"Hello?" Teige said, but he sounded far away. Hawk didn't answer, too busy thinking of the blurry shape of Emry sitting up in front of the fire, asking him why he wasn't getting up.

The bar was a low two-story wood building called Crossroad, and it sat on a small valley floor below the main road. The five of them had pulled the RV over just where the road split off into a steep dirt ramp that coasted towards the bar; Minnie had her hands on her hips.

"Wow," she said bitterly, "Even worse than I thought. Monster tent city. Totally visible from the road."

"Minnie," Parker muttered, pulling on a grey jacket in the cool of the autumn afternoon. She left it there, though, because the bar did not look especially innocuous. There was a smattering of tents pitched around it across the flat valley floor in the dry grass, and an assortment of vehicles--vans, trucks pulling trailers, other RVs--clustered together at the makeshift campground's edge. The bar looked rather odd by itself, sitting tucked away from the road with no parking and a yellow siren on a pole very clearly running a ground wire to it, but the tents didn't help.

"They ain't gonna have rooms, are they," Abi--sitting in the tall grass at the edge of the pavement, in the round shape of a tanuki--said disconsolately. "I was looking forward to a hot shower."

Hawk looked idly past the bar, past the small slow river running behind it, up into the treeline that climbed steeply up into foothills. There was a gas station just visible through the trees.

Teige, who had been leaning up against the RV silently, spoke up very quietly to Hawk's right.

"I got a bad feeling, Sunshine," he murmured. "Maybe we're on our way in the morning, yeah?"

"Yeah," Hawk answered, brow furrowing. "Okay."