CHAPTER ONE People can sense the things that lurk in the dark. Maybe that’s why a whole city was abandoned almost overnight. Maybe that’s why we should have been more cautious when we traveled to that lonely, forgotten mountain. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about the road ahead and start thinking about the path under my feet. My sore, tired feet. “One sec,” I pleaded as I collapsed with a soft whoosh onto a boulder. I crossed one leg over the other and removed my leather shoes to massage my foot. “I think my foot’s about to fall off.” Ros and I found ourselves along a dusty dirt road no wider than a cart. The path had once been at ground level, but countless centuries of foot and vehicle travel had dug a large ditch into the ground so that earthen walls surrounded us like a tu