Chapter 6 Live Long and Portal
Turns out, the worst isn’t so bad. We break into pairs—Grace couples up with Jaxon while Macy and I team up—and then we start combing our assigned part of the forest for portals.
Macy and I fall through one that feels like a giant electric shock the entire time we’re in it, and we hit the ground about fifty feet away—with every hair on our body standing straight up.
She cracks up the second she sees me. “You look ridiculous!”
“At least my hair is meant to stand up,” I tell her, brows raised at the way her entire hot-pink pixie cut is also standing on end.
“It’s a new trend,” she tells me even as she tries to smooth some of it down.
“Apparently,” I answer as two more students fall through the portal and have the exact same thing happen to them.
Macy starts to say something to them, but they take one look at me and dive straight back through the portal without giving themselves more than a second or two to recover from the sting of all those electric shocks.
“Don’t worry about them,” Macy tells me as she loops an arm through mine and pulls me closer to the portal. “People can be assholes.”
“I’ve learned there’s no ‘can be’ about it,” I answer right before we get electrocuted again. “Arsehole is pretty much most people’s default setting.”
“True story,” she tells me, and it’s the last thing I hear as we tumble back out onto the ground, right where we started.
“They didn’t even mark it,” Macy says, all but crackling with indignation as she looks at the dirt around the portal.
“Who’s got time to post a flag when the bogeyman is on your arse?” I answer with a snort.
“You’re not the bogeyman!” She shakes her head in annoyance. “People need to get over their shit.”
“People need to get over a lot of things,” I answer as Jaxon stalks toward me with a glower on his face.
“What’d you do to her?” he demands as he gets in my face.
“Do to whom?” I ask, shooting him a what the fuck look. At least until it registers on me that he’s alone. “Grace? You lost Grace?”
For the first time, he looks uncertain. “She’s not with you?”
“Bloody hell, man!” I shove a hand through my hair in frustration. “Why the fuck would she be with us?”
“I don’t know. She was right behind me one second, and then she was gone. I stopped to answer a text, and we heard you and Macy laughing through the trees. I figured she just came over to see you for a minute.”
“We fell through a portal,” Macy says. “We never saw her.”
“How long’s she been gone?” I move away from him, scanning the area as best I can considering we’re surrounded by trees in all directions. But Grace is wearing hot pink—how bloody hard could it be to spot her if she’s actually here? I’d wager you could spot that coat from space on a clear day.
“I don’t know. Five minutes or so?” He glances toward the portal Macy’s just finished marking. “You’re sure she didn’t fall in there with you?”
“It’s pretty narrow.” Macy shakes her head even as she pulls out her phone to text Grace. “And short. We definitely would have seen her.”
“So where is she, then?” I ask, moving deeper into the trees in an effort to glimpse some hint of her curly hair. But I don’t see anything.
“She didn’t answer my text.” Macy hits Call, and we all listen intently for Grace’s ringtone. But there’s nothing, save the whistle of the wind through the trees.
“She had to have fallen through a portal,” I say grimly, my stomach sinking as a bad feeling invades me.
“Yeah.” Jaxon blows out a long breath. “Which means she could be literally anywhere on the planet.”
“Not anywhere,” Macy says in an obvious attempt to soothe our nerves. “When they’re doing portals out here, the witch instructors limit students to a three-hundred-mile radius.”
“And here I was thinking they’d limit students to Katmere’s grounds,” I growl. “Considering students aren’t supposed to leave campus without checking out at the front office.”
“They do limit the first-year portal class,” Macy answers. “But they give the seniors a lot more leeway.”
“Apparently.” Jaxon prowls past me like a fucking wanker, and it’s obvious from the look on his face that he doesn’t trust that I’m doing a thorough-enough job.
I think about calling him on it, but I don’t want to waste the time right now.
Not when Grace is missing and we have a shite-ton of area to cover.
Instead, I change direction, turning right to check out the eastern portion of our area. I’m still scanning the forest for her pink jacket, but now I’m checking for portals, too.
“I don’t get it,” Macy says after a few minutes of unsuccessful portal hunting. “She’s been gone almost fifteen minutes now. Why doesn’t she just step back through it, like we did? It’s not like she doesn’t know how to go through portals by now.”
It’s a good question, but the answer has been haunting me ever since we figured out how she’d disappeared.
“She tends to dive in headfirst,” I say as I cover the ground around me in a quick back-and-forth pattern meant to cover every inch.
“She nearly injured herself a couple of times during Ludares.”
They both look surprised, but that’s because usually Grace went through those portals alone.
I’m the only one who was with her every second of the tournament, so I’m the only one who felt the way she landed when she came out of one—which was normally on her face or with her hands braced in front of her.
“Let’s split up,” Macy suggests. “I’ll take this area. Jaxon can cover that big patch to the right, and Hudson can cover the patch to the left. If she was just waiting on Jaxon to answer a couple of texts, she couldn’t have gone far.”
That’s what I think, too—or at least, what I’m hoping.
I start to run—I’m not quite fading because experience has taught me that sometimes you can go so fast that you actually skip over a portal opening, but I’m definitely moving faster than usual as I try to cover every inch of the area I’m in charge of as quickly as possible.
So far there’s been nothing, though, and I’m starting to get nervous. What if she did wander off farther than we thought? And worse, what if she’s actually badly hurt? How long is it going to take us to find her?
The thought pushes me to go faster, even though I’m meticulous in the area I’m covering. A couple of long minutes pass before Macy calls out to ask if either of us have found anything. Jaxon answers in the negative and so do I, and I can feel the anxiety growing deep inside me.
She has to be here, I tell myself, determined to stay calm. Which means we’ll find her, even if we have to ask for help from the others. We just need to be precise in what areas we’ve covered and what we haven’t. If we do that, then—
My foot goes right through the ground in front of me and disappears—a sure sign that I’ve found a portal. Praying it’s the same one Grace fell into a little while ago, I throw myself straight into it without another thought.