Then Aiden gasped and started breathing again. His skin returned to its normal color.

Aru looked up to see his dark eyes staring back at her. They flashed blue for a moment.

"Ammamma!" Brynne cried. "You're okay!"

Brynne pulled Aiden up to a sitting position. He blinked in confusion.

"What happened?"

"Long story, Wifey," Mini said, her eyes shining with relief.

Aru wiped away her tears and threw her arms around Aiden.

"You really need to stop putting yourself in the way of deadly projectiles," she choked out.

Aiden had the nerve to laugh. "I'll take that as a 'thank you'."

Suddenly Aru was conscious of the fact that Brynne was smirking at them, Mini was grinning, and Rudy had a wicked gleam in his eye that she didn't exactly like. She awkwardly let go of Aiden.

"So," Aiden started. His eyes flicked back to where the Safeway had been, and for a second Aru wondered if he could still see it, unlike her.

"Where to now?" He asked.

Brynne stood and turned a three-sixty. "We keep going west?"

Mini got to her feet as well. "Then let's go."

"Oh, c'mon," Rudy complained. "We can't rest?"

Everyone glared at him.

"Of course we can't," Rudy muttered under his breath.

He sighed and plucked a stone from his bag, tossing it onto the floor like a coin into a fountain. The green stone shimmered as Rudy chanted some words Aru didn't understand. When it landed, it started spinning, faster and faster. When it finally stopped, there was a white mark resembling an arrow's tip pointing the same direction Brynne was.

Rudy sighed and picked the stone back up, slipping it back into his messenger's bag. "West it is."

Mini stared at him. "What was that?"

"Arrow stone," he said matter-of-factly. "It points to where we need to go."

"Why didn't you use that earlier?" Brynne demanded.

Rudy glared at her. "That was before we got turned around in the Safeway!"

Aiden blinked. "What Safeway?"

"Nothing," Aru said, slipping the extract bottle into her pocket and standing up. "Let's just go."

"The faster we get out of here, the better," Mini agreed.

"C'mon, Wifey," Aru said, offering a hand to Aiden. He took it and got up, but once he was on his feet, he remained holding her hand for a few seconds, long enough for a blush to rise to Aru's cheeks.

The Potatoes continued moving onward with relative uneventfulness. They encountered a lone demon here and there, but one strike from Gogo, Dee Dee, Vajra, or Aiden's scimitars, and they were reduced to dust.

When night fell, they made camp again. Mini was fretting over their deadline, rambling to Brynne as she made the fire. Aiden sat on a nearby rock, staring into the crackling flames. Rudy fidgeted with his magic stones next to him.

Aru felt a tingling of uneasiness down her spine, like someone was dripping cold water down her shirt. She kept glancing at Aiden, who would sometimes catch her looking, at which point she would blush and look away.

But she couldn't shake the feeling that something more was about to happen.