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She wouldn’t willingly give them up.

She wouldn’t simply allow them to leave, not for any reason… likely not ever.

Until she no longer saw them as directly useful to her organization’s goals, they would belong to Lara St. Maarten first, before they even belonged to themselves.

Nick was still lost in his thoughts, lost in his attempts to strategize, to determine any way he might reason with the Archangel CEO––

––when there was a loud, thunderclap-type sound directly behind him.

The sound rippled up his spine.

It raised the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.

Like everyone else in the clearing, apart from the two dead vampires, Nick turned his head. He craned his neck around, and stared in the direction from which the sound had come.

He already knew, somehow, what he would find.

The sound had come from the dimensional rift.

Nick stared at it, along with everyone else.

He stared at the flickering, blue-green-gold light. He stared at the coiling smoke or mist, the glimpse of stars in the distance, the flashes of glittering light and color. He realized in shock, in a blind, terrified horror, that the rift was narrower than it had been the last time he’d looked at it. Instead of an opening of five or six feet, it looked to be under four feet now.

Another rumbled filled the clearing, and then it was three feet wide.

The dimensional portal was closing.

It was fucking closing, and there was nothing Nick could do to stop it.

All of them stared at that narrowing glimpse of space and time.

Not just Nick and his friends, but Lara St. Maarten, the I.S. Fucked officers, the members of The Leash and the higher-ups among the Human Racial Authority––all of them had frozen in place, stopped in the middle of whatever they’d been doing to watch as the door closed.

Some part of Nick wanted to make a run for it.

He wanted to grab Wynter, grab Malek and Tai, have each of them grab a hand of someone else who stood by them: Jordan, Morley, Kit, Charlie.

But Wynter was too far away, and Nick’s arms were bound.

His ankles were bound.

He could only kneel there, staring, as the rift’s opening eclipsed.

The only door he’d ever found that might take him back to his home world closed right in front of him, and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do.

The two sides of the portal melded seamlessly together, and another rolling peal of thunder jolted Nick’s teeth, making them vibrate painfully.

The portal was gone.

Nick, Wynter, the bushes, the trees, the dirt, the circle where they all knelt, got thrown into a mind-numbing darkness. The mountain itself loomed over them, a featureless shadow against the night sky, silent and unmoving.

Then grass rustled in the wind.

The dome’s stars shone dully in the hollow bowl of an artificial sky, looking disappointingly fake and two-dimensional now that Nick had been reminded of the difference.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to scream until they put him out of his misery for real.