I stared at the black hole that had once been my house, my gaze stumbling over singed wood beams and melted glass windows and twisted metal railings. Grief, fury, and harrowing pain scorched through my veins and burned my lungs, laboring my breaths, made worse with the inhalation of black dust.

It was just a house. A house that had been designed by Joel and me, the foundation poured with our dreams, the walls strengthened with the laughter of our children, and the roof buttressed with our love. Before the plague, I’d never envisioned leaving it. But when I was chased away, forced to abandon it, I’d carried with me a seed of comfort that the house was here, sheltering the archives of my past life like an impenetrable vault.

With no one around to put out the fire, there was no roof, not a single wall left standing, the foundation crushed beneath the destruction. Annie’s closet of ruffled dresses…Gone. Aaron’s collection of Star Wars action figures…Gone.

I didn’t need to ask how or who. My house hadn’t just burned to the ground. It was swallowed by thick layers of spider webs.

Scalding hatred burned the back of my throat. What a vile son of a bitch, leaving his webby funk on everything he destroyed, on everything I loved.

I stepped through the rubble of charred wood and soot, my boots tangling in nets of silk strings. The dappling shadows beneath the fallen walls no longer smoldered, the embers long gone. I couldn’t sense the dead aura of the Drone or the pulse of aphids. Couldn’t feel the warm hum of Michio’s presence.

Nothing lived here, nothing remained but the lingering aroma of smoke and burnt memories.

I’d left Darwin in Shea’s van with her, but Jesse and Roark hovered like shadows at my elbows. It would’ve been unnerving and downright fucked up to take my lovers on a tour of the home I’d shared with my family, but I would’ve preferred that to this.

Every incinerated flake that stirred beneath my steps made me shudder. Each groan of settling timber penetrated my chest and tightened my insides into an agonizing knot of hell. My shoulders hunched around my ears, my arms crossed defensively, and my entire body trembled in pain.

I wanted to be stronger, or at the very least, appear stronger. Forty men stood around watching me, and every one of them had lost something or someone meaningful. But the reminder didn’t help me stand taller or braver.

I looked out across the backyard, a view I’d once cherished from my deck. Blackened debris filled the in-ground pool. The maple trees rustled, covering the ground with dead, brown leaves. The valley of rolling hills and lavish homes now lay in ruins of cement and weeds. But they weren’t burned. No, that calamity only fell upon my house.

Jesse’s hand slid into mine, pulling my arm away from my torso. “Annie and Aaron…” He cleared his voice, softening it. “Their spirits used to talk about this place. The pool. The lightning bugs. The little lizards they would catch near the rock wall.”

Swallowing past a thick throat, I stared at the corner of the yard where the rock wall once stood and willed their ghosts to appear, if only for a moment, so I could trace their sweet faces with my gaze while I told them I loved them and missed them so, so much.

“Joel cremated them here.” My voice cracked in the crisp air. “He spread their ashes over the property.”

I was so thankful he hadn’t buried them, that their tiny bodies weren’t stuck in the ground beneath the sad waste of their home.

A terrible noise rose up in my throat, the sound shocking me. I covered my mouth, blinking burning eyes and wondering if I’d finally cry.

But the tears didn’t come, not even when Roark’s arms came around me, squeezing my chest to his.

I held onto his strength, my thoughts spinning into a mess of shattered images. I saw the day I’d brought Annie home from the hospital, carrying her into the house for the first time, her little body wrapped in pink blankets. I heard the patter of Aaron’s footsteps when he sneaked into bed with Joel and me at night. I smelled the rich aroma of Cavendish tobacco that clung to Joel’s skin when he made love to me.

Then I felt the pain, digging, clawing, and biting through my mind until all I knew was pain. Memories held power, the power to shut everything off and hurt so deeply and viciously that nothing else existed. So much fucking pain.

“We’re still here.” Roark’s brogue rumbled over me, his embrace squeezing my ribs. “Ye still have us.”

