“Ialmostbelieve you, Holland.” Logan smiled wryly. “The problem is you’re a wimp.”
He knelt and reached toward the water.
“No!” Opal rushed at Logan. Shehadto stop him.
Nico got there first. He grabbed Logan’s arm and yanked it back.
“Get off me!” Logan tried to shove him away, but Nico held on, and the motion knocked them both off balance.
“Look out!” Opal cried.
Locked arm in arm, the two boys tipped, toppled, fell.
Logan touched the surface first. For a moment, the dark water stilled.
Then it swallowed them whole.
19
NICO
Nico felt the cold of the Darkdeep envelop him.
His body seized as he was dragged down into the bottomless black. A pulse of energy ran over him,throughhim. He wanted to scream, but suffocating liquid pressed in from all sides. He was drenched. He was frozen. He was unmade.
Then it all vanished. He floated in a void. Days. Seconds. An instant.
Like the times before, but also … different.
He felt another presence struggling with him. Lashing. Twisting. Panicking.
Logan?
The sensation flickered. Currents of pure emptiness scattered Nico’s thoughts.
Beneath them, Nico sensed a deeper awareness.
Something murky. Alien. Impossibly old.
The Darkdeep wrapped around him like a funeralshroud, then tightened, enfolding Nico in a net of midnight black.
His mind blanked, and he felt nothing more.
Nico awoke gasping and spitting by the pond. He rolled onto his back.
“Oh, man,” he rasped. “Oh, jeez.”
He’d been through the vortex a dozen times, but this trip had been a nightmare. His head suddenly weighed fifty pounds. His fingers were blue, his body chilled to ice-cube status.
Nico had never felt so powerless inside the Darkdeep.
He’d never felt someone else.
He rocketed up. Spotted Logan a stone’s throw away—he’d crawled halfway out of the pond and wasn’t moving. Nico scrambled over to him, shouting his name.
Logan didn’t respond.
Nico reached for him but stopped short.
