I’d gone from horrified to surprisingly optimistic in less than an hour. After Heron and I had witnessed the Mara nurses feeding off the souls of Imen back in the infirmary, and after we’d killed the ones who’d thought they were strong enough to take us on, I had felt queasy.

But then, upon returning to the front of the building to find Correction Officers attacking our team, I had to shove all that aside and focus on getting ourselves out of there. I quickly made the link to what we’d seen in the infirmary, the rest of the puzzle pieces falling into place afterward.

I knew we’d have some time later in the night to fully process everything, so, in the meantime, I ran alongside Fiona and Scarlett, with Caia, Patrik, and Heron right behind us, and Blaze unconscious over Fiona’s shoulder.

“We caught a Mara nurse feeding on an Iman’s soul,” I told Fiona as we reached the gorge warning sign and made a sharp turn to the left. I could hear the Maras shouting and rumbling down the main road, but Patrik and Caia had done a good job of keeping them away. Just as our feet sank into the tall grass at the base of the mountain, Patrik shot out a flurry of blue fires and white sparks, leaving our pursuers dazed and unable to see where we went. “Sorry we took a while to get back—we had to deal with her and her colleagues.”

“That’s cool, I figured you were caught up,” Fiona breathed, leading us farther along the mountain base.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I replied. “I mean, I do believe it, but still… wow. Just, wow!”

“What the hell were they thinking, though? Luring us here like that?” Caia muttered.

“I have no idea, but I think the western tribe will be able to tell us more,” I said.

“Or Zane.” Fiona narrowed her eyes as she looked ahead. “Lord Kifo clearly can’t. You heard the Lords. The poor guy, it’s why he’s been trying to warn us since we first got here!”

Two dark figures emerged from a patch of purple flower bushes, their big, round eyes glimmering with what looked like relief, as they beamed their smiles at us. They were two young Imen boys, maybe sixteen years old, covered in brown leathers and dark green capes. The orange dots on their temples caught my eye.

“You made it!” one of them exclaimed.

“Yeah, sorry we’re late. It got… busy up there,” Fiona replied as we all came to a halt.

“I’m Alles, and this is Dion,” the young Iman said. “Vesta and Miss Hellswan sent us. I take it you have a better idea of what’s going on now?”

“Sort of, but I’m sure Vesta will fill in the blanks. In the meantime, we need to go. Now.”

They both nodded and motioned for us to follow them. They disappeared beneath the flower bushes, and we went in after them. A tunnel opened before us, its walls covered in red clay. One by one, we snuck through, and the Imen boys led us down into a loop, then a straight line beneath the two-mile plain.

“Patrik, can you make sure they don’t follow us through here?” I asked the Druid.

He gave me a brief nod when I glanced over my shoulder at him, then muttered a spell and reached his hands out, his fingers brushing against the walls on both sides. They left incandescent green traces, which quickly turned to massive cracks that collapsed the structure behind us with a deafening rumble.

We kept running, the Imen boys right in front of us.

“How do you two know Zane?” Fiona asked.

“Who?” Dion replied, his breath short.

“The daemon who sent us down here in the first place. How do you two know him?”

“We don’t! Not personally, anyway,” Dion explained. “We’d just made it out of the tunnel and were on our way up, when he popped up out of nowhere and started questioning us, asking what we were doing there. Our first instinct was to run, but… let’s just say he was faster.”

“And convincing,” Alles muttered. “We thought he was going to kill us, until we all heard the fighting upstairs. We’d never seen a prince of daemons up close before, you see. We certainly didn’t expect him to tell us to wait by the tunnel. It was weird, neither Dion nor I could understand what was going on.”

“Then he said that he’d send you all down here, for us to take you out of the city,” Dion added. “He said he didn’t care who we were or what we were doing there, anyway. He just wanted us to get you all to safety. So, you know, we watched him turn invisible before he went up to the infirmary. He’s not the first daemon we’ve had help from, but he’s definitely the first prince. The tides are changing…”

“That is just so sweet!” I chuckled, then grunted as Fiona nudged me with her elbow.

“We have two indigo horses with us,” Dion then said. “Two of you can get on them, with us, and we’ll lead the way through the Valley of Screams. The daemons are still recovering after what your friends did to them.”

“We barely saw any of them out in the gorges earlier,” Alles chuckled. “Whatever damage your friends caused, it’ll take them some time to get over.”

“Good, it means the gorges won’t be much trouble tonight,” Fiona muttered. “Caia and Blaze here will join you on the horses. The rest of us can keep up without a problem.”

I could still hear the commotion behind us. The Maras had tracked us to the tunnel, but they were stuck on the other side.

“There are about eighty feet of dirt and rocks between us and them,” Patrik said. “They’ve got their work cut out for them. We’ll reach the ravine long before they can even get past the blockage.”

I gave him a brief thumbs-up, then followed Fiona and the Imen boys as the tunnel began its smooth ascension toward the surface. We made it out into a narrow ravine, with maybe twenty feet of space between its tall limestone walls. Two indigo horses waited by a sharp rock poking out from the ground, and the Imen boys got on them. Caia climbed onto Dion’s horse, while Fiona plopped Blaze behind Alles, using a rope to hold him in place, tied to the saddle.

“Just make sure you don’t lose him along the way,” Fiona muttered. “We can’t do much without our dragon.”

Alles’s eyes grew wide with surprise, and he stared at Blaze. “This is the dragon?”

“Yeah, he’s out of it for the time being,” Fiona replied.

“Why? What happened to him?”

“He got all… murderous…” Caia sighed, her expression pained as she glanced at Blaze, whose large body was bent over the horse’s hindquarters.

“The Maras mind-bent him,” I clarified.

Alles and Dion nudged the horses with their heels, and the creatures darted forward. We followed, keeping up as we moved through the zigzagging ravine, the first moon glowing overhead.

My heart was tight beneath my ribs, my stomach tiny and stressed, but my muscles worked just fine as I dashed through the gorge. I started going over all the events that had occurred since we’d first set foot on Neraka, and the little inconsistencies I’d noticed before started to find their places in the much clearer picture of Azure Heights I now had.

This was a nasty place, inhabited by horrible creatures who had not only failed to better their ways, but had in fact gone from bad to worse. Like a plague, they’d decimated the native population of Imen, feeding off their blood and their souls.

I knew our only hope of defeating both the Maras and the daemons rested in our ability to find the swamp witch. As Fiona and I briefly glanced at each other, I knew we were on the same page. One way or another, we were going to be the end of the Exiled Maras.

Looking at it from an objective, exploratory perspective, the daemons were natives. We had no right to wipe them off the face of Neraka altogether, but we could force them into submission so they’d back off the Imen. But the Maras were foreign agents, already an anomaly in the Nerakian environment.

The damage they were doing was almost irreversible. They didn’t deserve a second chance. They’ve already wasted their second chance...