“Nothing. I suspect I’ll be seeing more of you.”
“Was that meant to be ominous?” I wondered.
He snorted and walked away from us. “Death comes for everyone eventually.”
The moment Nat turned away, the shadows in the bookstore seemed to deepen around him. For just a heartbeat—long enough that I wondered if my magic was playing tricks on me—his silhouette stretched dark, like a cloak settled around him. The edges of his form blurred into wisps of darkness, and where his head should have been, I swore I saw the glint of something skeletal beneath his perfectly styled hair.
I blinked hard.
The vision vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Nat looked ordinary, if a little out of current time.
Before I could ask a question, the entire building shook with a deafening boom. Books rained from the shelves and the room swayed. Angel yanked me against his chest as the shelf beside us toppled, landing where I’d been seconds before.
Nat cursed, and we all rushed for the door.
30
Angeland I raced through the stalls toward the market entrance, weaving around everyone stopped in the center of the aisle, gazes directed out the slew of windows overhead. A plume of dark smoke curled into the sky beyond the visible Veil splice.
That didn’t look good.
We burst out the doors of the market, the chaos fading behind us. Angel took the lead, steering us toward the smoke. In the span of a single heartbeat, we crossed the Veil back to the mortal side, concrete forming where there had been cobblestone, and the sounds of traffic and sirens filled the air.
An apartment building belched black smoke from one side. A fire?
People poured from the building, children and pets in their grip, and Angel and I ran past them to the door, holding it open. The scent of something chemical teased my senses, and the weight of magic hung in the air as we each guided people out of the building or down the main stairway to the front doors.
“Do you smell magic?” I asked Angel. “Is that because the tear is close?” He shook his head. I knew his senses were stronger than mine and couldn’t imagine him missing the heavy weight of ozone filling the building. A tingling sense of uneaseran its way up my spine. “Is the tear widening? I thought this one had been here for years and settled?”
“Everyone get clear,” Angel shouted in a no-nonsense cop voice. Everyone moved, shuffling quickly, the panic quieted by having confident authority giving directions. “Anyone need help getting someone out?” Angel called. He picked up a kid and helped a mother out to the curb.
I helped an elderly woman guide her husband. Fire trucks and EMTs arrived, and I directed them to one of the emergency crews. One of the EMTs eyes widened as he saw me.
“I’m SED,” I told him when his focus landed on my armband. “The building is filling with magic.” I pointed to the market in the distance. “We were across the street at the market when the explosion happened. But the tear might be expanding.”
The man cursed. “We’ll need to move down the street. Let me spread the word.”
I nodded, and Angel was already on his phone, though moving back toward the building to pull more survivors out. The firefighters waved us back, and Angel paused to argue with them about the rising magic, but something drew my gaze upward to the billowing smoke.
The fumes coiled unnaturally above the rooftop, tendrils twisting like living things. Within the haze, jagged streaks of violet lightning flickered, raw magic arcing through the particles. I blinked a few times, shocked to see a tangle of threads, black and sizzling, appear around the billowing smoke.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. “Angel?” I grabbed his sleeve, dragging him back a few feet. “There are patterns in the smoke. Threads,” I hissed at him.
He stared at me for a heartbeat, gaze focused on my face, then glanced up at the plume wafting from the balcony above. “Life threads?”
I held up the book clutched to my side. “I’ve had five seconds to look at this. And about that long to clarify whatever these lines are.”
“Your eyes are black.”
Well, fuck me. Was this demon magic?
One of the firefighters approached us, and Angel caught the movement, turning to face him. I hid behind Angel, keeping my gaze lowered, hoping not to frighten anyone with my eyes. Whatever the firefighter said was mostly lost on me. Something about an apartment they couldn’t enter.
Angel yanked a pair of sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and handed them over to me, then led us both to the building. I put them on and studied the bending magic as we followed the guy inside.
The smoke swirled in dark purple waves, growing thicker as the firefighter led us up a set of concrete stairs. The chemical magic stink intensified with the weight of zapping energy, though the firefighter didn’t have his mask on. Was it not fire smoke but magic smoke? I squeezed Angel’s hand, trying to let him know what I saw without saying it. He held tight, keeping me against his back as we plodded upward toward the location of the blast.
The magic in the air writhed as we approached the fourth-floor landing and open door to the hall of apartments. A vein-like luminescence, muted by the dark sunglasses, pulsed as though in time to my heartbeat, spanning the length of the wall. The threads of color surrounded the light, tugging at it as if ripping the tear open and hemming the edges to create a wider gap for the darkness to slither through.
