“Want me to text Stuart?” I asked.
“No need.” Dad pointed at the door. “See?”
I studied the door in the dim glow of his flashlight.
No handle. No visible hinges. Just a symbol carved into the wood at eye level—layers of intersecting lines and curves that looked almost like a fingerprint. I drew in a breath, then whispered, “Samarek’s mark.”
At least we knew we were in the right place.
“So what do we do?” Mom asked. “Knock?”
The door swung open.
“Well, okay then,” Mom murmured.
Beyond the door lay darkness so complete that the glow from Dad’s flashlight got swallowed three feet past the threshold.
“Jared?”
“I can’t see, either,” he said. “Haven’t run into that before. An enchantment?”
“Well, this isn’t ominous at all,” I muttered.
Of course, we stepped through anyway.
The room was wrong. Too large—much larger than the space above would allow. The ceiling disappeared into shadow, and the walls curved in ways that made my eyes hurt and gave the sense that we were walking and tilting all at the same time. This wasn’t the basement anymore. This was somewhere else. Somewhere that didn’t care about physics or blueprints or the rules of the normal world.
Dad’s flashlight swept the room, and my heart stopped.
Trevor.
He lay on his back in the center of the room, arms flung out to his sides, his shirt dark and wet with blood. A deep wound gaped across his throat. His wrists had been sliced open, too.
“Oh God,” Mom whispered.
For one horrible second, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. All I could do was stare at the boy I’d trained beside just yesterday, now lying broken and dead on the cold stone floor.
Then Jared’s hand tightened around mine, and something clicked into place. I gasped, blinking back tears as I forced myself to be strong. To look around. To be a Hunter and assess the situation.
And to stay alive.
I made myself breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
With effort, I pushed down the scream building in my chest. There would be time to fall apart later. Right now, I needed to see. To understand.
Trevor’s eyes were open, staring at nothing. Gone. Whatever spark that had made him Trevor—angry, guarded, hurting Trevor—had left.
But it wasn’t just his body that made my stomach lurch. It was what lay beneath him.
He’d been placed on top of something. A shape on the floor, outlined in pulsing red light. Door-shaped. And on one side, two spheres glowed like freakish doorknobs.
Like Timmy’s drawings.
The portal.
My knees went weak. All those pictures. All those doors Timmy had been drawing obsessively for weeks. He’d been seeing this. This exact thing.
Trevor’s blood oozed away from him, as if called to seep into the door-shape’s outline. And with each drop of ruby red blood, the light pulsed brighter. Hungrier.
