Again with this damn smoke. Chester clicked his lighter, though his mouth already tasted like trash from the cheap cigarettes he’d been burning through by the carton while driving.

He was shaking. Not from the cold—the evening in this pathetic roadside dump was suffocatingly close and foul—but from that sticky, soul-sucking crap that had been spinning in his head for the past couple of weeks. Thirteen years. Thirteen fucking years he’d convinced himself that Nick had been eaten by some stray owlbear, that it was just childhood fantasy, bullshit, shock. And now he’s sitting on the hood of this damn van, staring down a dusty road where they’d dragged themselves God knows why, and realizing: he was right. And for some reason, that knowledge made him want to puke his guts out rather than feel vindicated.

It all started with the case file. That routine dead-end, dammit, which turned out to be anything but. Then this kid, Kimberly the half-orc, with her laptops and a tail of unhinged goons. He’d just pinned her against a wall back then, hoping to squeeze some info out of her fast, and ended up with this tiny hacker saving his own ass from a stray bullet. Next came that feline show-off, Shira—hell, a regular high-society bitch with more sins on her soul than fleas, but without her connections to locked-down clubs they wouldn’t have gotten past the precinct doors. And then this massive scaly wardrobe, Vincent, who quietly patched up their bucket of bolts, shut up a couple of local punks, and hauled over a pot of actual home-cooked food like they were heading to summer camp, for fuck's sake.

Five idiots. Five completely incompatible bastards, every single one of them with enough dirt on their hands to swing from a rope right now. Chester had watched them this whole time with a dull, grinding irritation. Kim glued to her screen 24/7, stuffing herself with chemical energy crap instead of food. Shira acting all high and mighty, curling her lip at the dust. Vincent fussing over wrenches like he’s about to tear the whole damn world apart and rebuild it. Chester kept thinking: I’ll dump them at the first chance. Dead weight.

Yeah, right

Especially that stubborn elf. Raphael. Chester dragged deep, squinting against the acrid smoke, and cast a sideways glance. Raf is sitting right there, next to him on a log. Quiet as a damn mouse. As if they aren’t two steps away from a cursed forest where his brother was torn to pieces sixteen years ago, and from the den of a cult that worships the damn thing, for Christ's sake.

He remembered that evening in the bookstore. They’d burst in like a storm: him with his badge, Kim with her wires, Shira with that fake-ass grin of hers. Raf had looked at them with these huge, wide eyes and tried to play the pacifist—go on, walk away, kids, I'm out of it. And then Kim dug up the name of the missing Gabriel—this bookworm's childhood friend—in the commune's archives. And that was it. All that put-on softness cracked right down the middle. Raf had gone pale, brewed them a pot of bitter tea, and announced he was coming with them because without him these idiots would drop dead in the first ditch they crossed.

And he wasn't even lying.

Chester blew a gray stream of smoke into the oncoming dark. He side-eyed Raphael again.

"What are you staring at?" Chester rasped, stubbing out the butt against the sole of his boot and immediately digging into his pocket for another one.