Page 126 of Grave Beginnings
Angel chirped at him.
Bobby nodded and strapped a second taser to Angel’s vest. “In case you lose yours. Or if Angel has to quick change, he’ll grab his. Victor’s team is up by the door.” He waved me off, voice low and calm. I swallowed the rising bile of worry as Angel nudged me toward the group in question. He practically vibrated with tension at my side.
“I’m trusting you,” I reminded him. I never thought I’d be willingly going into the Veil. “If we go in where it’s not the Veil, and cross it inside the building, do we stay in the same place? Or end up in some netherworld alleyway?”
Angel watched the Veil with a sharp gaze. Studying it? Did he know? Not that he could answer me in this form.
I put on the helmet, visor down, and was surprised to find the shield incorporated a bunch of tech more like a video game than any I’d ever used before. I could see the layout of the building on the screen and a ping of messages indicating where there might be people.
“That’s helpful,” I muttered.
“Holt!” An unfamiliar voice shouted through my earpiece. Angel nudged me toward the door, and I studied the faces behind the visor, my own screen telling me last names. Victor glared at me. “Are you done lollygagging?”
Who even said shit like that anymore? But heat burned my face and I was glad the visor likely skewed my embarrassment. “We’re ready,” I answered, for Angel and myself.
Victor nodded, turning back to the door with his team. The lot of them made for imposing figures beside Victor’s lean form, though he seemed to be in the lead. Angel’s ears twitched as wetook our spot in line behind Victor’s crew. A low hum of energy in the air thrummed with a pulse of something unknown. I couldn’t define it, only that I felt something. Angel pressed himself to my side, and I rested my fingertips on his back, both for reassurance and guidance.
One of the glass double doors shattered with the tap of the tactical hammer. Victor reached around and unlatched the lock, then shoved them open. Who locked the door of a public building like this?
“Fire hazard?” I whispered, more to Angel than anyone else. He chuffed at me as we all slunk inside, Victor’s team holding up ballistic shields and weapons I didn’t recognize. The atmosphere inside the building lingered heavy and almost fluid as it undulated with blues and purples merging into dark-edged shadows. And we weren’t anywhere near the section of the building that had been split by the Veil.
We entered the lobby, the overhead spiky ball light, dark and lifeless, though the crackling of purple waves swirled the ceiling like some supernatural underworld waiting to swallow us whole.
“Lots of color variations,” I told Angel. “Window overhead almost looks like a portal, or a weakening of the Veil? I see movement, as though the glass is fluid. Is that normal?”
Victor glanced my way, eyes wide. Was he seeing it? His gaze went up and more SED filed in behind us, filling the space with shields, weapons, and energy. The colors flickered, snapped, and popped, like fast-moving lightning, merging and pooling into several spots. Was something manifesting?
“Merges in spots to dark shadow. Unnaturally dark. Like black pools drained of color rather than normal shadow,” I continued, doing as Angel requested, even if it pissed everyone off. “Might be too many people in here?” How did I explain that the more people entering the building, the more the Veil seemed to strain and stretch. How did I know it was the Veil? A guess at best,though I could sort of see a layer of writhing darkness on the other side, overlaying the mortal realm.
“Where are the shadows?” A female voice asked, and I recognized Kerry as she glanced my way. The uniform and helmet obscured a lot of her face, but I could tell she was in the larger form I’d first met her in.
“Near the elevator to the left,” I said. “And the doorway opening on the far right.”
“Doorway leads to stairs,” Kerry said.
“Elevator is a no,” Victor said as he stared at the closed metal doors. “I smell blood from above in the shaft.”
I was trained to never enter an elevator in a firefight anyway. They were called death boxes for more than the idea that they could fall.
Victor nodded at Kerry. She peeled away from the group—another, larger NVH at her side—and vanished down the hallway to the first level of community rooms. Another group followed them, shields up. Angel kept at my side, pressed against me as if he worried I’d go racing after something.
They returned in half a heartbeat. “All clear,” Kerry said. “Two units toward the back are open but empty. Neither appear lived in. Perhaps show units? No one in the workout room or any other community space.”
“Beta Group Three, hold the lobby and guide out anyone we send to you. Stairs first,” Victor instructed the rest of us as he made his way toward the large, gaping wedge of darkness in front of the stairs.
“If he walks through that, will it take him across the Veil?” I whispered to Angel, keeping myself tucked behind the shield of NHVs. “It’s a wall of swirling black, like one of those movies featuring the eye of a tornado.”
“There’s nothing there,” Victor replied, his tone annoyed. He stepped through the shadow as though it weren’t there, and intothe stairwell. The rest of the group followed. I heard their movement on the other side, at the stairs, but hesitated.
My heart pounded as I stood in front of that pulsing darkness as if it taunted me. Angel nudged my hip and I reached down, wrapping my hand around where his collar and his vest met, then took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The cold hit me with a wrenching yank, like that first subzero winter day after a long snowfall, where the air itself freezes your lungs. The icy bite sank into my bones, gnawing at my core as I sucked in a breath—surprised no one else felt it—and expected to step free to the other side, but my vision blurred. The world strained and bulged at the seams. My stomach flipped over with a gut-churning wave of nausea that had quickly become familiar in the last few days: crossing the Veil.
My feet hit solid ground, or what I thought was ground, though not the expected stairwell. We stood in a hallway that stretched endlessly in either direction. This was not what the building had looked like only days ago. Had it been warped by the Veil, or had we landed someplace completely different?
I gasped for air, trying to stave off the panic. Angel pressed himself to my side and I gripped his collar hard enough that my hand ached; but his gaze studied the long hallway in front of us, our back to a wall, a dozen doors in each direction. It was like we’d stepped from one dimension to another. There was no sign of the rest of the team that had just entered the stairway, nor was there any sort of entry behind us. It was as if we’d just materialized in this weird hallway. At least I wasn’t alone this time.
“This isn’t where we’re supposed to be, right?”