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But as her blue eyes met mine, her jaw tensed. “How do we get rid of them?”

Cyrus pushed forward, tossing a body over her shoulder and marching past. “We don’t do disposal.”

From behind us, Blade used both hands to pull a body along. “The Oracle does drop-offs and pickups. Like laundry.”

Shaking my head, I wanted to slap Blade for making such a gruesome joke. Tess was scared enough, she’d crossed the line into a new world — something no one but the three of us had ever done.

But then again, all of this was part of it. Even our ability to brush it off, to know that we’d done a good thing.

As we rounded the corner toward the main gate, Tess bit her lips. “So we just… put the bodies somewhere and trust that they’ll clean it up?”

Cyrus pressed ahead, heading straight for the open gate of the box truck.

Gripping the leg of the dead guy’s pants, I chucked him over the admissions turnstile. “They have no incentive to screw this up. They rat on us, we rat on them. It’s mutually beneficial. The Oracle doesn’t want these guys turning up dead.”

Blade laughed. “All roads lead to Delphi.”

Another slap for later.

Glaring at Blade, I shook my head.

There wasn’t much time for more questions as we made it to the lip of the box truck.

Cyrus had slung her kill over her shoulder and tossed him onto the bed of the cargo hold. Climbing up, she used the heel of her boot to kick him deeper into the truck. Blood smeared along the floor, leaving crimson tracks in his wake.

Taking a deep breath, I reached down and grabbed the ankles of the man I’d been lugging behind me. Bending at my knees, I heaved his body up and over the edge of the truck.

With Cyrus still up top, she grabbed his arms and dragged him to the back.

As Blade sidled up beside me, I wrapped my hands around her catch’s wrists and helped Blade heave the body into the truck.

Wiping sweat from my brow, I watched as Cyrus shifted the bodies in the back of the cargo box. She laid them out next to each other, minimizing the odds that they rolled around once the truck was in motion.

It didn’t take any words for us to work like this, a system in place that was beyond language. It was intuition.

If only we could be on the same page like this outside of a hunt.

The thought made my jaw clench tighter.

All of this was exactly how Cyrus usually resolved conflict: not at all. She ran, hid away in her lair and waited until it all blew over.

But the longer Tess stayed in Feverpoint, the more unlikely it became that any of this would just go away.

Leaping down from the loading edge, Cyrus’s boots smacked into the stone as she made her way back into the park to retrieve another body.

Blade followed closer behind her, her body still electrified by the night we’d had.

But as I turned back toward the park, I could feel Tess’s eyes on my body. She watched the way my biceps flexed under the weight of our kills’ bodies. With a wink, I tried to ignore the hunger in her eyes — in my own gut — as we hauled more bodies back to the truck.

Between the four of us, we made quick work of bringing the sacks of flesh to Feverpoint’s entrance. It was bizarre how quickly it became normal, hauling a dead man around by the ankles of his jeans.

On the last trip, my shirt soaked in sweat and blood as it clung to my body, the truck’s floor was covered in crimson. What blood was left to drain from each of the men’s bodies had spilled onto the metal floor of the box truck.

Dropping the arms of her and Tess’s last carry, Blade mounted the edge of the rig in one box jump.

Despite her lean muscle, Blade was able to keep up with Cyrus and I.

Even Tess had proven to be much stronger than I would have thought. I liked knowing that she could put up a fight.