Page 101 of Veil of Night & Flames

Riley turns the laptop so we can see it better, then refreshes the image. The first thing I notice is that the heat-map thingie of the dead zone isn’t a circle anymore. It’s more like a really smooshed oval. Or a long caterpillar that’s eaten its way across the walkway, its zillion little legs spreading out and inching toward Hamilton Hall on one side and the Science Center on the other.

“And the cameras caught six crossings in two nights,” Riley says. She clicks, and grainy night-vision fills the screen. A low four-legged shape slinks across dead grass and folds back into the trunk like it was never there. Then another, smaller and scuttling.

It’s awful, but it’s also almost…ordinary. Little things, darting and gone. My pulse is just starting to settle when the next clip loads and something dark steps into the frame.

It’s tall—seriously tall—and it doesn’t slink or scuttle. It unfolds, joint after joint after joint, like a body trying to remember how to be a body and getting it wrong. Skeletal. Slow. It crosses the dead grass without hurry, and even though it’s just a grainy video feed in a bright room, something in my chest turns to ice.

I don’t know what that thing is. But every cell in my body knows it’s worse than the rest combined.

“Chase.” My voice comes out small.

He’s already moved closer to the screen. “Well, fuck,” he says softly, and that’s scarier than if he’d shouted. “That’s a Threnir. From Retribution—the darkest realm under Adric’s crown. And the Threnir is the worst thing that lives there.”

“Worst how?” I ask, even though every part of me that just went cold really doesn’t want the answer.

“It feeds on terror.” His jaw tightens. “So it keeps its prey terrified. Days. Weeks, if it’s careful. It knows exactly how much you can take before you break, and exactly how to keep you from breaking so that the terror can keep on coming.”

He draws a breath but doesn’t look away from the screen. “Dying would be the part you’d be grateful for.”

I look back at the thing unfolding across the grass, and I think about it standing on my campus. Near the dining hall. The dorms. Tia.

“All these things that are coming over,” I make myself say. “Where are they going?”

Tia just shrugs.

Chase shakes his head, then sighs. “My guess is Kali recruited them, and she’s secured a place for them to hole up until it’s time.”

“Time?” I repeat, my voice squeaking as it rises. “For what?”

He meets my eyes, his dark and fathomless. “War, I assume.”

“Oh,” I say, though I should have seen that coming. “What do we do?”

“We find them,” Riley says, her voice hard and firm. “If Kali’s sneaking her army into the Real, we find where the soldiers are going, and we take them out.”

Chase tips his head. “Good plan in theory. Except you’re talking about creatures—” he completely disappears “—who can cross dimensions at will,” he finishes, popping back into existence by the front door.

I scowl. Tia’s eyes go wide. Riley just claps and says, “Oh, wow, that is so cool.”

She’s not wrong. “But if the enemy can do that little parlor trick,” I say, “they’re going to be a bitch to catch, much less kill.”

“Exactly,” Chase says, returning to my side. “But the good news is, they’re crossing in the wee hours. Which means they’re not ready yet. And that gives us time.”

“He’s right,” Riley says. “Every crossing’s late at night, when campus is dead. But soon it won’t be just a few. It’ll be an army. And what do you bet it comes over during the day?”

I nod, leaning against Chase, who wraps his arms around me. “When it comes to a head, they’ll cross when classes are changing, so there’ll be a zillion kids passing right by the Widow Maker,” I say, the thought making me sick. “And it’s going to be soon. I mean, they’re testing it now—but testing is risky. They wouldn’t bother unless they were close. A week, maybe?”

Tia and Riley both nod, and when I look up at Chase, he does, too.

“I’ve got a guy in the admin office who owes me,” he says. “I can get the whole area around the tree cordoned off—pathogen scare, soil contamination, whatever sticks. Doesn’t matter what they believe, as long as it reroutes foot traffic and gets students off that path.” He drags his fingers through his hair. “It won’t stop anything from coming through. But if something does, I’d rather it come up in an empty quad than one full of kids.” He shrugs, then looks at me. “That’s the best I can buy us. Distance. After that, we need a real plan.”

“A week,” Tia says with a shiver. “Guess we ought to hurry,” she adds, as Riley opens a clean doc on her laptop.

Fifteen minutes later, we’ve got more than the bones of a plan—we’ve got a little skin and muscle, too. Chase will handle getting the area roped off. Riley’s all over, setting up cameras and live feeds. Tia’s going to stay on translations but shift to the old stuff—how the barriers were built, what holds them up, and anything she can find about the keystone.

Nobody says the obvious thing, which is that a fence does not stop a monster from walking out from behind a tree at noon in front of a tour group.

It could happen. I really, really hope it doesn’t.