Page 34

Light snowflakes struck my faceas we burst out into a wooded area, the night sky overhead clouded by a gentle snowstorm. My stomach sloshed with nausea from the portal usage. I stumbled halfway into a tree, stopping myself just before my nose hit the frozen bark. My breath fanned out in front of me. From what I could see, it looked like we’d landed back in the Sierra mountains. I hoped we weren”t too far from the town of Greenspring, but it was hard to tell in the night.

I focused on the creature in front of us. It had a slight head start, but something about the teleportation process had slowed it down. Its injury may have something to do with it. I wished we could just let it go, but it was the key to our plan, and that awful scarred woman had stabbed it. If there were any more people in the Pocket Space, we could only get to them if we could use the Ghost. We needed to capture it and bring it back to the Bureau for medical attention. The creature had started out as our enemy, but it had become our greatest hope of rescuing the humans trapped in the Pocket Space.Even Jessica.

That woman infuriates me beyond belief. Those people are going to come back to haunt us, I”m sure.

I strained to listen as I pulled myself back into the rough trail of newly mowed-down shrubs.Loud thrashing sounds echoed through the forest down the path. My team lay scattered around me. Bryce huffed as he fell against a tree, and Kane was unconscious, from the looks of it.

”Sike, help Bryce,” I said, and glanced at Kane. Roxy was holding him up.

Dan was cradling his face in his hands, his knees shaking. He was shivering terribly without a coat. ”Chandry, take Dan.”

”On it,” she chirped. She draped her long-sleeved outer shirt over his shoulders, leaving her still comfortable in the short-sleeved blouse she had on beneath, since vampires naturally ran warm. Dorian and Cam flanked our sides in case anything more than the Ghost was out in the forest tonight. I waved the others on, seeing that everyone was relatively safe and sound after our landing. The monster was crashing its way through the forest, leaving behind a sour trail of blood. Arlonne and I fought our way through the underbrush in pursuit, Cam helping us cut through the path with a small machete he still had from our camping equipment.

If we lost the Ghost, we might not have another shot at the Pocket Space. It wasn’t like we would find another creature like it; it seemed to be unique.

Roxy still had the device that Joseph had designed on her person. I doubted we would need to incapacitate the Ghost, but it was nice to have. Cam had strapped Sike”s scanner to his chest, and it was bleeping wildly, telling us to continue forward.

”I can tell which way to go, thanks to the branches,” Arlonne snarled at the little machine as we rushed forward. The scanner was annoying.

”If it portals, we”ve got to know,” I reminded her. Breathing was a lot harder after an intense battle, and the regular heavier gravity of the Leftovers had returned in full force.

Colin hissed as the scanner showed the Ghost slowing down. It was growing weaker with every passing second. Blood smeared the crushed bushes in front of me, and a weak groan greeted me from the other side. A small sliver of a clearing showed above the bush. The monster had collapsed into the dirt, from the sounds of it. We pushed our way through the leaves. Blood got onto my hands, but I ignored the sticky sensation.

First, we glimpsed the creature in all its terrifying glory. Its scaly white skin was marred by black blood. It stared at us, red eyes halfway open. The scales suddenly disappeared as it turned invisible, and we stilled. Roxy whispered that its hot breath was still visible. Indeed, the cloud of steam floated into the air in a strangely peaceful way.

It might escape while we couldn”t see it. I hated to do this, since the creature was already weak, but…

”Roxy, we have to use the device,” I told her, ignoring the dubious look from Colin. ”We need it visible.”

Roxy sucked in a breath. ”Okay.” Stepping forward to fire at the creature, she held the device out and struck its skin. She immediately yanked it away as the creature came back into sight. We could capture it now.

”Hey,” Cam blurted. His squirrel friend, Finn, darted down his leg and hopped up to the creature. Finn sniffed the beast and looked back to us with wide eyes, as if to ask us what was happening.

The creature let out a terrible, soft moan. Its pale body shook. It was nearly luminescent as it finally collapsed before a large pine tree and curled beneath the lowest branches, breathing shallowly and quickly. Colin moved beside me, daring to go a bit closer to the monster.

The Ghost stopped moving. Colin leaned down next to it and then glanced back at us over his shoulder with sad eyes. He shook his head. The beast’s breath could no longer be seen in the air. I ran a frustrated hand through my hair. The Ghost was dead. We hadn”t meant to kill it, but that scarred woman had put the beast on death”s doorstep. My hopes fell like a ton of bricks. Colin released a sad sigh, upset to see the creature go.

