“Creepy,” I muttered.
Then the herd shifted.
A dozen skeletal sheep broke formation, drifting toward Tiana. Her flashlight beam cut through them like smoke, but she stared, entranced instantly.
“T,” Kerry called, as she lunged and yanked Tiana away. Tiana flailed for a half second before shaking off the compulsion.
“Sorry,” she breathed.
“Don’t stare directly at them,” Victor repeated. He whipped off his belt and snapped it in the air, which startled a dozen of the dark clouds to rejoin their brethren.
Wade stood oddly still about thirty feet away, and I reached for him, instinct driving my magic into the herd like a lash, which cracked, and the sheep surrounding him fled. A second later Bobby tugged Wade back to our side.
“It’s too easy to be caught,” Angel said, his back to mine. And the sheep were endless, stretching into the distance in the thousands.
“Eyes down,” I snapped as the rest of the group joined us in a circle, protecting each other’s backs. The shield around the barrier sizzled and zapped as the sheep approached, seeming drawn to it as though bugs to a zapper.
“Why are they...” My voice faltered.
The entire herd went still, skulls tilted toward something in the distance. The air thickened, pressing against my eardrums like a sudden change in altitude. At the edge of the field, the darkness warped, folding in on itself until a figure emerged, tall, draped in a tattered woolen cloak that seemed to drink in the moonlight.
His face was hidden beneath the hood, but I felt his gaze like a physical weight. My magic stirred, as if recognizing an old, inevitable song. He was tall, draped in a mantle of what looked like woven night and bones. Antlers curled from a hood that covered his face, and in one hand he held a crook that shimmered with veins of cold blue light.
Death incarnate, or as Victor had called him, the Shepherd.
The Shepherd took a single step forward, and the ghost sheep parted, their skeletal bodies bowing like grass in the wind. He moved silently, his cloak whispering against the ground, though no feet were visible beneath it.
Everyone froze.
Then the Shepherd turned toward me. His attention heavy and ancient.
He stared at me, and I waited with a thick sense of dread and kinship at the same time. Worried he’d attack or turn the sheep on us, his presence whispering power unlike I’d ever imagined, but also, strangely enough, calm.
After a long moment, he nodded, then turned, crook swinging with effortless grace, and the herd followed, shifting in perfect formation behind him. Like one body with a thousand legs. They moved away from the Veil tear, deeper into the dark beyond the line of trees. And then, without fanfare or sound, they vanished.
Gone with a pop of pressure that made me stagger back a step. Angel stepped into my space, his shoulder brushing mine, solid, warm, alive. His voice was all lazy amusement, but his fingers curled possessively around my wrist. “You said you wanted a more interesting assignment.”
I glared at him. “Next time I complain, just gag me.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Angel growled in my ear, which made me uncomfortably hard.
Ezra made a disgusted noise. “Do you two ever stop?”
But everyone else laughed, and I guess for the moment, since we were all alive, I’d take their laughter over the Shepherd’s silence any day.
13
Three days without sleep.Three days of teeth-gritting, adrenaline-pumping madness was unraveling my sanity.
The moment someone dared to close their eyes, the alarms shrieked. Another wave of something new and lethal surging toward the tear. New tears attracted chaos, but spread as thin as we were, sometimes things still crossed, which was why the electric barriers and tape existed on both sides.
Gnomes came first. Tiny, grinning mechanical menaces who could reduce a truck to nuts and bolts in thirty seconds flat. Then the will-o’-the-wisps, floating like harmless lanterns until their sparkle dust turned the air to poison. The worst were the unicorns. not glittering steeds, but razor-hooved killers with horns crusted in dried blood, their eyes black and hungry. All my childhood fantasies shattered by the assault of toxic glitter and deadly ponies.
By hour seventy-two, my magic buzzed under my skin like an open wound, tired, underfed, and reacting to every shift in the Veil. My nerves were frayed. My reflexes shot. And the entire team was on edge, taken to silence rather than snapping at each other.
I glared into the darkness behind my mask, standing a dozen yards from the barrier, watching the trucks and everything beyond them for any sign of movement. My heavy breathing beneath the mask muffled more noise than I’d have liked, but since our entire group spread itself across the length of the barrier, back to the building, we didn’t need to worry about something coming in behind us.
But I was dozing on my feet.
