A flat stare.
I glanced down. My clothes were days old, crusted with ash and blood. I looked, and smelled, like something dragged out of a warzone. His expression said I needed to look less like a feral animal, and more like someone composed and ready to hear reason.
“Right. I should clean up.”
Twenty minutes later, I was as clean and composed as I could stand, scrubbed raw, in clothes that didn’t smell of smoke or blood. It was a thin veneer of humanity, but it would have to do.
Nox’s ears twitched, his head cocked sharply toward the living room.
I listened, too. Beneath the TV’s drone, I counted heartbeats. Grandpa’s, steady as stone. Peanut Butter’s snores, a contented rumble. And Ivan’s, a rabbit-quick flutter of panic in the stillness. Something was wrong.
Nox launched off the bed and streaked through the open door. I was on his tail as he crossed the living room, a silent shadow flowing toward Ivan’s room. The door clicked open an inch before he reached it. Magicking it open. Of course. Good to know the little menace didn’t need my help for midnight door duty.
I tiptoed into the dim room. The air tasted of ozone and old paper. Ivan was hunched on the floor, his silhouette stark against the cold light of his phone screen as he leaned over thehaunted printer I should have confiscated. But his focus was fixed on the open closet door.
It wasn’t a closet anymore.
The space within churned with snapping violet energy. Jagged, static-like tendrils licked the frame. The deep purple light pulsed like something breathing, and a low, sub-audible hum vibrated in the fillings of my teeth. A smell, sharp as burnt wire and wet stone, rolled out in waves.
Holy fuck. Was there a portal in Ivan’s goddamn closet?
“Ivan…”
He scrambled to his feet. In one frantic motion, he planted himself directly in front of the swirling maw, arms flung out as if his skinny frame could block the view and somehow hide a screaming tear in reality with his body.
“What the hell—?” The question died in my throat. I had too many, and they were all trying to claw their way out at once.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said, voice tight.
“It looks like you’ve opened a goddamn portal. In your bedroom. In Xavier’s borrowed, warded apartment.” I kept my voice low, a furious hiss. How long before the wolf figured out there was a breach?
“Uh…” His gaze darted to the swirling vortex behind him. “It’s… it’s a door. To Jude.”
“What!”
He sucked in a sharp breath, as if bracing himself, and gestured to the papers strewn across his bed. Diagrams of interlocking circles sprawled across the pages in an ink that shimmered faintly, looking less like science and more like forbidden alchemy ripped from a nightmare. “It’s a temporary doorway. Not a veil tear.”
It looked exactly like a tear in the Veil. It hummed with the same wrongness Jude had described from our previousencounters, from the purple lightning to the moving smoke. “Ivan…”
“I just want to talk to him,” he whispered, the words raw with a grief that instantly doused my anger, leaving only cold fear. “I asked the printer if it could give me a way to find him. And since I have a bond to him, a brother-bond, and I sort of… borrowed the idea of your bond, the mate-thing, as a booster? Like a two-point anchor? And it spat out all this… this long, detailed ritual about creating a ‘way between.’ I had to stop it because I was running out of paper, but I had the important parts, the diagrams, and I… I didn’t really know what they’d do, I just assembled them like the instructions said, and then it just… activated. And now… well. Here we are.”
He’d opened a door tosomewhere. My mind conjured a grim catalog of possibilities, a lake of fire, a den of soul-eaters, a void. Each one an instant, gruesome finale. “Absolutely not.”
“I’m just going to peek through it,” Ivan said, already inching toward the swirling darkness as if he intended to stick his head in a lion’s mouth.
“The hell you are.” My hand shot out, grabbing his arm and yanking him back from the swirling darkness. “How do wecloseit?”
“Don’t you want to see if Jude is on the other side?” His voice was half challenge, half plea.
“Jude isdead.” The words snapped out, harsh and final, a knife in my own gut as if saying them would make them more real.
Ivan flinched, his gaze falling to the floor.
“Ivy,” I began, needing to fix this if only because Jude would have, and he’d have been so much better at it. “This could be a trap from some other world. We don’tknowJude is through there.”
“I feel him.”
And how terrible was I to stomp on that hope? “He’d want you safe,” I said, trying for reason. “Not jumping through a cosmic doorway to the unknown.”
