Page 43 of Veil of Night & Flames

Riley sits up straighter, then clears her throat. “Right. Okay. Fair warning, I ramble. But onward.” She taps the laptop, and suddenly there’s a bright red blob centered on the Widow Maker, fading to yellow and then green at the edges.

“Heat map,” Riley says. “And, okay. Backstory first. I moved here in late May, did both summer terms to get a head start on my Comp Sci requirements, and pretty much immediately started getting bored. So I picked up an extra credit project. My family’s been into amateur electromagnetics since forever—my mom worked in telecom, and dad ran a ham radio operation in our basement that I’ve helped with since I was five. So I came to college with a serious kit, and I wanted to use it.”

“A kit?” I ask, wondering if I’m the only one not following.

“Gear for measuring electromagnetic stuff,” she explains. “Spectrum analyzer, field meters, EMF detectors—stuff you use to measure invisible things.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, hoping there won’t be a pop quiz. “You were taking readings or something at the Widow Maker? What for?”

“That’s the thing. I wasn’t. My original site was the cell tower behind the cafeteria. Predictable anomaly source, easy data. I was going to write up a clean little portfolio piece on tower interference patterns. Easy A in a summer class. Get my credit and move on.”

“But?”

“One night, I was walking back from my dorm past the Widow Maker. I was talking with a friend, and poof, my phone died. Like totally. But I’d started out with a full charge. Annoying, right? I figured it was a glitch and just kept walking. And then on the far side of the quad, poof. It came back on. But only with a sixty-three percent charge.”

“Weird, right?” Tia says, and I nod.

“I mean, it could have just been a glitch. But I didn’t think so. So I did it again. Five times, actually. Went dead at the same spot. Same percentage return when it came back on.”

“That’s totally freaky,” I say.

She nods. “Freaky enough that I changed my project. Easy A on the tower could wait. The tree was interesting. The first thing I did was define the zone. Walked a grid around the Widow Maker with a portable spectrum analyzer, marking every spot where electronics behaved abnormally. Make sense?”

“I think so,” I say, “but you’re starting to fry my brain. Can you jump to the I-Suck-at-Science wrap-up?”

She glances at Tia, who shrugs. “Bottom line, there’s an area around the Widow Maker that I’m calling a Dead Zone. And it’s getting bigger.”

She clicks a few keys, and some graphs pop onto the screen. “Slow at first, see? And then it really starts to grow.”

“And that means what?” Chase asks.

“It means that whatever’s making the tree weird is getting bigger. Or stronger. Or both.”

“What is it?” I ask. “What’s doing that?”

She just shakes her head. “Don’t I wish I knew? I’ve never seen anything like it. But here’s another weird thing. The day you disappeared?” She taps the graph, and the line spikes sharply. “The dead zone grew. Three feet to six. Whatever’s stabilizing at this tree, it noticed when you crossed.”

“Meaning?” I ask, trying not to shudder.

“Okay, so, more backstory. Before I knew about all this, I was already working a thesis that there was some kind of portal at the tree. Weird readings that didn’t make sense. Stuff bleeding over. Stuff that’s not normally here. I didn’t know what, exactly, and the goal was to figure it out. Or at least prove it was really happening. Once Tia told me about the Nightmare Realm, the puzzle pieces snapped together.”

“Snapped how?”

“I’m almost a billion percent sure that the Widow Maker’s a doorway. And it’s been slowly waking up. Or unlocking. Pick your metaphor.”

I look from her to Tia, who shrugs.

I glance at Riley. “Can you try that one again?”

Riley tilts her head back and forth, then says, “Okay, try this—think of the spike on the day you crossed as the door noticing it had been used.”

Chase has gone very still. “If a portal is stabilizing here,” he says quietly, “mares will come through it. Whether anyone sends them or not.”

The room goes quiet.

“How long?” Tia asks, looking between Chase and Riley. “I mean, how long before the readings get bad enough that things actually come through?”

“Not long,” Chase says. “Days. Maybe weeks. Depending on how fast it’s stabilizing.”