We stared at each other for a long moment as Nox leapt up on the bed and batted at the pages. Ivan and I both held our breath, eyes locked on the portal. The violet energy continued to churn and snap, utterly indifferent to the missing pieces of its recipe.
A new kind of cold seeped into my veins.Well. That couldn’t be good.
“That should have broken the spell,” Ivan muttered, staring at the stubbornly swirling vortex in disbelief.
“Does that damn printer of yours have a troubleshooting section?” I snapped, my eyes darting between the portal and the bedroom door. “An off switch?”
Ivan hefted a stack of pages easily two inches thick. “Maybe in the instructions? But I had to stop printing. I ran out of paper.”
The unmistakable sound of the main apartment door opening cut through the hum of the portal. Voices followed. Sylas’s sarcastic teasing, Keanan’s flat reply, and beneath them, the low, rumble of Xavier himself. He must have felt the breach.
We didn’t have minutes to skim an epic fantasy novel for the deactivation rune. My mind raced through pathetic, mortal options. Slam the closet door? It was a physical barrier to a metaphysical breach. We were seconds from being caught red-handed.
“Maybe you can distract him?” I said, my mind scrambling for ideas.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Ask him for homework help?” If the kid had been a few years older, the answer would have been obvious since their fated mate bond meant a connection, even if Xavier pretended it didn’t exist. But Ivan was still a kid, and Xavier wasa centuries-old demigod claiming he’d ignore his mate. Right now, I had a teenager, a stack of incomplete magic instructions, and a screaming hole in reality that needed to vanish in the next thirty seconds.
Ivan’s eyes went wide with panic, then narrowed with a startling, desperate cunning. “Homework.” He searched the room, blanching at the mess of papers. “Maybe food. I’m really hungry. And sad. Food sometimes makes people feel better, right? Jude always fed me when he thought I was sad.” He nodded, a grim little soldier, and slipped out of the room, pulling the door almost shut behind him.
A second later, I heard his voice, “Hey, ah… that bakery Jude brought me stuff from? That’s close, right?”
Xavier’s response was indecipherable, but the distraction was live. Though I knew I didn’t have much time. He could probably sense the magic, or whatever the fuck this was.
I turned back to the problem. The portal pulsed, impatient as a heartbeat. I flipped through the stack of papers frantically, pages of schematics mapping impossible energy flows, annotations in a tight, looping script I couldn’t read, and a disconcerting number of question marks scrawled in the margins. Was this runes? Alchemy? Something from a dimension where physics was just a polite suggestion?
The actual answer was probably on the last page, still trapped in the haunted printer because we’d run out of paper.
Nox stared at me from a perch on the end of the bed, head tilted as though I were a puzzle he was trying to solve. “Don’t suppose you have a book about unstable portals to the unknown?”
The voices in the living room trickled closer to the door, though thankfully Ivan had shut the bedroom door behind him.
I grabbed the closet door and threw my weight into swinging it shut. It moved an inch before hitting an invisible wall ofresistance, the violet light bleeding around the edges, searing the paint with black, smoking cracks. The portal wasn’t just in the closet; it was fused to it. Until we closed the portal, therewasno closet.
This close to the portal I could sense something tugging at my core. I sucked in a haggard breath. It was my bond to Jude. Was Ivan right and this was a portal to wherever Jude was?
A sharp chirp from Nox made me glance over my shoulder. In that split second of distraction, he launched. Not a playful pounce, but a deliberate, full-bodied impact against the small of my back.
The shove, combined with the portal’s relentless pull, broke my balance completely. I jolted forward, arms flailing, into the violent, humming light.
“Son of a—!” The curse was torn from my lips as the world unstitched, folding itself violently inside out.
58
JUDE
A crash shatteredthe library’s silence. A guttural, furnace-blast growl echoed from the hall. The scrape of claws on stone that set my non-existent teeth on edge. Something heavy slammed against the wall, shaking the room. Books exploded outward in an apocalyptic rain, thudding around me like dusty hailstones.
“Perfect,” I muttered, not bothering to dodge a falling copy ofEctoplasmic Ethics. “There goes my afterlife’s work, ‘Tower of Babel-ing On About Nothing’.”
The hellhounds scrambled off, leaving only a fading, violent echo in its wake.
They’d been doing their sentry thing for hours, the supernatural equivalent of security guards making their rounds, lava-drool and all. Annoying, but predictable. This was different. This was the sound of those guards drawing their weapons and breaking into a sprint.
Something had tripped the alarm.
Something that didn’t belong.
