Page 131 of Grave Beginnings

Things peered from doorways; ghostly faces filled with sadness. I saw moving mouths, though I couldn’t hear what they said. I blinked again, thinking it was from hitting my head a half dozen times, but realized my helmet was missing. When had I lost that?

Angel stood up, leaving me to stare up at his divinely sculpted body covered in tattoos and feel very overwhelmed. He hauled me up and over his back. “Can you hold on?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said without any inkling if I could or not, as my body felt like a giant noodle. But he adjusted me to piggyback him, hands under my thighs with my arms around his neck. Since I had dressed in the dark, my undies were boxer briefs with little rubber duckies on them, dressed as different characters. Not the first choice for a day my ass would be on display in the middle of a tactical nightmare, but no one had commented yet.

“I marked the door back to the other side in my cat form. I could cross, at least partially, but the others couldn’t. They can’t see the door. I stayed to look for you.”

“We’re not in the same building across the Veil?”

“No. I have no idea where the fuck we are. Whatever you saw that you stepped through… that wasn’t a normal Veil splice, and you brought me with you.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, wincing as we passed a couple of doors with dead faces peering out of them. Did they all go to rooms like the one I’d stumbled into? Filled with dead and dying things preserved in supernatural liquid?

“What are you seeing?” he asked.

“It’s a prison,” I said. “There are ghostly faces looking at us, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s because I hit my head, or if I’m really seeing shit.”

“Let’s go with you seeing shit. I can’t see them, but I smell dead. Lots of dead. And magic, and fae, and demons. This place is wild. I don’t know where the fuck we are, but this place is insane.” He pressed his taser into my grip. Where had mine gone? “If something comes at us, shoot it.”

“Sure,” I agreed, holding onto the tool and him, grateful for his body heat. I worried I’d crush the little creature as it had been on my chest, and my chest was pressed to Angel’s back, but it felt as if the warmth of it had slid around to my back. Strange.

“The fuck?” Ezra asked as he followed Angel and me down the hall.

“Honestly, more of a refrigerator than a prison, and all the captives are snacks,” blue-hair said.

“I wondered why the gel you were in was cold,” I said as we passed a dozen doorways. Some were more see-through than others.

Angel stalked down the hall, keeping a careful path down the middle, gaze on the doorways. Ghosts lingered in some, and I studied each group we passed. They pounded on the open doorways as though there was an invisible barrier between us and them. Were these the remaining spirits of those who hadn’t survived? The tubes of dissolved human-like remains had felt like nothing, not even a spirit remaining.

“They are ghosts, I think.”

“There isn’t much left of them,” blue-hair said.

“I can sense them, but they feel really weak.”

Maybe the mark he’d made had vanished? I searched each door with my gaze as we passed. Some of the things we passed felt stronger, as if I could reach out and pull them free. Others slid by my senses with a cool shiver or something barely perceivable.

“Wait, stop, Angel.”

He froze. “What?”

“Go back two doors on the right.”

The entire group paused and walked back two doors. I stared inside, heart flipping over in my chest. “It’s the kid.”

“What?” Ezra asked.

“Jonah,” I said, pointing at the doorway and seeing the kid coloring at a table on the other side.

“I see nothing,” Ezra said. He smacked his hand on the doorway but it hit as though he’d found the wall instead. “It’s black, like a painted-on door.”

“There’s a barrier,” blue-hair said. “All of the rooms have them to keep the captives in.”

I was not leaving that kid there. “Angel…”

“Do not let go. You’re not going in that room without me.”

Ezra’s fingers curled into fists, and Angel’s breath hitched as I reached for the doorway, determined to free Jonah. My magic hummed—weak, but focused. The little fae on my back tingled as if in agreement. A connection flared between me and the ghosts, their memories fluttering by the edges of my awareness though they were distant, but adding strength as my power flared white hot for half a heartbeat. Something cracked, the sound shattering like a thousand windows of glass bursting, sharp and sudden. Jonah’s door splintered, spiderwebbing from the center outward before it crumpled with shimmering fragments of broken magic. And it didn’t stop there. Every other door cracked in the shockwave, barriers broken, and thenchaos.