Chapter 47
“Hands up!”
Blinking away the stars in my vision, and the nausea, I registered the circle of SED units, weapons trained on us.
Ezra already had his free hand up, the other locked around Jonah’s small frame.
Blue-hair cursed under his breath. Angel shifted, his grip on me tightening like he could shield me from the bullets with his body alone.
“Angel?” Victor called.
“Alive,” Angel agreed. “Can we get med support?”
Everyone moved, weapons lowering as the rest of our team headed our way.
Then reality split at the seams. The door behind us widened, as if trying to reclaim its lost prize.
Victor and Kerry surged to snap us out of its reach, but something else spilled out, separating them from us.
The first creature looked like a Rodent of Unusual Size, right out of the movie.
Someone screamed as it skittered by. Then there was something with too many teeth, legs, and chitinous limbs, like some landbound squid.
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” I muttered into Angel’s shoulder. “And the wildlife is pissed.”
Everyone scattered, getting out of its way, while others shouted at each other to catch it.
But those were only the first of many. The SED units scrambled, shouting orders as things emerged from the rift.
They were beyond beast or real recognition, the horrors spilled free as Angel threw us to the side, Ezra and blue-hair rolling with him to avoid the eruption of nightmares.
Angel took the brunt of my weight with a grunt as he kept himself between me and the floor.
Agents dove for cover. Victor called out commands, but no one fired, as their group was too close. Groups of SED broke off to race after creatures escaping into the mortal realm. I only half heard some of the comments shouted about the dangers of some of the beasts.
“We need to close that,” blue-hair shouted over the screams and chitinous skittering.
“How?” Ezra asked. “I can’t even see it, other than the things leaping from it.”
Blue-hair pointed at me. “He opened it, he can close it.”
“I… What? I must have missed that chapter in the employee handbook. ‘Advanced Rift Management: 101’.”
“When you broke the barrier to free the kid,” blue-hair said. “It freed them all, and this is the easiest doorway for them to escape that prison.”
The tear vomited out another nightmare, something with too many eyes and a mouth splitting it in half, filled with shark-like rows of teeth.
It wriggled, trying to free itself as if the tear were too narrow for it to fit through.
The Veil stretched and wobbled around it as if the thing would tear a larger gap between the worlds.
Holy fuck!
Blue-hair growled, “Now is not the time to be coy.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I have no idea what I did.”
“Fine,” he said as he lunged around Angel, reaching for me.
Then his hand was on my face, fingers digging into my jaw, tilting my head back.
His lips crashed against mine—not a true kiss but a demand.
I gasped as his mouth sealed over mine. It might have seemed like a kiss to observers, but my gasp was at his suction of my power.
Magic erupted from us both in a torrent of energy, crackling and raging in fluorescent purple ribbons of power, searing my vision with afterimages of brightness.
Blue-hair slipped his hand around the back of my neck to hold me in place as he slapped his free hand on the ground like a wrestler calling a match.
The air snapped and shuddered, then retracted, sinking back into the rift as the edges of it began to reseal. The half-emerged monster vanished back through the Veil with a reverberating howl of rage for having been unable to free itself.
The pressure in the room plummeted, my ears popping as the portal imploded with a thunderous crash. The backlash sent a shockwave through the floor, marble splintering in a jagged, colossal crack that spiderwebbed a dozen feet, spraying dust and debris into the air.
Angel snarled and shoved blue-hair hard enough to send him crashing a few feet away.
He scooped me up into his arms, rage pouring off him in waves as though it took everything in him to keep from tearing the man apart.
I wrapped my arms around Angel, trying to stay conscious as well as calm his anger.
“I’m okay,” I grumbled, though my lips burned and my body trembled, the edges of darkness pooling around my vision. I fought the rising tide of blackness, blinking at the blue-haired guy and gasping for breath. What the hell had he done?
“What the fuck was that?” Angel snarled, putting himself between me and the new guy.
“Your boyfriend is demon spawn. I needed to borrow his power to seal it. He’ll be fine.
” His gaze flicked to the space where the rift had been.
Though the snapping and snarling of the Veil through the building continued, without the open tear spewing monsters, it was little more than a ripple.
“The link to this Veil tear and that nightmare prison has been severed, but I’d advise everyone to clear the building anyway.
What little is left on this side will be dragged across soon. ”
The SED teams streamed around us, with Victor arriving at our side, handing a shirt to Angel to cover his nudity. “Who’s hurt?” He blinked, his eyes going black as he narrowed his gaze on me. “Why are you bleeding? And smelling like fae?”
“Uh… broken jar?” The world swayed around the edges of my sight. “Don’t let Angel kill blue-hair guy.”
“Medic is on the way,” Kerry said from somewhere behind Victor. “Is that our missing practitioner? And the Thayerson kid?”
“Yeah,” blue-hair said. “Remington Woodward.” He scooted behind Ezra, keeping the shifter between himself and Angel.
“I suspect you’ll find a changeling in place of the kid on this side.
Thanks for the assist,” he told me. “One second, I was in the damn field studying the magic they used, the next, I was waking up in that tube.”
I tried to answer, words falling from my lips in little more than a stuttering mess of incoherence as I leaned into Angel’s body heat.
Wade arrived with a handful of medics. Someone took the kid from Ezra and began looking over the other two.
Angel snapped at them until Wade crowded him and wrapped his arms around me to pull me out of his grip.
“I’ve got him, Angel. Let them help.” Wade set me carefully on the ground, using himself as a shield between me and Angel as one of the medics unwrapped my knees.
The bandages dripped with blood. My vision swam at the sudden pain of air hitting the wounds, and I got my first good look at them.
Holy fuck, was that bone? “Uh…” The pain was sharp and intense, a deep burning that ricocheted through my entire body.
I gasped for air, the darkness of my vision making more sense as I realized it wasn’t only the power drain but also loss of blood.
“Fuck,” Wade cursed as the EMTs began to work, triaging the wounds. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
Panic set in at the thought of going to the hospital.
Angel slipped past Wade and wrapped his arms around my chest, hiding the damage as they brought out a board to put me on.
“Don’t leave me,” I begged, uncertain if he understood me.
“I won’t,” he promised.
The world moved in slow motion, the pain heightening until my vision narrowed to tiny pinpricks and I sucked air as if breathing through a straw.
“I think he’s going into shock,” Wade said as an EMT pressed a mask to my nose, giving me air. “Breathe, Holt.”
I sucked in air and focused on Angel, who pressed his face against mine, whispering sweet, comforting things I couldn’t understand in the moment. There were shouts, and I blinked at the chaos for half a heartbeat before darkness slid over my vision and I passed out.