Chapter 19
The darkness pulsed as though in time with my heartbeat.
A vertical gash tore through the rooftop’s corner, its edges weeping strands of shadow like unraveling stitches.
The air around it twisted into a funhouse mirror of distortions that didn’t appear to be of the human world at all.
My breath hitched. A Veil tear inside the Veil? That shouldn’t be possible.
On the rare occurrence that the worlds merged completely, like they had in the district where Angel now lived, one place transitioned seamlessly to another.
No tear needed, no lightning or magic required to walk from one realm to the next.
It was part of why so many avoided places settled into the Veil.
New tears took decades to settle, merge, and open, often creating shifting ripples between worlds that would take anyone who crossed a new tear to somewhere else completely, from either side.
But I’d never heard anyone speak of a tear within a tear, and this looked more like a door than a slice through the Veil.
Would it lead to another realm? The human world? Maybe even that nightmare prison we’d found ourselves stuck in before?
I seized Angel’s hand. Our shield rune ignited with a sizzle, snapping into place and clarifying the dark wriggling edges. The tear yawned wider, edges curling back like scorched film, but it looked very much like an open doorway to another reality.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered as the smell of ozone singed my nostrils. The outline snapped with electricity, wild and jarring. Inside the opening, a dim flickering of lights reminded me of the dying fairies from the otherworld prison we’d barely escaped.
I took a step toward it, but Angel gripped my hand.
“Absolutely not,” he said. Angel hauled me backward, arm around my waist like a vise.
“What is it?” Victor asked.
“A doorway?” I glanced from the opening to Angel, wondering if he saw it the way I could. “A tear, maybe, but more defined?”
Kerry’s nostrils flared. “I smell magic, but it’s faint. And I don’t see shit.”
Victor waved his gloved hand through the distortion without resistance. “Here?” he asked me.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t feel anything,” Victor said, practically staring directly into the opening. “Let’s get Bobby and Wade up with the scanners.”
I tilted my head to catch Angel’s gaze. “You see it too, right?” Could he see it through our bond?
His jaw clenched. “No. But your eyes are black.”
But Kerry couldn’t see anything, and if I was seeing demon magic yet the one demon among us couldn’t see it, what did that mean? “How can there be a Veil tear here?”
“Describe it,” Victor demanded. “Is this like what you saw in the stairwell before you vanished the last time?”
“Yes, and no?” This was a thousand times clearer. Like a giant Gothic door cracked with sizzling lightning edges, yawning into a dark gray void of faintly flickering lights. Voices, distant and muted, trickled through the opening.
“It’s coming.”
“Oh God, please save us.”
A child cried. Someone shushed it.
Metal screeched, making me flinch, but I lunged forward. Angel held me firm, his shifter strength making my thrashing pointless.
“Someone’s in there! They need help.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Victor said, taking a step between us and the tear. I feared he’d walk right through it. “I don’t sense anything.”
My gut flipped over as I realized this was just like the portal I’d accidentally dragged Angel through.
The one that led us to that otherworld prison.
And there were people on the other side of this.
I turned my gaze to Angel. “There are people in there,” I whispered. “Calling for help. You don’t hear it?”
He shook his head and held tight.
“It could be a trap,” Kerry pointed out. “That shadow thing seems to want Jude. Maybe it’s trying to lure him?”
“Are you hearing Ivan again?” Angel asked me.
“No. People. A kid for sure. Maybe a man and a woman? It’s hard to tell. The voices are faint.” The sobbing continued, faint and wrenching, laced with fear, though I had to strain to hear it.
“Bobby, can you hear me?” Angel spoke into his earpiece.
“Roger,” Bobby replied. “We’ve swept halfway up, no sign of life or other occult traces.”
“We need you to run a spectral sweep up here on the roof deck. Jude’s got some sort of portal in view. Hears voices from it.”
“A tear within a tear?” Wade asked back.
“Yes,” I said.
“On our way up,” Bobby’s voice crackled through the earpiece.
Victor stalked the length of the deck, gaze peeled.
