Chapter 29 #2
“Show them,” Tia says. “It’s gotten way worse.”
Riley turns the laptop so we can see it better, then refreshes the image.
The first thing I notice is that the heat-map thingie of the dead zone isn’t a circle anymore.
It’s more like a really smooshed oval. Or a long caterpillar that’s eaten its way across the walkway, its zillion little legs spreading out and inching toward Hamilton Hall on one side and the Science Center on the other.
“And the cameras caught six crossings in two nights,” Riley says. She clicks, and grainy night-vision fills the screen. A low four-legged shape slinks across dead grass and folds back into the trunk like it was never there. Then another, smaller and scuttling.
It’s awful, but it’s also almost…ordinary. Little things, darting and gone. My pulse is just starting to settle when the next clip loads and something dark steps into the frame.
It’s tall—seriously tall—and it doesn’t slink or scuttle.
It unfolds, joint after joint after joint, like a body trying to remember how to be a body and getting it wrong.
Skeletal. Slow. It crosses the dead grass without hurry, and even though it’s just a grainy video feed in a bright room, something in my chest turns to ice.
I don’t know what that thing is. But every cell in my body knows it’s worse than the rest combined.
“Chase.” My voice comes out small.
He’s already moved closer to the screen. “Well, fuck,” he says softly, and that’s scarier than if he’d shouted. “That’s a Threnir. From Retribution—the darkest realm under Adric’s crown. And the Threnir is the worst thing that lives there.”
“Worst how?” I ask, even though every part of me that just went cold really doesn’t want the answer.
“It feeds on terror.” His jaw tightens. “So it keeps its prey terrified. Days. Weeks, if it’s careful. It knows exactly how much you can take before you break, and exactly how to keep you from breaking so that the terror can keep on coming.”
He draws a breath but doesn’t look away from the screen. “Dying would be the part you’d be grateful for.”
I look back at the thing unfolding across the grass, and I think about it standing on my campus. Near the dining hall. The dorms. Tia.
“All these things that are coming over,” I make myself say. “Where are they going?”
Tia just shrugs.
Chase shakes his head, then sighs. “My guess is Kali recruited them, and she’s secured a place for them to hole up until it’s time.”
“Time?” I repeat, my voice squeaking as it rises. “For what?”
He meets my eyes, his dark and fathomless. “War, I assume.”
“Oh,” I say, though I should have seen that coming. “What do we do?”
“We find them,” Riley says, her voice hard and firm. “If Kali’s sneaking her army into the Real, we find where the soldiers are going, and we take them out.”
Chase tips his head. “Good plan in theory. Except you’re talking about creatures—” he completely disappears “—who can cross dimensions at will,” he finishes, popping back into existence by the front door.
I scowl. Tia’s eyes go wide. Riley just claps and says, “Oh, wow, that is so cool.”
She’s not wrong. “But if the enemy can do that little parlor trick,” I say, “they’re going to be a bitch to catch, much less kill.”
“Exactly,” Chase says, returning to my side. “But the good news is, they’re crossing in the wee hours. Which means they’re not ready yet. And that gives us time.”
“He’s right,” Riley says. “Every crossing’s late at night, when campus is dead. But soon it won’t be just a few. It’ll be an army. And what do you bet it comes over during the day?”
I nod, leaning against Chase, who wraps his arms around me.
“When it comes to a head, they’ll cross when classes are changing, so there’ll be a zillion kids passing right by the Widow Maker,” I say, the thought making me sick.
“And it’s going to be soon. I mean, they’re testing it now—but testing is risky.
They wouldn’t bother unless they were close. A week, maybe?”
Tia and Riley both nod, and when I look up at Chase, he does, too.
“I’ve got a guy in the admin office who owes me,” he says.
“I can get the whole area around the tree cordoned off—pathogen scare, soil contamination, whatever sticks. Doesn’t matter what they believe, as long as it reroutes foot traffic and gets students off that path.
” He drags his fingers through his hair.
“It won’t stop anything from coming through.
But if something does, I’d rather it come up in an empty quad than one full of kids.
” He shrugs, then looks at me. “That’s the best I can buy us.
Distance. After that, we need a real plan. ”
“A week,” Tia says with a shiver. “Guess we ought to hurry,” she adds, as Riley opens a clean doc on her laptop.
Fifteen minutes later, we’ve got more than the bones of a plan—we’ve got a little skin and muscle, too.
