AT THE VERY BACK OF the group, Henbane grunts when Beetle, just in front of her, suddenly stops. “Move,” she hisses, shoving at his hindquarters. “I can’t get around you.” When he doesn’t move or answer her, she huffs, loud and purposefully annoying, and shoves harder. He stumbles forward a step, and then turns to glare at her over his shoulder, ears pinned.

    “Stop being annoying,” he hisses. “I think Smokejumper found something.”

    “Ugh,” she mutters.

    “Just wait,” Beetle shoots back.

    Henbane sniffs in reply and settles back to wait. Distantly, she can hear the raspy baritone and softer lilt of Halftruth and Smokejumper murmuring together. All the horse’s lanterns light up the dark, narrow passageway, but the tell-tale blue glow of Halftruth’s wisp, Aurae, can be seen flickering across the ceiling ahead. Rustling between her ears is Henbane’s own little companion – Pip, whose tiny paws grip strands of forelock.

    Henbane jumps. Metal clangs ahead, then clatters against the stone, echoing between the stone walls for what seems like minutes.

    “See?” Beetle says. Henbane shoves him again in response, thankful when he starts moving forward again.

    As they progress, Henbane finds the source of the pause: a metal door, rusting on its hinges, lays across the stone floor. Knowing her mentors, she assumes that Halftruth was the one to do it in. It rattles when she steps over it and joins the rest of the horses on the other side. The passageway opens up into a room where the ceiling arches just a little higher than before. A similar metal grate bars the far side of the room, and there’s no other door out except behind the rusting latticework.

    “Did you take out the other one?” Henbane asks, sidling up next to Halftruth. The pink-and-white puck flicks an ear towards her, lip twitching with amusement.

    “Sure did.” She turns to look at her. “Stop arguing with Beetle.”

    Henbane groans, scuffing a hoof on the ground. “But he’s so annoying sometimes.”

    Halftruth ignores her, turning her gaze to Beetle. “Stop arguing with Henbane.”

    Beetle echoes Henbane’s groan. “She was being impatient!”

    “You weren’t telling me anything!”

    “Stop.” Smokejumper’s voice cuts through them all as she strides closer to the other side of the room and its metal barricade. “Let’s put our minds to better use,” a curt glance at Henbane and Beetle, “and see if we can bring this one down, too.”

    Beetle steps forward to investigate one side, and Henbane follows. The bars are widely spaced – not enough for a horse to squeeze through, but something a little smaller, certainly. Like…

    Henbane shoves her head through the bars to look around the other side. There’s nothing but dust and bare stone.

    At Henbane’s feet, Smokejumper’s wolf, Brimstone, creeps closer, his ears pricked and hackles raised. He growls, low and deep.

    “What’s wrong?” Henbane murmurs to him. He doesn’t even twitch an ear at her.

    “Henbane,” Smokejumper says, “get your head out from between the bars.”

    “There’s nothing here,” Henbane says.

    Pip shifts between her ears, sniffing loudly. With a sharp tug of her forelock, the rat suddenly races down the crest of her neck and dives into one of the many satchels available to it. Still in the same spot, Brimstone growls again, louder.

    Hoofsteps clatter on the other side of the doorway. From the shadows lunges a courser. Henbane jerks backwards, smacking the back of her cheek on an iron bar on the way out. Face stinging, she sits on her haunches, nose a hairsbreadth away from the bare, yellowing skull of a dead horse.

    It swings its head, inspecting all of the living horses in front of it. Its head snaps, birdlike, from one to the next. “Group…” it rasps. “Join…?”

    “What?” Henbane wheezes.

    “Group,” the skeleton pleads again in a voice even raspier than Smokejumper’s. “Join…? Join… group?”

    Scrambling back to her feet, Henbane turns to look at Halftruth and Smokejumper. Both the older adventurers stare at it in shock, legs braces and heads high.

    “I think it… wants to come with us?” Beetle says.

    The skeleton courser snaps its attention to him. “Y…yes! Join!” It presses forward. Metal grates against stone.

    “We should go back the way we came,” Smokejumper says, finally. “There may be more of these waiting.”

    Halftruth steps back. “We can find another way around,” she agrees. “I don’t want to have to fight in such tight quarters if we don’t have to.”

    “No!” The creature cries. It lunges forward again, and this time the metal grate lurches forward with it. Before Henbane can blink, it closes the distance between them, teeth snapping closed around the crest of her neck, impossibly tight.

    Someone curses in surprise. Henbane, scrambling for coherency, echoes them, trying to throw herself free of the monster’s vice-like jaws. “It won’t get off!”

    “Stop!” Beetle cries. “Stop!”

    Henbane stops. The skeleton holds on, wailing. Panting, Henbane flicks her gaze to Beetle. Halftruth and Smokejumper creep closer on her other side, focused on the skeleton.

    “You’re just going to hurt yourself more by struggling,” he says, coming closer. “Just… stop moving. We’ll figure out a way to get it off you.”

    Henbane flattens her ears. She can feel blood dripping down her neck in hot rivulets. “Just – figure it out quick, please.”