Jesse moved against my back and touched his forehead to my shoulder.

Roark’s words and Jesse’s silent support struck a chord, plucking me from the paralyzing depths of memory and yanking me to the surface.

My home had been destroyed long ago and not by a fire. It stopped existing when my family died. But Jesse and Roark were still here. My new family. I wasn’t alone.

Closing my eyes, I let the ache of my loss fall away like tears. Then I pulled in a shredded breath, blinked rapidly, and cleared my eyes of dust.

“Yeah.” I stood taller, breathed a little bit easier, and strengthened my stance. Smoothing my palms over the breast of Roark’s coat, I stretched on tiptoes and kissed the soft hairs that had grown on his chin. “Thank you.”

I reached back, found Jesse’s hand, and gave it a squeeze.

“Now what?” Link strode toward us, his crossbow slung over his back.

“You have trackers, right? Put them on the Drone’s trail.” I stepped out from between Jesse and Roark, ready to get the hell away from this dead place. “If people are talking about us, let’s drag them out of their hidey-holes and find out what they’ve heard about a man with a cape and wings.”

Link’s head turned slowly, ever-so slowly in my direction, as if he were deliberately trying to intimidate me with…what? A slowly turning head? Whatever.

His black eyes took their time, too, finally resting on mine. “That’s your plan?”

“Got a better one?” Jesse asked, his eyes scanning our surroundings.

“Nope.” Link grinned.

Apparently, he wasn’t holding any grudges against Jesse. Smart man.

I moved to walk back to the van, refusing to give the charred remains of my house a soul-sucking good-bye, but as I took a step, I felt…twitchy. Another step, and a warm, glowing sensation settled over me, like someone had turned on a bulb and held it close to my skin.

Then, as if a door had been opened to a deep unseen world that buzzed with electricity, a wave of static energy released into the air and trickled through my body in steady, humming pulses.

I spun, lungs pumping and eyes frantically searching the street while my mind narrowed on nothing but that hum. “Michio?”

The cool breeze whispered back, breathing icy tendrils beneath my hair and down my nape. But the hum remained, stronger now, searing through my blood.

“Ye feel Michio?” Roark turned in a circle, visually probing the houses and overgrown yards. “Where?”

As the hum quaked through my body, I tried to trace the source. It didn’t draw outward in threads like the aphids. It spread like a beam of light. I should’ve been able to pinpoint where it concentrated, but it felt like it was coming from every direction.

“Everywhere?” I panted hopeful gusts of air and scrambled over the rubble toward the street, looking in both directions. “I don’t know.”

Jesse paced around me on the street, his bow in one hand, the other raking through his hair as his sunlit glare burned over the landscape. “I don’t like this. What do you mean everywhere?”

The humming sensation felt like Michio, but it didn’t. The night Michio left, I could sense his general direction. Granted, it had only been seconds before he blinked away. But now?

“There’s no clear direction.” I curled my hands into fists. He had to be out there, and my heart thundered with every second that passed. Every second that I might’ve been losing him. “Let’s spread out.”

The moment the words left my mouth, a blur of movement spread over the horizon. I whirled, turning completely around, my gaze darting in every direction. I couldn’t see that far to make out what they were, but the blur of countless tall, dark shapes seemed to emerge from everywhere. In a few seconds, they would be surrounding us.

My muscles stiffened and heated as I reached for the bow on my back and nocked an arrow. The hurried mass of movement propelled toward us with lightning speeds. Seemingly man-sized. Or aphid-sized? I didn’t feel aphids, but holy fucking shit, they didn’t move like humans.

They moved like Michio.

The flash of Roark’s sword glinted in my periphery. Jesse planted himself at my side.

“They’re not aphids or nymphs,” I shouted, loud enough for forty soldiers to hear.

Footfalls pounded around me. Men shouted. Knives and other weaponry sounded as they slid from their leather holsters. And one clear, baritone voice boomed, “Fuck yeah. Let’s fight!”