Chapter 30
Angel and I raced through the stalls toward the market entrance, weaving around everyone stopped in the center of the aisle, gazes directed out the slew of windows overhead. A plume of dark smoke curled into the sky beyond the visible Veil splice.
That didn’t look good.
We burst out the doors of the market, the chaos fading behind us.
Angel took the lead, steering us toward the smoke.
In the span of a single heartbeat, we crossed the Veil back to the mortal side, concrete forming where there had been cobblestone, and the sounds of traffic and sirens filled the air.
An apartment building belched black smoke from one side. A fire?
People poured from the building, children and pets in their grip, and Angel and I ran past them to the door, holding it open.
The scent of something chemical teased my senses, and the weight of magic hung in the air as we each guided people out of the building or down the main stairway to the front doors.
“Do you smell magic?” I asked Angel. “Is that because the tear is close?” He shook his head.
I knew his senses were stronger than mine and couldn’t imagine him missing the heavy weight of ozone filling the building.
A tingling sense of unease ran its way up my spine.
“Is the tear widening? I thought this one had been here for years and settled?”
“Everyone get clear,” Angel shouted in a no-nonsense cop voice. Everyone moved, shuffling quickly, the panic quieted by having confident authority giving directions. “Anyone need help getting someone out?” Angel called. He picked up a kid and helped a mother out to the curb.
I helped an elderly woman guide her husband. Fire trucks and EMTs arrived, and I directed them to one of the emergency crews. One of the EMTs eyes widened as he saw me.
“I’m SED,” I told him when his focus landed on my armband. “The building is filling with magic.” I pointed to the market in the distance. “We were across the street at the market when the explosion happened. But the tear might be expanding.”
The man cursed. “We’ll need to move down the street. Let me spread the word.”
I nodded, and Angel was already on his phone, though moving back toward the building to pull more survivors out. The firefighters waved us back, and Angel paused to argue with them about the rising magic, but something drew my gaze upward to the billowing smoke.
The fumes coiled unnaturally above the rooftop, tendrils twisting like living things.
Within the haze, jagged streaks of violet lightning flickered, raw magic arcing through the particles.
I blinked a few times, shocked to see a tangle of threads, black and sizzling, appear around the billowing smoke.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. “Angel?” I grabbed his sleeve, dragging him back a few feet. “There are patterns in the smoke. Threads,” I hissed at him.
He stared at me for a heartbeat, gaze focused on my face, then glanced up at the plume wafting from the balcony above. “Life threads?”
I held up the book clutched to my side. “I’ve had five seconds to look at this. And about that long to clarify whatever these lines are.”
“Your eyes are black.”
Well, fuck me. Was this demon magic?
One of the firefighters approached us, and Angel caught the movement, turning to face him. I hid behind Angel, keeping my gaze lowered, hoping not to frighten anyone with my eyes. Whatever the firefighter said was mostly lost on me. Something about an apartment they couldn’t enter.
Angel yanked a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and handed them over to me, then led us both to the building. I put them on and studied the bending magic as we followed the guy inside.
The smoke swirled in dark purple waves, growing thicker as the firefighter led us up a set of concrete stairs.
The chemical magic stink intensified with the weight of zapping energy, though the firefighter didn’t have his mask on.
Was it not fire smoke but magic smoke? I squeezed Angel’s hand, trying to let him know what I saw without saying it.
He held tight, keeping me against his back as we plodded upward toward the location of the blast.
The magic in the air writhed as we approached the fourth-floor landing and open door to the hall of apartments.
A vein-like luminescence, muted by the dark sunglasses, pulsed as though in time to my heartbeat, spanning the length of the wall.
The threads of color surrounded the light, tugging at it as if ripping the tear open and hemming the edges to create a wider gap for the darkness to slither through.
An apartment door hung splintered outward in its frame, an explosion from within, and I felt the drain of magic before we’d gotten ten feet from the apartment. I stopped hard, pulling Angel back. “Stop,” I called, loud, hoping to pull the response team back, fearing they’d get caught in the drain.
“Everyone pull back!” Angel yelled, projecting through the haze and making everyone turn his way.
No one could see what I did, could they? But I clung to Angel, trying to ground myself in his touch even if my magic wanted to latch onto the pandemonium growing around us, as if it knew what to do, even if I didn’t.
The response team moved as one, all of them leaving the space of the broken doorway, and I realized none of them could enter. Some sort of web of dark lines spanned the opening as if creating a barrier. Perhaps a shield of some sort?
The firefighter who had led us in stood in front of Angel asking questions, and I could sense Angel focusing on me.
“There’s a barrier over the door,” I said.
“And a magic drain leaking from within.” The vivid memory of the family sucked dry of all life in their apartment, which had been dragged across the Veil, flashed through my mind.
I didn’t even need to see inside the space to know what would lie beyond.
“Like that spell we saw across the Veil,” I whispered to Angel.
He couldn’t see it, I knew that, but he had to smell it.
“Water isn’t working,” one of the firefighters said.
“Not a chemical fire either,” another added.
“Can’t get in the apartment. It’s like invisible glass in front of the door.”
“The smoke is getting worse.”
I let all the voices filter through me as I stared at the door, wondering if there was a way to fix this. Across the Veil, when the spell had been broken, the bodies disintegrated. Were there people in there?
Yes.
My gut answered without needing further clarification.
The strands of what remained of them, what little it was, flickered on the edge of my senses.
As if whatever Nat had taught me had opened me up to seeing the lines in everything.
At least practicing would be easy in the future.
As long as we didn’t get sucked across the Veil with this building and dropped in some otherworld river of death.
“Maybe there’s something in this book to help?” I whispered to Angel, uncertain how much he wanted me to say.
“There’s a couple of SED teams on the way,” he told me and the firefighters waiting in the hall.
“There are people in there,” one of the responders said. “I can see them from the doorway.”
“They look hurt,” another added.
“Dead,” I whispered, feeling bad about that. And how I knew from out here had to be due to my variance.
“Those inside this apartment are already dead. Can we ensure the rest of the building is clear?” Angel asked the response team. “Above and below this apartment?”
The guy who had led us in nodded. “I’ll leave two with you and guide the SED up when they get here. We’ll work on making sure the building is clear.”
“Create a clear zone, too,” Angel added. “In case the building is pulled across.”
A beat of silence passed through the hallway as if none of them thought that was possible until that moment.
Then they all moved as if their asses were lit on fire.
And I suppose, as I’d never been on the scene when a tear was this fresh, opening wider as we stood there, I didn’t know how fast it could happen.
The group split into pairs, making their way to knock on doors and clear the building faster than I could recall ever seeing any emergency team move.
The weight of the magic grew, leaving me half breathless. Angel backed me up, keeping between me and the doorway to the stairs. A cool breeze slid by, clearing my senses, and I blinked up into Angel’s face, surprised to see a dark figure gliding behind us, and gasped.
“What?” Angel asked, his gaze darting behind him.
The figure moved through the smoke like ink through water, untouched by the disarray around it. The hallway lights flickered as it passed beneath them, and for a heartbeat, I saw its true shape, not unlike what had appeared across the Veil when we’d been surrounded by a horde of zombie sheep.
The silhouette bled with dark smoke around the edges. Where the face should have been beneath the hat, a grim white skull glistened, and bony fingers curled like talons as he pointed a gnarled digit at me.
My breath hitched. Piecing together what little I’d learned about the many supernatural beings across the Veil, it had to be a Reaper. Death of some kind.
It turned its head, the shadows parting for a half-breath, and I gasped as I caught the glimpse of an overlaid face on the skull.
Nat.
Holy fuck!