Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
The campus is alive with students now, all walking fast to their first class or the nearest coffee stand. Tia and I zig and zag between them as we hurry toward Mr. Griffin’s place and whatever new info Riley has to share.
“You’re really not going to tell me anything?” I ask.
Tia shrugs. “I would, but you’d ask questions, and I don’t know how to answer them. Trust me. Riley can explain it much better.”
“Fine. But I’m going to assume the worst.”
She grimaces, and my stomach twists.
“Well, hell,” I say. “Does that mean I really do need to assume the worst?”
“Yes. No.” She shoots me a scathing glare. “I don’t know. And stop asking me questions. I’ll just make stuff up and then you’ll be really confused.”
“Just a hint?” I plead, then say a silent cheer when I see the resigned expression on her face that means I’ve won.
“It’s just that Riley’s found some weird stuff.”
“Well, duh. I figured that out on my own. Define weird stuff.”
She stops walking long enough to stare me down. “That’s my point. Riley can tell you. All I can say is there’s bad shit happening at the Widow Maker.”
I pause, remembering how the cat freaked out, and almost get run over by a guy on a scooter.
“What kind of bad shit?”
But she just puts her fingers in her ears and says, “La la la,” as she continues walking.
I hurry into step beside her. “You know I hate you right now.”
She stops la-ing long enough to look at me. “No, you don’t.” And, dammit, of course she’s right.
I glance back toward the massive tree, but what I can see of it seems perfectly normal. Still, I remember overhearing Tia and Riley when Adric brought me here. Something about readings being off.
I start to ask Tia about that particular conversation but decide now isn’t the time to reopen the whole I spied on you when I was here with my pretty much godlike fiancé thing.
So, no, I don’t bring it up. But I do veer off our trajectory and cross to the tree.
I hear Tia sigh, but she doesn’t protest. Instead, she follows me.
I stand under its canopy and look up. It’s the oldest oak in St. Augustine, and it’s huge. It’s also infused with magic. That’s what legend says. And Tia agrees.
As for me, I think it’s both awesome and creepy. After all, students have reported seeing the shadows of hanged men swinging from those limbs. So maybe not the place for a midnight picnic after all.
I frown as I look, noticing things I hadn’t seen when I’d been watching the cat.
For one thing, the moss is the wrong color.
Like a washed-out gray. And the grass at the base is dead, forming what seems to be a perfect circle around the massive trunk.
Some sort of gardening equipment that distributes fertilizer in a circle, maybe?
But instead, it spread poison? Like maybe some horrible Frat initiation that no one will ever cop to?
Possible, but my gut knows that’s not right.
I take a step closer and feel a weird buzzy sensation. Like I walked too close to high voltage. When I step back, the buzziness lessens.
I turn back to Tia. “Something really is wrong here.”
She nods. “And listen. No birds.”
She’s right. And how freakishly weird is that?
Birds are everywhere on campus—gulls, mockingbirds, grackles. But there are no birds in or near the Widow Maker.
“There were birds here at the start of the semester,” I say. “Weren’t there?”
“I think so.” She shrugs. “Or maybe we’re just assuming?”
“Maybe.” But I don’t believe it. And I’m sure she doesn’t either. I turn in a slow circle, taking it all in. “Let’s haul ass to the store,” I say, increasing my pace to a half-run, with Tia right behind me.
When we arrive breathless at the Griffin’s Nest, three students are camped out at the new release table. A woman with a baby in a sling browses the gardening section, and somebody at the register is paying for a stack of paperbacks.
And there’s Mr. Griffin, ringing them up. He catches my eye and gives the smallest nod toward the back.
As we have so many times before, Tia and I weave through to the back room, then head down the stairs.
My eyes go wide as soon as the training space comes into view.
Mostly because it is no longer the training space it was just a few hours ago.
Now, it’s a classroom. A long folding table dominates the space, with Riley seated at one end, two laptops open in front of her, and a pile of books stacked behind her computer.
Her short purple hair is sticking up like she’s been running her fingers through it, and her septum ring catches the light from the array of monitors on the far side of the room.
A different graph fills every monitor, and I have zero idea what the information represents. Presumably, Riley will clue us in.
As for Chase, he’s leaning against one of the mirrors that line this round room. His arms are crossed, and his eyes are on me. I pause, then smile, and he extends a hand.
“Hi,” I say, moving to his side.
“Hi,” he says, with the kind of heat in his voice that precedes a kiss. A kiss I don’t get because Riley shoves back from the table and launches herself at me, almost sending us both tumbling. Thankfully, we have Chase’s firm hand on my shoulder keeping us steady.
“Lyte,” she squeals as she hugs me so tight I start to fear I’ll get tunnel vision. When she steps back, I gulp in air as she looks me up and down. “We were so freaked. Thank goodness you’re okay. You are okay, right?” She studies my face. “I mean, what with pretty much going to hell?”
“Nightmare realm,” I say. “Not hell, I promise. It’s actually quite lovely. And I got to ride a dragon.”
Her eyes go wide. “Well, now I’m just jealous.” A smile tugs at her mouth. “But it’s true? You’re really okay?”
“Fine,” I assure her.
“We were really worried,” she says, nodding toward Tia. “We burned through three entire packs of chocolate truffles in one sitting. I mean, it was touch and go for a while.”
She grins, then pulls me into another hug. “Seriously,” she says as she releases me. “We’re all so relieved you’re back.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I wish I could have told you all not to worry. Like an inter-realm cell phone or something.”
Riley catches Tia’s eye. “Actually, I should work on that.”
