Chapter 57
ANGEL
You’re doing great…
The song broke through the haze of sleep. My eyes snapped open.
Light bled through unfamiliar curtains. Daytime, late. I catalogued the room. Borrowed. Bland, but upscale. Xavier’s safehouse.
The phone kept ringing, Jude’s ringtone. He’d set it himself, that silly boyish grin on his face.
Wait.
I jerked upright, fumbling for the phone on the side table. The ringing stopped just as my fingers closed around it.
I hit redial. It rang. Once. Twice. Five times. Voicemail. The sound of Jude’s no-nonsense voice made my heart ache: Leave a message after the beep.
I tried again. Nothing.
I stared at the screen, at the missed call with Jude’s name attached, and wondered if I was going crazy. My heart hammered, a frantic drum against the silence where the bond should be. I slumped back against the pillows. The fight drained out of me.
A weight landed on my chest. “Oof,” I choked, and opened my eyes. Nox, in cat form, filled my vision, his nose an inch from mine, purple gaze narrowed. “Uh, hi?”
He gave a low, chiding merow.
“What? Do you need out? Aren’t you magic or something?” I glanced around him, finding the door cracked open just enough for a cat.
I should get up and face the world, be the leader they expected, but the pillow beneath my head smelled like Jude. Someone must have taken it from my apartment and given it to me.
Any other time, I’d have been embarrassed about clinging to a scent, but my heart ached. The beast of shadow and rage slept, burrowed in my soul. I knew it wouldn’t take much to awaken it, but the quiet gave me a long breath of mental clarity. Which, of course, added more questions.
Nox purred, a soft, grounding vibration against my sternum. My hand moved automatically to stroke his back. Nox nipped my chin.
“Ouch. Dammit.”
He began to knead my collarbone, claws digging in. Making biscuits. It hurt with a clarifying sharp, and physical pain. I focused on it. Nox leaned in, bumping his forehead hard against my jaw. A demand. When I didn’t move, he did it again, more insistent.
“I’m up,” I grunted, though I wasn’t. What was the point?
He trilled, hopped off my chest, paused, then jumped back up, landing with that brutal thousand-pound cat-paw stand.
“Are you trying to break my ribs?” I raised a brow at him. We stared at each other. Sharing a moment of understanding. He missed Jude too.
“I need to find him,” I said and swung my legs over the side of the bed, and sitting up, knocking Nox off my chest. He grumbled at me as I pushed myself up to take a step toward the door. Nox batted at my ankle.
I glared down at the fae-cat-dragon. “What?”
He hopped off the bed, leaned against the bedroom door to nudge it shut, then trotted to the open bathroom doorway. He sat, waiting.
“Is this your way of saying I stink?”
A flat stare.
I glanced down. My clothes were days old, crusted with ash and blood. I looked, and smelled, like something dragged out of a warzone. His expression said I needed to look less like a feral animal, and more like someone composed and ready to hear reason.
“Right. I should clean up.”
Twenty minutes later, I was as clean and composed as I could stand, scrubbed raw, in clothes that didn’t smell of smoke or blood. It was a thin veneer of humanity, but it would have to do.
Nox’s ears twitched, his head cocked sharply toward the living room.
I listened, too. Beneath the TV’s drone, I counted heartbeats. Grandpa’s, steady as stone. Peanut Butter’s snores, a contented rumble. And Ivan’s, a rabbit-quick flutter of panic in the stillness. Something was wrong.
Nox launched off the bed and streaked through the open door.
I was on his tail as he crossed the living room, a silent shadow flowing toward Ivan’s room.
The door clicked open an inch before he reached it.
Magicking it open. Of course. Good to know the little menace didn’t need my help for midnight door duty.
I tiptoed into the dim room. The air tasted of ozone and old paper. Ivan was hunched on the floor, his silhouette stark against the cold light of his phone screen as he leaned over the haunted printer I should have confiscated. But his focus was fixed on the open closet door.
It wasn’t a closet anymore.
The space within churned with snapping violet energy. Jagged, static-like tendrils licked the frame. The deep purple light pulsed like something breathing, and a low, sub-audible hum vibrated in the fillings of my teeth. A smell, sharp as burnt wire and wet stone, rolled out in waves.
Holy fuck. Was there a portal in Ivan’s goddamn closet?
“Ivan…”
He scrambled to his feet. In one frantic motion, he planted himself directly in front of the swirling maw, arms flung out as if his skinny frame could block the view and somehow hide a screaming tear in reality with his body.
“What the hell—?” The question died in my throat. I had too many, and they were all trying to claw their way out at once.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, voice tight.
“It looks like you’ve opened a goddamn portal. In your bedroom. In Xavier’s borrowed, warded apartment.” I kept my voice low, a furious hiss. How long before the wolf figured out there was a breach?
“Uh…” His gaze darted to the swirling vortex behind him. “It’s… it’s a door. To Jude.”
“What!”
He sucked in a sharp breath, as if bracing himself, and gestured to the papers strewn across his bed.
Diagrams of interlocking circles sprawled across the pages in an ink that shimmered faintly, looking less like science and more like forbidden alchemy ripped from a nightmare.
