Page 2 of When the Sky Breaks

“You’re bleeding, Lady Sorcha,” I said, dabbing at her forehead with the cuff of my sleeve. “We need to be sure you’re not otherwise hurt, my lady.”

“Drop the ‘my lady’ bullshit and tell me what happened,” she snapped.

I paused for a long moment. How was I supposed to break that kind of news? Definitely not sitting in the mud while she bled from an untreated head wound.

“I said tell me what happened,” Sorcha pressed. “And once you do, I’ll let you get me back to town and check me for injuries.”

“A portal opened in the plaza,” I finally managed, voice low, words careful. “Some kind of beast emerged, but no one was injured. Then another one opened on the hilltop. And another creature came through and . . .”

I couldn’t finish.

“Spit it out,” Sorcha insisted.

“And it killed your father,” I said.

Sorcha’s face paled, her breathing hitched—and then she went limp, her dark green eyes rolling back as she slumped into unconsciousness.

Two

Sorcha

Islouched in my father’s too-big chair at his too-big desk, head in my hands.

It’d only been six hours since my only remaining blood relative died, and already I was inundated with questions. There hadn’t been a second to mourn, to grieve, even to breathe. I was already dreading the wave that would come crashing in once I finally had a moment of peace.

But that seemed a long way off yet. I’d spent the better part of the last hour staring at his last journal entry. My vision was starting to swim from the prolonged focus in dim light, or maybe that was a concussion. Nobody had properly checked yet.

The afternoon was all a blur. I’d been out seeing if any of the bears were up for water during the false spring. Then a sound like a thunderclap had fractured the air, and my mare Chuckles, the quietest and most docile creature, who’d never so much as flattened her ears in my fifteen years riding her, reared, bolted, and threw me down hard on the rocks.

There was a blank spot after that.

I’d come to on the settee in our study with Nokona pressing a peppermint-doused compress to my chest and murmuring in Comanche. Behind her? Our new Steward, Neal. Glen’s boy. Well, boy was the wrong word. He was older than me by at least half a century and better looking than he had any right to be.

I’d immediately tried to get to my feet, but Neal pushed me back gently.

“You promised,” he said. “I told you what happened out there on the sole condition that you would sit still and let us check on you.”

I had no recollection of any such conversation, but I’d grumbled and complied. They’d begun to check me for injuries, Nokona’s familiar touch ghosting over my scalp, neck, and shoulders as Neal’s bigger, rougher, distractingly warm hands felt the bones of my hands and feet for breaks.

But long before they’d finished, the sheriff, the local priest, and a half dozen others showed up, pounding on the door and demanding answers. Neal had protested at first but eventually gave in to the barrage of requests.

I spent the next three hours hearing complaints, calming nerves, and offering advice. Nokona brought dinner I was too nauseated and distracted to eat. Two hours after nightfall, Neal finally locked the door and insisted we turn anyone else away. So I tried to eat as I pulled out a stack of my father’s notebooks and scrambled to make sense of anything.

The final journal entry, dated only two days prior—six weeks after Glen’s departure, during that dark night of the soul when my father, without the steadying influence of our Steward, had done little but take meetings about rogue monsters and lock himself in his office to write—was shocking, to put it mildly.

A monk came in from the desert yesterday, looking half starved and fully mad. And he kept talking about portals opening and eldritch horrors coming through. I wrote it off at first, but a talk with some of the local native elders and our own Padre Julio suggests other reports in the past few months, with related legends predating my arrival in New Mexico, perhaps even human habitation. The last one, if our near-rabid hermit is to be believed, produced a massive slug belching hellfire. It consumed a half acre of forest and a dozen head of cattle before it returned from whence it came. I’ve sent word to Ansel, in hopes he can dredge up some proper history on the creatures, tell us just how much to worry, then set one of his best on it.

I’d read those words a dozen times now. But I couldn’t get my mind around it. Portals? Eldritch demons? A hellfire slug? Who the hell was Ansel? Where was the world I’d woken up in that morning? A world where I tended the herb garden, played with my cats, rode out on my gentle mare to talk with the birds? Had it all really been so profoundly disrupted so fast?

I fought back tears. This wasn’t my life. It couldn’t be.

I was supposed to be dyeing roving for a new blanket, not grieving a parent, surely not running the Outer Court.

The unreality hit harder than anything else.

Someone knocked at the door, and I wiped away the tears I didn’t even realize I’d shed, smoothed my skirt, and called them in.

Neal came into the office with a steaming mug in his hands.