I laugh, but also wonder if maybe she’s serious. Because how cool would that be?
I glance at Chase, then nod to Riley. “You two met?”
She nods, looking like a kid in a candy shop.
“Just now. I mean, I already knew about him, but meeting a real, live Hunter from another realm. It’s like the time my mom met Brad Pitt.
I totally want to sit you down and talk about pretty much everything,” she tells him.
“It’s top of my list of things I will absolutely circle back to when there are fewer apocalyptic readings on my screen. ”
She turns back to me, then frowns as she eyes my necklace. “Cool necklace. Wine?”
“Not exactly,” I say as Tia slides up beside her and takes her hand.
“I’ll catch you up later,” Tia says. “Right now, you’re on deck.”
“Oh, right. Right, right, right.” She gestures to the chairs and the cushions on the floor. “Get comfortable,” she says. “I’ve got a lot to tell you all.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Mr. Griffin?” Tia asks.
Riley shakes her head. “His help called in sick, so he’s watching the store. But I filled him in earlier.” She draws a breath. “Okay. You guys ready?”
Chase, Tia, and I nod, and she taps something on her laptop. The second she does, her screen comes awake, appearing on one of the room’s huge monitors. It’s a satellite image of campus—the quad, Hamilton Hall, the Science Center, and the Widow Maker, right in the middle of it all.
Riley sits up straighter, then clears her throat. “Right. Okay. Fair warning, I ramble. But onward.” She taps the laptop, and suddenly there’s a bright red blob centered on the Widow Maker, fading to yellow and then green at the edges.
“Heat map,” Riley says. “And, okay. Backstory first. I moved here in late May, did both summer terms to get a head start on my Comp Sci requirements, and pretty much immediately started getting bored. So I picked up an extra credit project. My family’s been into amateur electromagnetics since forever—my mom worked in telecom, and dad ran a ham radio operation in our basement that I’ve helped with since I was five.
So I came to college with a serious kit, and I wanted to use it. ”
“A kit?” I ask, wondering if I’m the only one not following.
“Gear for measuring electromagnetic stuff,” she explains. “Spectrum analyzer, field meters, EMF detectors—stuff you use to measure invisible things.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, hoping there won’t be a pop quiz. “You were taking readings or something at the Widow Maker? What for?”
“That’s the thing. I wasn’t. My original site was the cell tower behind the cafeteria. Predictable anomaly source, easy data. I was going to write up a clean little portfolio piece on tower interference patterns. Easy A in a summer class. Get my credit and move on.”
“But?”
“One night, I was walking back from my dorm past the Widow Maker. I was talking with a friend, and poof, my phone died. Like totally. But I’d started out with a full charge.
Annoying, right? I figured it was a glitch and just kept walking.
And then on the far side of the quad, poof.
It came back on. But only with a sixty-three percent charge. ”
“Weird, right?” Tia says, and I nod.
“I mean, it could have just been a glitch. But I didn’t think so. So I did it again. Five times, actually. Went dead at the same spot. Same percentage return when it came back on.”
“That’s totally freaky,” I say.
She nods. “Freaky enough that I changed my project. Easy A on the tower could wait. The tree was interesting. The first thing I did was define the zone. Walked a grid around the Widow Maker with a portable spectrum analyzer, marking every spot where electronics behaved abnormally. Make sense?”
“I think so,” I say, “but you’re starting to fry my brain. Can you jump to the I-Suck-at-Science wrap-up?”
She glances at Tia, who shrugs. “Bottom line, there’s an area around the Widow Maker that I’m calling a Dead Zone. And it’s getting bigger.”
She clicks a few keys, and some graphs pop onto the screen. “Slow at first, see? And then it really starts to grow.”
“And that means what?” Chase asks.
“It means that whatever’s making the tree weird is getting bigger. Or stronger. Or both.”
“What is it?” I ask. “What’s doing that?”
She just shakes her head. “Don’t I wish I knew? I’ve never seen anything like it. But here’s another weird thing. The day you disappeared?” She taps the graph, and the line spikes sharply. “The dead zone grew. Three feet to six. Whatever’s stabilizing at this tree, it noticed when you crossed.”
“Meaning?” I ask, trying not to shudder.
“Okay, so, more backstory. Before I knew about all this, I was already working a thesis that there was some kind of portal at the tree. Weird readings that didn’t make sense.
Stuff bleeding over. Stuff that’s not normally here.
I didn’t know what, exactly, and the goal was to figure it out.
Or at least prove it was really happening.
Once Tia told me about the Nightmare Realm, the puzzle pieces snapped together. ”
“Snapped how?”
“I’m almost a billion percent sure that the Widow Maker’s a doorway. And it’s been slowly waking up. Or unlocking. Pick your metaphor.”
I look from her to Tia, who shrugs.
I glance at Riley. “Can you try that one again?”
Riley tilts her head back and forth, then says, “Okay, try this—think of the spike on the day you crossed as the door noticing it had been used.”
Chase has gone very still. “If a portal is stabilizing here,” he says quietly, “mares will come through it. Whether anyone sends them or not.”
The room goes quiet.
“How long?” Tia asks, looking between Chase and Riley. “I mean, how long before the readings get bad enough that things actually come through?”
“Not long,” Chase says. “Days. Maybe weeks. Depending on how fast it’s stabilizing.”
“Right.” Riley’s I’m in charge of the lecture voice is completely gone. She looks around the room at all of us. “So we pretty much need to figure this shit out fast.”
And that, I think, is one hell of an understatement.