Page 27

“ Y ou sure this is it?” Ryder asked, kicking a For Sale sign in front of the structure before us.

In a line of Victorians splashed with pastel blues and manicured hedges, this Gothic outlier looked like it had been abandoned ages ago.

Maybe it had once been a brilliant eggplant—the sun had bleached the fish scale shingles that covered every inch of the exterior walls.

The scrollwork—curling, swirling gold gingerbread trim—was half-eaten by the ocean’s erosion.

With cobwebs thick as curtains on the latticed panes of every gable, dome, and turret, the house seemed so out of place—and I found myself checking the business card for the dozenth time to make sure we had the right address.

I cut across the patchy dead lawn under the glaring gargoyle statuettes perched atop the multi-level spires, who watched for trespassers just as vigilantly as Ryder scanned for threats.

Propping myself up onto my tiptoes, I peered into a bay window along the circular lower tower.

A glow caught my attention through the layers of lace: a neon Fortunes sign, flickering in the dimness.

Score.

With a thumbs-up to my comrade, I ascended the porch, the paint splitting beneath my feet.

My pulse quickened with every step.

The door loomed over me, much taller than it had seemed from the base of the stairs.

My head kicked back as I looked up at the cathedral top—it had the width and the height, even the smell, of a redwood sapling.

It was huge. Curling my fingers into a fist, I rapped my knuckles against the wood.

No answer. I knocked again.

I waited for the shuffling of footsteps when something else occurred to me.

“There’s no handle!” I yelled over my shoulder.

Unless that too lay hidden behind some optical illusion.

Still, I didn’t see an obvious way to get in.

“Maybe a doorbell?” Ryder suggested from where the overgrown pathway met the sidewalk.

“I can’t find that, either,” I grumbled, skimming the archway.

Thin, runic notches were cut into the doorframe.

I tilted my neck to read them, but they were just as indecipherable sideways.

“Did you try knocking?” I didn’t know how it was possible for Ryder’s smirk to creep into his voice, yet that’s exactly what I got from him.

I hoped his amazing hunter’s vision caught me rolling my eyes.

I studied the knots in the door, followed their emerging paths.

They circled more like ring lines than splinters, forming a natural mosaic.

The weirdest urge to press my hands into the wood overcame me.

I gave in to the impulse, a smoky, violet haze billowing from beneath my palms. I jumped back, almost tripping off the porch’s top step, as the tinted haze dispersed into the air.

My gaze shot to my hands.

I flipped them over—they still looked the same—still felt the same.

So did the door. But when I touched it again, the hues erupted once more: wispy clouds of blue, lavender, silver billowing from the notches in the wood under each brush of my fingers.

A persistent tug on my intuition told me I had seen this before.

Maybe I was reaching, but it reminded me of the portal I’d crossed into in the dream I had on Grad Night.

That doorway had inscriptions too, and tentacles of light, if I recalled.

Aside from my touch, nothing special was needed for it to open and transport me to another realm.

A realm full of magic and redwoods and…

death. And Ryder. Who shot me with an arrow.

Frowning, I shook off the nightmare.

“Ryder! You need to see this.”

Thumbing the quiver strap that rested in the cleft between his pecs, he left his position at the edge of the lot.

As he moved the overgrowth with his buckled black boots and long-legged stride, I gawked about as bad as the circling crows.

“Take a look.” I gestured to the door, thankful for a reason to switch my attention from his black tee and how it hugged his brawny chest as he leapt up the stairs.

“First of all, this thing is massive. Second, look at these patterns.” My finger hovered over the swirling age lines.

With every trace of the air, I focused on the knots.

They became more and more symmetrical to me, like I could start pointing out shapes as I would in the clouds.

“I don’t think they’re random.”

Holding my breath, I guided his hand to the markings.

Nothing happened.

Well, that was embarrassing.

He snorted. “This is what you wanted to show me? A big-ass door?”

“No,” I huffed.

Nudging him aside, I held my skin to the timber.

Its grooves smoldered in color.

“See?”

His eyebrows shot towards his hairline.

I held my chin high in triumph.

“I must not have pressed hard enough. Let me try again.” He lunged forward.

Nothing came from under his fingers’ imprints.

I crossed my arms and gave him an expression I wasn’t used to wielding: a smirk.

“Guess I have the magic touch.”

“You really do.” He stared at me with wide, electric eyes, chest reclining on a long, unsteady inhale.

For a moment, he looked like he might run.

“And you’ve been right in front of me all this time. I wanted so bad to ignore it.” He ran his hand through his hair and took me in like a panoramic view of a mountain—one he was supposed to climb.

A petrified sort of awe that rooted him to the spot.

I might’ve paused on his acknowledgment—at least I thought that’s what this was—if we weren’t breaking and entering.

I’d have to revel in the credit later.

Not sure where to go from there, I turned back to the door.

“What if the key to get inside is a pattern on this door? Like some sort of code. And we just need to…trace the right one for it to unlock?”

My words seemed to snap him out of his daze.

“That’s a good idea, but we’re not going to just get lucky and stumble across the code.” He narrowed his eyes at what towered in front of us.

“We need to figure out what the lines represent and narrow down a pattern from there.”

I pulled the beige scrunchie off my wrist, twisting my hair into a loose, low bun.

“There are so many to choose from.”

Brows furrowed in concentration, Ryder rested his chin between his thumb and pointer.

“Yeah, this could take forever.” Ah, the king of encouragement.

The spiraled bark lifted more the longer I stared, defying its gravitational bounds.

I rubbed my eyes until I was no longer seeing double and let out a sigh.