The creature”s body morphed into white light and then floated up as a small faint orb. I stilled, shocked to see the ball of light floating where the beast”s body had just been. It looked similar to an arbiter”s orb form, but much smaller, and plain. There was no fanfare in it. Was it the creature”s soul? I watched, entranced like everyone else, as the light slowly floated up and fluttered into the treetops. Just like that, the white orb was gone. We had all seen that.

”What the…” Cam trailed off, unable to finish his thought. He had never seen a soul before. Frustration and disappointment seeped into every inch of me. This wasn”t how things were supposed to go. We had tried our best, but we’d fallen short. We had misunderstood the creature, and now our only way back to the Pocket Space had been taken from us. I hung my head for a moment, unable to speak the hard words out loud. We failed.

This was the opposite of how I wanted our first mission to go. I felt strange. On the one hand, the mission had failed in many ways. On the other… Roxy cradled Kane close to her chest. We had found him. Chandry put a reassuring but awkward arm around Dan, who was crying bitter tears into the night.

I’d truly, wrongly thought we knew everything about the universe after fighting to prevent it from splitting at the seams. The Higher Plane was supposed to be the ultimate discovery, but there was something about the Pocket Space that went beyond what we previously understood about the planes.

Something wicked and weird. There”s more going on than we ever considered. I let the familiar sense of sadness and loss of control over life crash over me. Tomorrow would be a new day, but tonight I would mourn what we had lost. I didn”t understand anything about the Pocket Space or those strange people, but we could change that…

I stared at the space where the creature had died. We would need to find a way back to the Pocket Space eventually, but that wasn’t a possibility at the moment.

Roxy sighed heavily. ”There”s not even a body to take back to the Bureau.” She adjusted Kane on her lap. His eyes remained closed, and the shadows under his skin were weak. He needed to feed soon. ”This sucks.”

”It does,” I admitted. There was no point in pretending otherwise. ”Colin said the beast was running itself to the point of exhaustion. What happened?”

Roxy”s gaze flitted down to Kane, and her eyes softened. ”The Ghost brought me to Kane. Colin realized that if I was thinking about him and talking to him, it would create interplanar energy and the monster would take us to him. It moved obsessively, though… like it couldn”t help itself.”

Like it couldn”t help itself… On some level, most creatures had a basic instinct to survive, but this monster had weakened itself because of its compulsions. It was a special type of drive or desire that would make a being do that to itself.

”What happened with Kane?” I asked. His eyelids flickered weakly. Roxy hoisted him into a standing position, and Dorian came to her aid on the other side. He was useful with all those muscles.

”I found him starved. He”s been passing out for long periods of time.” Roxy shot an urgent look at Dorian. ”He needs to feed as soon as possible.”

I nodded. ”We”ll get him to the medic and see about arranging for him to feed.” Thankfully, vampires were made to survive dire conditions. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least Kane wouldn”t die.In the meantime, Arlonne approached and offered him her wrist to feed from to tide him over, since she had just fed. He bit down with a grateful sigh.

In all my confusion, I barely registered the rest of the group. On the outskirts of the small clearing, my remaining team members gathered. Chandry was sympathetically patting Dan”s back, a vampire out of her element but doing a good job.

”She chose them over me,” Dan said between soft sobs. ”I don”t understand.”

I diverted my attention from him to make sure Bryce was still okay. Sike held steady, uninjured from the fight, as he helped Bryce. We”re all safe, Lyra, calm down.

”There, there. It”s okay,” Chandry muttered. Her voice was stiff. ”Uh, she was… someone special, I”m sure.”

Dan didn”t appear to be listening, which was probably for the best. He was wiping his face and nose on his dirty sleeves.

”Dan, what happened to you?” I asked, trying my best to sound sympathetic. In many ways, I was. Even if he would”ve made our lives easier by not getting involved, he’d still lost someone important to him and had been treated cruelly by that mysterious group.

He sniffed and lifted his head. ”The monster left me… and Jessica… I heard her calling for me somehow. Maybe it was in my dreams. I was going in and out of consciousness.” He rubbed an angry tear away. ”If she just hadn”t gotten so obsessed, none of this would have happened. Ever since the Leftovers appeared, Jessica became a fanatic about this stuff.”

