I stopped, swaying on my feet. The wolves circled me, their eyes bright and worried, gleaming in the golden firelight of my torch.
“This is the place,” I said, my voice sounding strange and faraway, like it didn’t quite belong to me anymore. “Reed’s close.”
Lee and Hunter both let out low, plaintive whines.
I looked at them, then at Lacey. “Thanks for coming with me.”
Lacey growled, low and unmistakable in its meaning.
I met her gaze and understood. She was telling me not to say goodbye. She was telling me to come back in one piece. Emotion, hot and painful, twisted in my chest.
“I misjudged you, too,” I told her.
She huffed in reply, her tail swishing once.
I turned back to the tear, the torch heavy in one hand and my gun in the other. My heart was beating too fast now, erratic and weak. The fever was burning through me, pulling me closer to the edge. I knew, instinctively, I didn’t have long left.
This was it. I was going to bring Reed back or die trying.
I took a breath. And then I stepped through the tear in reality.
The world fractured around me. Colors bled and blurred together. I let out a sharp gasp, the sound warping, becomingalien—like hearing the echo of an echo. My stomach lurched and my knees buckled. For an awful moment, I thought I’d fall and maybe keep on falling forever.
But I didn’t. Instead, abruptly, I stood in the Otherworld, gasping for breath, my vision blurring until there were two of everything.
Reed was through the trees ahead of me. I could sense his nearness. I just had to get to him.
I took two more steps before the fire burning through my veins ignited into an inferno and I doubled over in agony. I sank to my knees, my heart racing like it was attempting to break free of my rib cage.
A thrill of genuine fear cut through the pain and the disorientation.
My human self was about to die.
And then I would be reborn as something else.
“Reed,” I whispered, digging my palms into the earth and trying to drag myself forward. But my body wouldn’t obey me.
The fire became unbearable, then all at once it subsided, its work complete.
My heart pounded in my chest once more, decisively. A single note, summing up everything I had ever been before. Then it stopped.
Panic gripped me. What if this didn’t work? What if I didn’t wake back up and this was really the end? What if the Algea found me while I was transforming and destroyed my unconscious body?
What if I was too late to save Reed?
My vision went gray around the edges and the world dimmed.
Instinctively, I took a last, desperate breath as a human man, as though I might somehow stave off the inevitable.
All the feeling left my body in a rush, and I collapsed face-first onto the ground.
Please don’t let him die. Please don’t—
The darkness overtook me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE || REED
Pain. That was all there was. Pain and darkness and the Algea’s claws cutting into me again and again, agonizingly slow and deliberate, a cruel artist crafting a gruesome masterpiece.
