I sat in the car, staring at my phone, bleary-eyed and wrung-out.
I set an alarm on my phone for an hour, locked the doors, and tilted the seat back. I expected I wouldn’t be able to sleep, too caught up in my thoughts. But I passed out almost immediately.
* * *
I was standing in a forest. The shadows were dark enough that they seemed to drink in all the light. The moon overhead was too bright and vivid to be real. The evergreens were massive sentinels all around me, their boughs a deep and unnatural neon green, their trunks so impossibly wide they dwarfed me completely.
The Otherworld. The same clearing I’d rescued Sally from thenight before.
Reed was there. In human form, lying on the ground a few yards away—shirtless, his torso covered in blood, thin surgical scratches raked across him.
The Algea stood over him.
It was more solid here than it had been in our world. Its grin was wide and terrible, its black eyes gleaming with predatory anticipation as it watched him.
Reed’s eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. My heart lurched and for a horrible moment I thought he was dead. Until I saw his chest rise and fall.
It was waiting for him to wake up, I realized. Waiting to feed on his suffering, his despair. Just like it had done to the hiker. And to Sally.
No.Horrified, I started toward him.
It must have—what? Jumped him? Taken him?
Did the pack know?
“Harris.” Reed’s voice came from behind me.
I turned to face him. He stood a few feet away, his gaze locked onto his own body in the clearing. When he raised his eyes to meet mine, there was a ragged desperation in them that made me want to put my fist through a wall.
“Harris, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I never should have said those things. I was scared and being an idiot.”
It was exactly the words I had prayed he’d come back to the cabin to say—except that given the circumstances, it sounded horribly like goodbye.
He swallowed, then said, “I love—”
“No! Don’t!” I cut him off, hating the resigned look in his eyes. “Afterwe save you, you can tell me as many times as you want. But not like this!”
“Harris, no. There won’t be a later. I’m here, in the Otherworld. It’s got me.”
“There will be,” I said firmly. “Because I’m going to kill it.”
His shook his head, his eyes widening with alarm. “No! Don’t come here! Let the others know, but don’t—”
I shattered the dream, sitting up with a gasp, before he could finish. My heart was hammering and sweat soaked my shirt. For a moment I just sat there, my hands shaking, trying to catch my breath.
Reed was there. In the Otherworld. The Algea had him.
And I knew—bone-deep, certain—what I had to do.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up my contacts, scrolling fast. Emma. There. Reed had made sure I had her number in case of an emergency. Well, this was one hell of an emergency.
I hit call.
She answered on the third ring. “Harris? Are you okay? Where are you? Lindsey told me what happened, but—”
“The Algea took Reed,” I said, my voice steady despite the way my hands were still trembling. “He’s in the Otherworld. We need to get him out. Now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY || HARRIS
