Page 152

Nick could feel something else now, too, a feeling he wouldn’t have recognized even a month ago, but now was so unmistakeable, he understood the significance even before he’d admitted it to himself fully.

He felt floaty, light-headed, in a way he hadn’t when the radiation had been poisoning him. He saw whispers of memories behind his eyes, views of himself standing on the battlefield beside Brick, both of them gripping long plasma rifles as they walked side by side into a firefight filled with Charles’ seers wielding swords, and mentally-compromised humans wearing armor that vampire fangs couldn’t puncture.

Nick saw dead bodies strewn for entire football fields in all directions. In his head, the air smelled like smoke and fresh blood, and Nick’s fangs were extended even as rage boiled through him that he had to be there at all.

Then he would blink, and he would see a house just like his parents’ house in Potrero Hill. He would see bonfires on the beach, and his tanned, human arms, and hear laughter as they passed around joints, their boom-box blaring tunes that echoed up the sandy cliffs.

Nick blinked again, more forcefully that time, and the corridor swam back into view.

The portal was close.

It had to be.

Wynter glanced over at him when he thought it, and gave him a slight nod.

He could feel that her and the other seers were reacting to its nearness, too, but he couldn’t tell in exactly what ways. From what he could feel, Wynter was having an especially strong reaction to it, though, which made sense if she wasn’t from this world.

“It’s not just Wynter,” Tai whispered.

Nick glanced at the baby seer, then at her brother, who walked beside her, now holding his sister’s hand.

As Nick looked at their two, pale, dirt-smudged faces, he realized she was right.

It wasn’t just Wynter.

It wasn’t just him.

Maybe it was all of them.

Or maybe it was just those of them who hadn’t been born in this place.

Either way, Nick could feel his blood singing with a kind of chaotic relief.

It was stronger than he remembered from the last time he’d gotten this close to one of the portal gates. It was strong enough to make him feel dizzy, drunk, even euphoric in a way, and dangerously close to out of control. He worried that those feelings would make it difficult to face whatever they’d meet at the end of that tunnel, but the feelings themselves made it almost impossible to hold onto that worry for more than seconds at a time.

For most of the time they walked down that steeply-sloped path, Nick felt like he might vibrate out of his skin.

Then, before he’d found a way to manage all of that, they rounded the last corner.

Nick had been hearing a rising hum in his ears for a while now, what sounded like machinery, but it hadn’t been enough of a difference to prepare him for what he was looking at now.

Maybe it was because he hadn’t heard anything else apart from that hum: no voices, no discordant notes, no clanging, no footsteps, no indication of a single living being rustling around in the wider space. Nick smelled nothing ahead that indicated they weren’t alone.

For that reason alone, the end of the corridor managed to utterly surprise him.

It also made him think Malek was right.

Someone definitely knew they were here.

CHAPTER34

THE EXPECTED

Nick cameto a dead stop when the tunnel abruptly opened up.

He found himself standing at the entrance of a strangely round room, with a ceiling so high, he couldn’t see where it ended, even with his vampire eyes. He looked for the highest point anyway, for a few fractions of a second, at least, then lowered his chin to gaze into every corner of the room itself.

It was filled with machinery.