I raised a curious eyebrow at that. If Jessica did have powers—and clearly, the mysterious hooded figures agreed on that—then it sounded like she’d developed them right after the meld.

”How did it start?” I asked.“Jessica’s interest in the Leftovers.”

Dan huffed. ”We were in the thick of it. We lived in Salt Lake City in Utah, you know? The chaos was right there. We’d been following the news about the vampires for months before, and Jessica started her show… but then that day came. When everything went strange, Jessica”s classes were canceled for a week because half the city—including our entire apartment—was suddenly in a freaking lake. Everything went back to normal, and the city tried to continue on as if nothing happened.”

Roxy murmured, ”She made it into college?”

Dan hadn”t heard her. ”She complained of headaches and strange symptoms, like sudden nausea out of nowhere. It got bad. Suddenly, she became a lot more serious about her online blog and web series. I played her cameraman, but I thought she couldn”t really be serious about all the supernatural stuff. The show got popular. We were suddenly making enough money to do more videos, and Jessica demanded we move out of Salt Lake City to go take the show on the road. I was working as a freelancer, so it was no problem for me, but she dropped out of college. It was bizarre, but not enough to make me think she was losing it. At first, she treated the whole supernatural thing like a gimmick, but then it became very serious for her. I”m not sure when that happened.” He shook his head and grabbed it, as if it pained him. ”She kept getting headaches, and I asked her to go to the doctor, but she refused. She became more secretive… and she wouldn”t tell me things. I found files on her computer that spanned back several years, news clippings and online articles that she must”ve dug into on her own time, while I was sleeping.”

Chandry cringed lightly as Dan broke out into a series of fresh sobs. Being a therapist isn”t a vampire”s calling, but she”s doing a better job than I would.

I had to be delicate with Dan, but he was also going to have to face the consequences of his own actions with the Bureau.

”I don”t understand,” he muttered sadly. ”She just abandoned me for those creeps after they told her they would tell her about her powers… I didn”t really believe she had any, to be honest, but I guess they must”ve thought so. I guess that means we”re broken up now, but I”m still worried she might die.” He rubbed his eyes again and collected himself.

”I”m sure it”s hard,” I told him, trying to find the right words. There was no guarantee that Jessica would survive, after all, but I was skeptical of Dan”s story after his initial lies. If he had been able to push back against Jessica or stop her, then we might”ve kept the Ghost alive, but Jessica was her own person who was set on doing what she wanted. It’s not his fault. He loved her… well, still loves her.

Something else was worrying me about Dan”s story. If Jessica had begun having symptoms right after the meld and managed to connect it to the Leftovers, what made her think that her symptoms were related to that place? If things were truly affecting normal humans and giving them powers, perhaps the Pocket Space was calling to them, like darkness to a vampire. I sank my teeth into that disturbing idea. We knew how to deal with vampires and creatures from the Immortal Plane, but magical humans? Two of those people we took down back in the Pocket Space were dark vampires. Something weirder than the Leftovers was happening; or rather, it was like the Leftovers were just the tip of the iceberg. Jessica presumably had powers… which was far more frightening than I dared to admit.

”We were together for five years,” Dan mumbled. ”I can’t believe she just abandoned me.”

”There are other redbills in the sky,” Chandry said comfortingly. Cam and I stared at her. ”Oh, is that not an expression used around here?”

I shook my head, looking toward Roxy and expecting to see a ”get a grip” look on her face. Instead, she was staring intently at Dan with a thoughtful frown. I debated asking her about her thoughts, but they might not be appropriate to share in front of the others. Maybe she was thinking about her intimate psychic connection with Kane.

Sighing, I rallied the team. We couldn”t spend all night in the forest talking about Dan”s feelings. What he really needed was a therapist and a good lawyer after this mess, not Chandry”s amateur pep talk.

Cam detached the scanner from his person and used it to lead us back through the forest. ”We”re not too far off,” he commented in the first ten minutes. I gave a little cheer for that news. I wanted to get Kane medical attention and talk about all of this mess in a long debriefing… after some sleep and a hot shower.

We”ll get to camp, and everything will be fine. Once we’ve rested, we can make a plan.

A distant whining sounded from nearby. We came out of the forest to find the nearby highway that was swallowed by the Leftovers. Cam rotated himself in a few different angles before landing on the direction back toward town. It would be a forty-five-minute walk.

We just had to survive the night. I breathed in the cold air, promising myself that tomorrow was a day full of possibilities.