The child’s sobs twisted into a scream. The sound drilled straight through my skull, making my heart race, and I fought Angel’s grip to get to the door. “Someone’s in danger!”
The tear pulsed violently, electricity supercharging the edges of the entry as if powering up. I sucked in half a breath as the entire building lurched. The rooftop tilted sideways, sending us all sliding.
“Fuck!” Kerry cursed as she and Victor slammed into the glass barrier. Cracks spiderwebbed through the panes with an ominous crunch.
Angel’s grip on my hand became a vise as we skidded across the concrete, speed increasing as we headed for the wall.
If we hit the glass too, I knew it’d break and we’d all plummet to a grisly death.
Angel caught the edge of a bolted table, slowing our slide as the building shifted the other way, swaying as if the damn thing were an inflatable tube man rather than a concrete modern monstrosity.
Victor lunged for us, half catching one of the bolted lounge chairs as his fingers grazed my jacket and missed.
The world swam in a whirl of motion. Kerry scrabbled for something to hold on to.
Victor clung to a chair. Angel’s grasp yanked free from the table, though he refused to let me go as we suddenly careened toward the open black maw of the strange Veil door.
“Angel!” I gasped as we slammed into the darkness. Half a second of fluid, icy cold, Angel clinging to me as we plunged through the portal. We fell, weightless for a moment, seeming to float, as gravity righted itself. Then concrete rushed up to meet us.
Angel took the brunt of the landing with a loud “Oof.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I grumbled, rolling off him and staring up at flickering fluorescents. The portal had vanished. “Is this a parking garage?”
Identical concrete pillars stretched into the distance, numbered stalls with familiar vehicles. Angel rubbed his ribs, scanning our surroundings.
“You ever get the feeling the universe is just messing with us at this point?” I asked him without getting up. “Unless there’s a hell dimension that is only parking garages, this is anticlimactic.”
“Don’t curse us. Last time you said anticlimactic, we wound up battling ghost sheep, mechanically destructive gnomes, and murder unicorns,” Angel growled, shoving himself to his knees.
“At least I have my pants this time,” I groused as I climbed to my feet, sore, stiff, and more than a little queasy from the drop and another trip through the Veil.
There couldn’t be another world with ugly-ass cybertrucks, right?
“Welcome back to Earth. Where bad ideas get funding by useless billionaires pretending to be geniuses.” I waved my hand at a mobile dumpster parked under a light.
Not that it helped, since the thing was half-squashed by a broken concrete column.
“As long as there’s not a herd of rabid trash pandas hiding in that piece of garbage, I think we’re fine,” Angel said. He pressed the button on his comm. “Bobby? Wade?”
Static hissed through Angel’s earpiece. The kind of empty silence that meant either our comms were fried, no one was left to answer, or crossing the Veil again meant the connection stretched too far.
“I hope Victor and Kerry are okay,” I said.
“As long as the building didn’t drop, they’re probably fine,” Angel said.
“Maybe we can call SED from our cells?” I wondered, thinking we had to be somewhere in the human world, and I didn’t think the trash truck was a big sell across the ocean, but maybe supernatural beings were into them?
A wet crunch echoed from the shadows beyond the broken column.
Angel’s hand went to his sidearm, and he slipped in front of me, gaze peering into the dark.
“Could be raccoons,” I whispered.
The sound came again. Closer this time. Bigger. Too heavy for raccoons. Too deliberate for debris shifting. Something scraped against concrete, dragged metal shrieking with the familiar pop of broken glass.
“Is something dragging a car?” I whispered, heart pounding.
“That would be a really fucking huge raccoon,” Angel said, gaze still focused in the direction of the noise and the ramp out of the garage.
“We could just take the stairs,” I pointed toward the far door.
A low, rattling breath answered from the darkness. Footsteps, heavy enough to shake the entire structure and rain concrete debris down on our heads, headed our direction.
“Stairs,” Angel said, shoving me toward the door, and he didn’t have to tell me twice as we both raced for the steel fire door to escape whatever new nightmare was headed our way.