Maybe if I treated it like a 3D image the answer would pop out?

Javi and I had done dozens of stereograms in our lives, competing for who could see the illusion first—this’d be no different.

Despite my winning streak, after thirty dizzying seconds here, I tapped out cross-eyed and empty-handed.

I spun my mom’s necklace, directing my stress to the pendant.

The brocade indented my fingers as I pressed into the dull lines—which strangely felt sharp.

“Ow!” Its raised, rounded edges had somehow punctured my skin enough to draw a drop of blood, but that’s not what had the gears of my mind spinning wildly.

Holding my necklace, my breath, and the teensiest bit of hope that I refused to give in to too quickly, I drew the raindrop pattern of my necklace, ripples and all, with the two stars, onto the door.

It glowed like bioluminescence against the red wood.

So promising, until it wasn’t.

“Damn. I thought I had figured it out,” I muttered as the light faded into nothing.

“You might have the right idea…” Ryder’s hand shook with the slightest tremor as it halted mere inches from my chest. “May I?” I nodded, and he scooped the lapis stone into his palm, tracing its design with an incisive gaze.

“This is the Empyrean symbol for water.”

A tidal roar reached my ears although I stood a mile away from the Pacific Ocean.

A draft tunneled through the porch and caressed my skin like a chill, velvety current.

Something about what he said clicked.

Gently releasing the pendant, he leaned into the door with his arm overhead, pressing his knuckles into the wood.

“Since it doesn’t work solo, it could be part of a greater combination.” His eyes swept the door’s gnarled patterns for meaning.

“There are three other elements. Earth, air, and fire.”

My heart thumped so hard it could’ve knocked on the door itself.

“Do you know the symbols for those?”

“I do.” He dropped his hand and took a step back.

“Okay.” My nerves made it to my voice.

“Where do we start?”

“Let’s try ascending order. First would be earth, the basis of all creation. A circle with a star in its center, like the ones on your necklace. Like this.” Ryder spoke with conviction, yet as he drew nearer, the trembling fingers he placed over mine lacked that assurance.

He stroked my pinky with his thumb, a silent wish of good luck, and moved our hands to a larger knot in the center.

We traced a single round line, not lifting our fingers until the shape had been completed, then added a four-pointed star in the middle of it.

The drawing burned into the surface and flared with a stability unlike the flickering from earlier, like the door was accepting that part of the code.

“You were right.” I stared at the geometric blaze, almost too dumbstruck to continue.

“Which one next?”

“Earth rises out of the water, so water.” I knew this symbol, but he still guided my finger, selecting a knot to trace over, a bit lower and to the left.

We watched, no less intrigued as the ultraviolet rays once again flared brighter.

“Now air, which breathes life into the first two pillars. Let’s put it here.” Still interlocked, together we traced on the symbol, his grip on me tighter than before.

“Across from water.”

Beginning with a four-pointed star this time, we used its bottom point to start a spiral that looped around it counterclockwise, then snaked to the right and slightly below into a matching design.

A final star was placed above the dip between the two.

Another element, bold, effervescent, lit up the board.

“The final glyph, fire, which reigns over everything. A flame with four stars lining its right side, below.”

Ryder rotated my wrist as he moved behind me, draping his arm over my shoulder, the floorboards creaking against the thick soles of his boots.

I was rooted, hardly breathing, as earth, water, air, and fire continued to burn in their places, an elemental compass directing me to my true north.

On the peripheral something plopped into the straw grass.

I glanced back at Ryder and his gaze met mine, pupils condensing into pinpricks before my eyes.

Tension stiffened his shoulders and every facial muscle stilled as his instincts seized control.

He prowled to the spindled railing and twisted over it to scan the roofline.

Then the whole house started moving.

One by one, the eaves slid off the roof, into a pile at the base of the home.

Ryder dodged a mini cherub as the molding fell off the porch ceiling’s plaster, the trim’s cornices breaking apart at our feet.

A loud crack made me look upwards.

The beams had begun to split.

A tremor shook the foundation, dividing the deck, tossing Ryder to the stoop and me to the welcome mat.

I smashed into the door hinges, the receding nail heads tearing into my scars.

The metal ripped one of my straps to mere threads and red sprinkled the floorboards, the blood and rust staining the side of my gingham top.

Hoisting myself up the latched wooden entrance, I desperately knocked at the door.

“We need to get out of here!” Ryder called.

That was probably the better idea, but something in me told me to keep trying.

That this might be my only chance.

So, knocking became pushing, pushing became banging, but the door stayed sealed shut.

Closing my eyes, I prayed for something to click amongst the collapsing gothic revival, but my thoughts were weighed down by the frenetic whir of the sliding shingles.

By the windows creaking and groaning and exploding into a thousand jagged pieces, my senses lying somewhere in the shattered glass.

Around me, the entire building was caving in on itself like I had created a black hole at its center, and I was about to be swallowed.

“Quarto vigil.” The fortune teller’s phrase was hushed on my curling lips.

“I am the Fourth Watcher.” I exhaled sharply.

When I opened my eyes to face my crumbling reality, at first it seemed like nothing had changed.

But as I reached to cling to the door, my hands grasped empty air.

Because where the door had stood there was now a tunnel that swallowed the ultraviolet light we had brought forth on the wood.

No floor. No ceiling.

No old wicker furniture.

A passage of darkness.

My gut nudged me forward.

A voice called me back, the lilt of the accent so sharp and irresistible and growing so frantic that I almost listened.

But intuition screamed louder, it could no longer be silenced, and I stepped into the epicenter.