“It’s a temporary doorway. Not a veil tear. ”
It looked exactly like a tear in the Veil. It hummed with the same wrongness Jude had described from our previous encounters, from the purple lightning to the moving smoke. “Ivan…”
“I just want to talk to him,” he whispered, the words raw with a grief that instantly doused my anger, leaving only cold fear.
“I asked the printer if it could give me a way to find him. And since I have a bond to him, a brother-bond, and I sort of… borrowed the idea of your bond, the mate-thing, as a booster? Like a two-point anchor? And it spat out all this… this long, detailed ritual about creating a ‘way between.’ I had to stop it because I was running out of paper, but I had the important parts, the diagrams, and I… I didn’t really know what they’d do, I just assembled them like the instructions said, and then it just… activated. And now… well. Here we are.”
He’d opened a door to somewhere. My mind conjured a grim catalog of possibilities, a lake of fire, a den of soul-eaters, a void. Each one an instant, gruesome finale. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m just going to peek through it,” Ivan said, already inching toward the swirling darkness as if he intended to stick his head in a lion’s mouth.
“The hell you are.” My hand shot out, grabbing his arm and yanking him back from the swirling darkness. “How do we close it?”
“Don’t you want to see if Jude is on the other side?” His voice was half challenge, half plea.
“Jude is dead.” The words snapped out, harsh and final, a knife in my own gut as if saying them would make them more real.
Ivan flinched, his gaze falling to the floor.
“Ivy,” I began, needing to fix this if only because Jude would have, and he’d have been so much better at it. “This could be a trap from some other world. We don’t know Jude is through there.”
“I feel him.”
And how terrible was I to stomp on that hope? “He’d want you safe,” I said, trying for reason. “Not jumping through a cosmic doorway to the unknown.”
We stared at each other for a long moment as Nox leapt up on the bed and batted at the pages. Ivan and I both held our breath, eyes locked on the portal. The violet energy continued to churn and snap, utterly indifferent to the missing pieces of its recipe.
A new kind of cold seeped into my veins. Well. That couldn’t be good.
“That should have broken the spell,” Ivan muttered, staring at the stubbornly swirling vortex in disbelief.
“Does that damn printer of yours have a troubleshooting section?” I snapped, my eyes darting between the portal and the bedroom door. “An off switch?”
Ivan hefted a stack of pages easily two inches thick. “Maybe in the instructions? But I had to stop printing. I ran out of paper.”
The unmistakable sound of the main apartment door opening cut through the hum of the portal. Voices followed. Sylas’s sarcastic teasing, Keanan’s flat reply, and beneath them, the low, rumble of Xavier himself. He must have felt the breach.
We didn’t have minutes to skim an epic fantasy novel for the deactivation rune. My mind raced through pathetic, mortal options. Slam the closet door? It was a physical barrier to a metaphysical breach. We were seconds from being caught red-handed.
“Maybe you can distract him?” I said, my mind scrambling for ideas.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Ask him for homework help?
” If the kid had been a few years older, the answer would have been obvious since their fated mate bond meant a connection, even if Xavier pretended it didn’t exist. But Ivan was still a kid, and Xavier was a centuries-old demigod claiming he’d ignore his mate.
Right now, I had a teenager, a stack of incomplete magic instructions, and a screaming hole in reality that needed to vanish in the next thirty seconds.
Ivan’s eyes went wide with panic, then narrowed with a startling, desperate cunning.
“Homework.” He searched the room, blanching at the mess of papers.
“Maybe food. I’m really hungry. And sad.
Food sometimes makes people feel better, right?
Jude always fed me when he thought I was sad.
” He nodded, a grim little soldier, and slipped out of the room, pulling the door almost shut behind him.
A second later, I heard his voice, “Hey, ah… that bakery Jude brought me stuff from? That’s close, right?”
Xavier’s response was indecipherable, but the distraction was live. Though I knew I didn’t have much time. He could probably sense the magic, or whatever the fuck this was.
I turned back to the problem. The portal pulsed, impatient as a heartbeat.
I flipped through the stack of papers frantically, pages of schematics mapping impossible energy flows, annotations in a tight, looping script I couldn’t read, and a disconcerting number of question marks scrawled in the margins.
Was this runes? Alchemy? Something from a dimension where physics was just a polite suggestion?
The actual answer was probably on the last page, still trapped in the haunted printer because we’d run out of paper.
Nox stared at me from a perch on the end of the bed, head tilted as though I were a puzzle he was trying to solve. “Don’t suppose you have a book about unstable portals to the unknown?”
The voices in the living room trickled closer to the door, though thankfully Ivan had shut the bedroom door behind him.
I grabbed the closet door and threw my weight into swinging it shut.
It moved an inch before hitting an invisible wall of resistance, the violet light bleeding around the edges, searing the paint with black, smoking cracks.
The portal wasn’t just in the closet; it was fused to it.
Until we closed the portal, there was no closet.
This close to the portal I could sense something tugging at my core. I sucked in a haggard breath. It was my bond to Jude. Was Ivan right and this was a portal to wherever Jude was?
A sharp chirp from Nox made me glance over my shoulder. In that split second of distraction, he launched. Not a playful pounce, but a deliberate, full-bodied impact against the small of my back.
The shove, combined with the portal’s relentless pull, broke my balance completely. I jolted forward, arms flailing, into the violent, humming light.
“Son of a—!” The curse was torn from my lips as the world unstitched, folding itself violently inside out.