“How far up did you go in the dream?”
“It felt like forever,” I said, not convinced it was a dream at all. “But Cassidy’s apartment is on four.”
“Let’s piggyback each floor,” Victor suggested. “One team to clear each room, one waiting in the stairwell, and one in the hall as immediate backup.”
“Sounds good,” Angel agreed as we headed for the stairwell. Everyone hesitated before it, gaze landing on me.
“Looks fine,” I said after a long moment. “No wriggling shadow things or portals.” No one wanted to find themselves in that weird prison filled with jars of goo.
Angel took a firm grasp of my arm before stepping into the stairwell, but we all headed up one flight, kicked open thedoor, and waited while one team went apartment to apartment, clearing each.
We regrouped in the stairwell, the door creaking shut behind us like a complaint. Dust spiraled in Wade’s flashlight beam as we climbed. The air was heavy and thick with smoke, though I knew no one else saw it.
“Smoke. Not purple like in that prison, but thick, and gray-black like real smoke.”
“No fire,” the bipedal wolf grumbled.
“I don’t smell anything other than ozone,” Angel agreed. “And that’s faint. Maybe from the building being pulled across the Veil?”
“Downstairs didn’t look like this,” I offered without further explanation.
We cleared the third floor, apartments empty, abandoned, but the smoke thick. As we headed up to the fourth, where I knew Cassidy’s apartment to be, the weight of the smoke grew worse until I was clinging to Angel to move at all, as it was suffocatingly dark.
Angel paused as we filed into the hallway, letting Victor’s team of NHVs take the lead to break open doors.
“Can’t see beyond the smoke,” I whispered to Angel. Goosebumps snaked up my arms. The sensation of something lingering in the deep shadows made my heart pound, and I clutched the Taser Angel had shoved into my hands to replace the missing one, but I’d be aiming blind.
Angel slipped his fingers around the back of my neck, beneath the helmet, and I realized he’d pulled off his glove because our connection was instant, and I could see him, despite the rising shadow fog. “You see me?”
“Yeah,” I breathed with relief, though beyond him, everything sank into layers of fading darkness.
He tugged off one of my gloves, keeping his fingers on the back of my neck. “Remember that symbol Remi showed you? Trace it on my hand.” He held up his other hand, also bare of the glove, and I stared at it. “Do you need me to trace it?”
I swallowed hard and ran my finger down the back of his hand, slowly tracing the symbol to link Angel to my shield—a simple rune, really, just a handful of squiggles. But I redrew it twice before it began to glow. “Oh, is that okay? Is it hurting you?”
“I’m good. Keep going,” Angel said.
Five more times and the symbol flared brighter, its glow seeping into Angel’s skin like liquid sapphire. His grip on my neck tightened, not painful but anchoring, and suddenly, the suffocating smoke around us faded. A translucent haze lingered in the air, snapping with energy like sparkles on a high-priced ballgown, but the hallway sharpened, doorways revealed, cracks stretching the walls, and the outline of Victor’s team moving apartment to apartment ahead.
“Hold on to it,” Angel said, his focus on me. The rune pulsed in response, its light threading through the veins of his hand like a living thing. I could feel Angel’s heartbeat against my palm, the controlled rhythm of his breathing, the way his power, warm and bright, flowed into the symbol, reinforcing it. “There it is,” Angel said. “Just like that.”
Rather than draining or siphoning my power, the rune tied to Angel created an anchor, or a conduit, grounding my flailing magic into focus. “Holy fuck.”
“Good or bad?” Angel wanted to know.
I could see everything. Almost. The empty apartments, the movement of the teams, even through the walls and down near the trucks where the rest of the team lingered. “Good,” I admitted, flexing my fingers against Angel’s. “Intense.” Mygaze snagged on the door to Brandon Cassidy’s apartment. The moment I focused on it; the clarity shattered.
The rune’s glow flickered. The hallway dimmed. The door wavered in my vision, edges blurring as if smeared with oil.
“Don’t chase it,” Angel’s voice was sharp, dragging my focus back to him. The hallway solidified, and the connection stabilized.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“Tell me what you see, but don’t linger on any of it. We’ll keep working on our connection until it’s easy as breathing.”
I could really use a few hours of nothing but breathing him in, but we were stuck in another tactical nightmare. “I can see through walls. People moving. Almost like infrared, but I know that’s not what it is.”
“Life forces,” Angel said, understanding.
