Chapter 14
The video call glitched again, freezing Ivan’s face into a pixelated grimace. I dug my nails into the truck’s upholstery, resisting the urge to hurl the phone. He was safe. He was alive. Why did my skin still crawl with the certainty he’d been in that building?
“Backup’s coming,” Bobby murmured to Angel. “From this side.”
We were down a truck. Either the NHV team had missed a few gnomes getting into the motor, or someone had sabotaged it. It wouldn’t start, and everyone piled into ours seeking shelter, equipment, and food.
Angel’s gaze swept over our scattered team.
All of us hollow-eyed and twitchy. All missing hours we couldn’t account for.
At first, I thought the problem had been all me again.
But the entire team had been overcome by something, losing hours while none of them remembered more than vague dreaming.
NHVs and HVs alike, all lost in some sort of trance.
All except me.
I sighed, hating the choppy video but happy to see that Ivan was alive, well, and protected in the borrowed apartment. In fact, someone had picked up Grandpa.
“Signal’s shit here,” I muttered as the call reconnected, showing Ivan sprawled across Xavier’s absurdly overpriced couch. Behind him, Grandpa waved enthusiastically.
“The lights, my boy. Looks like a city! Are you near the city?” Grandpa’s voice crackled through the speakers.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Please don’t go outside without backup.”
“We’re fine,” Ivan added. “Sy and Kea are here.”
“You’re on a nickname basis with the murder twins?”
Ivan snorted. “Why do you call them that?”
“Their vibe. Isn’t your generation all about vibes?”
“My vibe says you’re in over your head.”
He wasn’t wrong. “I’m fine. I’ll be home in a few days. You need to be home and safe. Are you keeping up with your school work?”
“Yes,” Ivan snapped at me. “Xavier has been bugging me about it too. Stands in the doorway behind the murder twins and asks twenty questions. I’m fine. We’re fine. Even Peanut Butter.” He lifted the orange cat off the floor and into his lap.
“Good. I’ll try to worry less.”
“You’re the one facing otherworldly beings,” Ivan said. He waved his hands around. “This feels more like a vacation.” Not home. Was the last my wishful thinking? “Try not to get hurt.”
I said nothing about my aching wrist and the stinging marks lingering on my neck. “I’ll do my best.”
“Try harder.”
I swallowed back my worry and ended the call. Angel added another sandwich to my plate, but I pushed it away, too nauseous to eat.
“You need the food.”
“If I eat anything, I’m going to hurl.”
Angel sighed and dug through the cooler as though looking for something else to tempt me. But all our cake was mysteriously missing. Fae dragon thief, or had we eaten it all?
“How about some electrolytes?” Wade offered, holding out an icy bottle of clear liquid to me. At least it wasn’t one of those neon things. “Sometimes after a shift I get really queasy and the minerals help.”
I took the bottle from him with my good hand. Angel twisted off the lid and accepted another from Wade for himself. I took a sip and let it soothe my parched throat. My neck throbbed with each swallow, the marks dark and bruised, like someone had really tried to kill me.
“The wrist looks bruised, a little twisted, maybe,” Tiana said, using a scanner to check over the bone. “No breaks.”
They thought I’d caused it while thrashing from the nightmare-turned-seizure.
I knew the truth. It hadn’t all been a dream.
My Taser was missing. Lost somewhere in Brandon’s secret observation closet, I was certain.
And no one could explain where it went. And a seizure didn’t explain the damage to my neck. Had I somehow choked myself?
“One more time,” Victor prodded from a chair nearby. He had a computer open to both record me and type notes as he went.
“Why? You’ve recorded it four times.”
“Tell me about the apartment again,” Victor directed. “Every detail that you can remember.”
“But I told you I’d been in there before.” How embarrassing to have to come out to the entire team as having had a relationship with a guy suspected of summoning some evil overlord. Not that what we really had was a relationship.
“Humor me,” Victor said. His tone even, expression bland.
I recalled everything I could about the apartment, from the wall color to the cabinet placement to the material on the couch.
Was it all the same the two times I’d been there in the past?
Had I been dreaming it all from a memory?
I didn’t think so. My gut screamed that I was missing something.
Though the electrolytes began to ease the roiling.
“We need to go in there,” I said to Angel for the tenth time.
“The teams from this side cleared the building,” Ezra growled.
Angel held an ice pack to my neck, expression dark over the damage. Fingerprint-shaped bruises ringed my neck where Brandon had squeezed. Had it been him? Something pretending to be him? And why was I the only one attacked?
“What are you seeing?” Angel asked Victor.
“The closet isn’t on the wall Jude described,” Victor said after a long minute.
“What?” Bobby asked, leaning over to look at the screen.
“Blueprints don’t show any major changes,” Kerry added, sitting on Victor’s other side.
There were way too many of us inside this tiny van.
But everyone was trying to refuel and take a breather.
The rest of the NHV team, who were mostly half-demons like Kerry, took turns standing guard outside the truck and watching the tear for anything headed our way.
“Can you put it on the big screen?” Angel asked.
He swiped the empty bottle from my hand and passed over another.