Chase will handle getting the area roped off.
Riley’s all over, setting up cameras and live feeds.
Tia’s going to stay on translations but shift to the old stuff—how the barriers were built, what holds them up, and anything she can find about the keystone.
Nobody says the obvious thing, which is that a fence does not stop a monster from walking out from behind a tree at noon in front of a tour group.
It could happen. I really, really hope it doesn’t.
Then Chase says it—the thing that’s been sitting like a lump in my gut ever since Whistler said Kali’s name. “Does Adric know how fast it’s moving?”
“I’ll tell him tonight,” I say, hating that this is my burden.
“He has to hear all of it. Kali’s soldiers.
The freaky rot spreading around the Widow Maker.
The daytime crossings.” I look at all of them in turn.
“It isn’t just one breach getting worse—it’s the keystone.
Adric said so himself. It goes, the barriers all go. ”
“Do you really think he cares?” Chase asks, his voice mild.
I look at him. “What the hell are you saying?”
“Exactly what I asked. He cares about you, Cora. But the rest of it? The students, the school, your little coffee stand? The parks and the ocean and the quaint shops? Hell, the whole history of this town—of this world you’re a part of?
” He holds my eyes. “All of that, and you’re still the only piece of it he loves. ”
He says it without heat, even as my mind drags itself back to last night. The two of them beside me. A night where their differences went quiet.
A night that, if Chase is right, changed nothing for Adric.
I swallow. “He wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure?” He steps closer and takes my hands. “I’m not saying it to be cruel. I’m saying we need to know where he actually stands before we’re standing in the wreckage, finding out the hard way.”
And there it is—the thing I’ve been ignoring all day, said out loud by the other man I love.
I nod, blinking hard to hold back tears. “I’ll find out,” I say. “Tonight. Alone.” I add the last word before Chase can say he’s coming, too. “He’s not going to give me the truth with you in the room. You know that.”
“He might not give you the truth anyway.”
I only shrug. Whether he’s right or wrong, it is what it is.
I draw a breath, then catch Tia looking at me. “Walk me out before you go interrogate your fiancé,” she says. “I left my charger in the car.”
Her charger is right there, plugged in next to the fridge. More than that, Riley has a battered old car, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t drive.
Doesn’t matter. I grab Chase’s hoodie like it’s an emotional support jacket and follow Tia out, because of course this isn’t about chargers. We sit on the steps in the slanting afternoon light, and she bumps my shoulder with hers, then waits.
“Okay,” I finally say, zipping up the hoodie despite the afternoon warmth. “Don’t laugh.”
“I would never.”
I stare her down. “You’ll definitely laugh.”
“I’ll laugh later, in private. You’ll never know. Now talk.”
I blow out a breath. “I think I want to do it again. The—last-night thing. The three of us.” My face is on fire.
“And I don’t know what that makes me, and it’s messing with my head a little, and I’m supposed to be saving the world, and instead a solid forty percent of my brain is doing a lusty-teen routine. ”
“You are a lusty teen,” Tia says.
“Okay, but am I a slut?”
“No way,” she says with absolutely zero hesitation, which only makes me love her more. “You’re in love with two people who are crazy about you right back. That’s not a scandal. Movie of the week, maybe, what with Adric playing the anti-hero, but not a scandal.”
I try very hard to stare her down without laughing. So far, I’m managing.
Then she bumps my shoulder again. “Of course, the studio screwed up. Because it’s so not television. We’re talking NC-17 major theatrical release all the way.”
I roll my eyes—mostly in the hope that the motion will stop my cheeks from burning.
“I’m serious,” she says. “No bitching about your very intriguing love life while the lawn’s trying to eat freshmen. Ground the Lust Bunnies. They can come back out when the world’s not ending.”
“Right. Lust Bunnies, grounded. Totally on it.”
“Good,” she says, then pulls me into a hug. “Probably bad timing to say I’m a little jealous. Because a three-way? Honestly, that’s on my bucket list.”
“Noted,” I say. “But it’s Riley you need to be talking to, not me.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Working up the nerve.” She nods up toward the apartment. “Now go say goodbye to one of your men so you can go tell the other his right hand’s a traitor. And remember,” she adds, “you come back safe, or I will totally beat the crap out of you.”
“Roger that,” I say. And then, because I just don’t want to deal with goodbyes, I stand up, check the street for lingering pedestrians, then take a single step and cross over to the Nightmare Realm.