“Jude.”
I jolted, thinking Angel or one of the team had called me, but when I glanced back and forth, I saw them all standing in the same place, none of them focused on me. Maybe it had been in my head? I scanned the horizon, the unchanging colors making it hard to keep track of the time. Daytime or nighttime, it all looked the same.
Nothing moved, and I slowed my breathing, straining to hear beyond the breeze.
“Jude.”
I whirled around, yanking my Taser free from my belt in one move, expecting someone to be right behind me.
No one. Just the shadowed building, dark and vacant.
“What the fuck,” I cursed, expecting Angel to react from his spot a half dozen yards away, but he didn’t move and neither did Wade on my other side. In fact, the whole team stood frozen, as if locked in time.
A shadow detached itself from the building’s exterior, lengthening and turning more solid. I gasped and took a step back as it turned my way.
My breath caught as familiar eyes met mine.
Ivan?
Holy fuck!
He slipped through the broken front door, vanishing into the shadowed interior like he was some kind of shade instead of a person.
“No, no, no, no.” I chanted, racing after him. “Stop!”
Why was he here? Had he followed me? I’d only gotten a handful of texts from him between all the chaos, but he’d sounded fine, and Xavier, the supernatural bastard, had promised to protect him.
“Ivy!”
I charged forward, determined to rescue my little brother from whatever trouble he’d found himself in again. As I burst through the broken doorway, my boots hit concrete and broken glass, while behind me, my team remained frozen statues. That should have been a red flag, but I couldn’t let Ivan vanish from sight. What if something nabbed him?
Inside, the lobby stretched longer than it should have. The walls breathed, pulsing like living tissue. Ivan’s shadow flickered at the end of the hall, his form vanishing and reappearing with each stuttering fluorescent light overhead. Had the building had fluorescent lights before? I couldn’t remember why everything looked unfamiliar, narrow, and dim. Perhaps the Veil crossing had warped it.
The floor tilted, sending me crashing against a wall that yielded like rotten fruit. Something warm and sticky soaked through my sleeve as Ivan slipped down a hall toward the stairwell.
“Ivy?” I whispered, fearing something else would hear me. I swallowed hard, remembering the last time I’d tried to enter that stairwell and ended up in some otherworldly prison. How was any of this real? Why would Ivan run away?
“Ivy?” I reached for him, mind whirling but slow. It caught up as I reached the doorway, reminding me that the team shouldhave been right behind me, yet inside the building I was alone, and Ivan had no reason to be there.
I stood staring into the doorway, terror making my heart race as I feared stepping through it would take me back to that nightmare prison. Would I find Ivan on the other side? Slowly dissolving in goo?
The stairwell yawned before me, not the sterile concrete of Brandon’s building, but the same endless black pit from my nightmares. The air reeked of mold and copper, thick enough to choke on. Above, something moved. Footsteps, the thick clunk of someone racing up the stairs.
Ivan?
I jolted through the doorway, racing up the stairs after him, though it felt like they stretched for ages into the gaping darkness overhead. My throat caught as I tried to shout for my brother again, the air thick as if the building were on fire. That couldn’t be right.
A dozen floors and I plodded upward, or at least it felt like a dozen though I had yet to encounter any other door. Then one opened at the top, someone darting through and slamming it, and I burst after it, catching the handle and yanking it open to leap after Ivan.
I plunged into complete darkness, the door slamming hard behind me, and I reached for it in panic, finding it gone.
“Jude Alexander Holt.”
The floor vanished beneath me, and I plummeted into the darkness screaming. A half second later I jerked up, opening my eyes to find myself on a couch in a vaguely familiar apartment. My heart raced in my chest as though I’d run a marathon chased by axe murderers.
Where the hell was I?
Soft lighting filtered from under the kitchen cabinets in a high-end kitchen forty feet away. The sectional I lay on wasmade of gleaming black leather with that sort of lingering scent I’d never come to like, as it always reminded me of the fabric’s origin. A set of coffee cups rested on the counter, steaming as if they’d just been poured, one on each side of the granite island countertop. A jacket sat draped over a stool beside one. Not mine, that much I knew.