Maybe I was thirstier than I’d thought. Tiana wrapped my wrist with a brace and helped me put the glove back on.
A few seconds later we all watched as Victor walked us through a visual 360 tour of Brandon’s apartment.
“Is this what you remember?” Bobby asked me. “This scan is from before he purchased it, from the original real estate listing.”
I studied the apartment, finding it mostly the same, though the pictures absent furniture. He hadn’t even painted the walls. Lack of decorating skill, or did he just not care? The visual proceeded through to the main bedroom, and I had to do a double take.
“That looks different. Smaller. I thought his place was a one-bedroom. Is there another?”
“It is a one-bedroom,” Victor said. “Dimensions of this room are twenty by twenty-five.”
“His room wasn’t that big.” Not the two times I’d been there, or in this last nightmare. “It barely fit the king-size bed.”
“Did the team who cleared the building have visuals in each apartment?” Bobby asked.
“If they did, I don’t have them,” Victor grumbled.
“Let me call them,” Tiana offered, picking up her comm unit. “See if they have anything.”
“Is there a protocol for this?” I wondered.
“Technically,” Wade said. “But not everyone on this side cares about following the rules.”
“Our rules; why would they need to follow them?” Bobby said. “It’s more courtesy than anything else.”
“Teams from this side are more muscle,” Angel told me. He dug a mini candy bar out of a bin below the storage cabinet. “Can you eat this? Your blood sugar smells low.”
I raised a brow at him but took the bar.
“I might have some more sweets in our van, if he needs the sugar,” Kerry offered.
“I’m okay,” I said, not wanting to be a bother.
“If you don’t mind,” Angel told her. “As long as the guys watch your back while you go in.”
She gave him a wink and a toothy smile. “Look at you, being all considerate. Married life agrees with you, eh?”
“Married?” I sputtered.
“Mated,” Angel amended.
“Same thing,” Victor said, still frowning over the schematics.
I glared at them all, but Kerry waved off my grumpiness as she popped out of the van to rummage through the other.
The call ended with Tiana’s brow furrowed.
“They said they swept the building but didn’t document individual units.
Too much interference, tech glitches, structural changes that didn’t match the blueprints.
” She hesitated. “Lights kept going in and out. Lots of comments about shadows, but it’s hard to tell on this side what is legit movement and what is someone jumping at the darkness. ”
I had a lot of reason to be jumping lately.
“They herded everything out of the building that had come through that portal,” Tiana continued. “From that prison. And checked for any lingering humans who might have been stuck when it was dragged across the Veil.”
Ezra growled. “They wandered through, kicked out a few strays, and called it clear? No sweep logs? No room-by-room verification? Do they want the military on this side?”
“That’s a war no one wants to start,” Victor said with a sigh.
“They’re used to dealing with feral cryptids, not hidden rooms and cops turned into cult summoners.”
I glanced out the window and up at the building, searching for a sign of Brandon again. But the windows were just black voids reflecting the eerie otherworldly lights of the distant city. My skin goose-pimpled as I stared at the one I was certain belonged to his unit. Was he up there watching us?
“I can’t find any permits pulled for renovations to create a concealed wall or extra closet,” Victor added.
“Not everyone pulls the permits they should,” Bobby said.
“It could be something worse,” Kerry supplied. “Like a pocket dimension or a mimic nest to hide things.”
I stared at her with horror. “Can those exist on this side?”
“Originally, no, but now,” she shrugged. “Maybe?”
“We should do a full sweep,” Wade said. “Categorize it all. Find Cassidy’s apartment.”
“There wouldn’t still be regular people in there, would there?” I asked.
Angel exhaled sharply. “We’ll have to wait for backup. And I’d like to split the teams up. Half down here, watching the trucks, guarding the tear, and on the comm, the rest inside.”
I knew instantly what he was trying to do. “I’m not staying out here.”
He met my gaze with narrowed eyes. “Whatever is in there wants you.”
“What better way to get it to come out and play, then?” I threw back, folding my arms across my chest, ready for a fight.
A low howl cut through the silence outside. Not the eerie, unnatural cries from beyond the Veil, but a deeper, rougher sound that vibrated in my ribs.
“Backup’s here,” Kerry said, reappearing with a bag of Peanut Butter Snickers. Those things were gold.
“Thanks,” I told her as she dropped the bag in my lap.
Angel straightened, relief flashing across his face. “About damn time. We can put them on the tear and sweep the inside.”
Another howl cut through the night, long, mournful, and unmistakably close. Another answered, then another, a chorus of guttural voices rolling in from the tree line.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
“Werewolves,” Bobby said.
I blinked and glanced at Ezra.
He scoffed at my look. “They are more beast than human.”
“That’s what most of humanity says about us,” Angel said, getting to his feet and tugging me up after him. “Let’s go meet our backup.”
“You’re not going to make me stay out here?” I was surprised I didn’t get more of a fight from him.
“You’re not a toddler, Jude. But know I’ll be sticking to you like glue the whole fucking time we’re inside,” Angel said as he headed toward the door, heavy footsteps crunching our way from outside.