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Nick could feel whatever it was coming from the mountain up ahead. He could feelsomethingthere, even from this far away. It seemed to be building and changing around him as Morley hit the gas on the next straightaway, going through the last light before they reached a long stretch of unbroken country road.

Nick glanced at the virtual map inside his headset.

He tried to gauge how much longer it would be before they got up to the base of that mountain, factoring in the speed Morley was driving. He let the A.I. do the calculations for him and came up with roughly twenty minutes.

It felt like a lifetime.

Nick could see Morley following the same lit, gold line in his own headset. It wound its way through curvy roads and over a bridge, passing through a narrow canyon beside a river and then back behind another mountain. Only after it left that river again would it start climbing higher, eventually reaching the base of the largest of the five, snow-covered mountains.

Nick had been looking at those mountains for weeks now.

He’d been looking out Wynter’s windows, and wishing he could go hiking on them.

It was so fucking strange to think of any of that now.

That sick feeling in his gut worsened as they began to wind their way along the canyon. Nick fought to calm down, to clear his head as they climbed higher, up through the forested road towards where Mal’s portal was supposed to be.

Even though twenty minutes felt like forever when it started, barely any time seemed to pass at all before they were suddenly in the last stretch of road.

Nick could see the cave and its portal on the map now.

He knew that before then, before they got within two hundred yards of the cave itself, they’d reach a point where there wouldn’t be any more road.

When they got that far, Nick would probably have a lot better idea of just how fucked they were.

He might even know just how much he’d already lost.

CHAPTER32

THE WALK UP

It was disturbinglyquiet when they got out of the car.

Nick and Morley exchanged looks, then gazed up at the mountain that loomed overhead.

No other cars had been waiting for them in the small turnabout and parking lot that marked the end of the dirt road.

They left the paved portion of the road maybe ten minutes before they got that far, bumping and skidding down a dusty and mostly intact road that took them from the main road between the mountains and up to the base of the tallest.

Now they had run out of road altogether.

Nick had been dreading that, expecting to see a number of abandoned vehicles by the time they got to this point, but they didn’t see any.

Nick would have thought that would ease his mind, at least give him some shred of hope they might have beat his doppelganger up here, but somehow it didn’t do that, either. Morley kept driving as long as he could, even past the last packed-dirt parking area. He found a way between the boulders marking off the edge of the road, and made the police vehicle go through the woods.

He got a lot further that way than Nick would have thought, until they ran up to a grove of dense trees and they couldn’t drive any further.

Now they were getting out of the car.

Nick looked warily up at the clouds, realizing he hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella, or anything that would have protected him from the sun.

For now, the clouds covered the sun, but he couldn’t count on it staying that way.

Remembering the sun’s rays beating down on the portal and everyone standing around it in Malek’s paintings, Nick grimaced, then walked to the back of the police trunk and signaled for Morley to open the latch.

Morley did, triggering the mechanism with his headset, and Nick rummaged around inside until he found an umbrella of his own. It wasn’t a great umbrella. It wasn’t anywhere near as sun-repellant or as dense as the ones Mal drew the newborns carrying in the painting.

It was navy blue with a faux-wooden handle, an umbrella meant to keep a human moderately dry in a moderate rain, not to keep a vampire’s skin from burning in full sun.