the path near the river. Neither of us waved, and I did not turn around. As I paralleled the stream, I saw tendrils of smoke pass over my head. There were low-lying clouds over the valley, and the smoke had struck an inversion layer, so it no longer rose but twisted lazily along the course of the river. Over the water there must have been an area of damper, cooler air, because the debris from the fire began to settle out and fall to earth.

  And I walked down the path through the ashes of a dead lover.