Arriving in Kansas City had felt weird. It was like being in a house where you live that isn’t your home. Your stuff is there. It’s all familiar. But it’s not right—it doesn’t feel right.
Dr. Cale Ryan picked us up at the airport, which was a surprise. It was very clear to me from the moment we stepped out of the plane why he was there. He had a sparkle in his eyes that he couldn’t hide; there was a possibility my sister might be single again. I like Cale, and we joked around a little bit in the car on the way back to headquarters, but I thought it was a little despicable that he was there to hit on my sister when Aaron wasn’t dead. Not that it would have been okay if Aaron was dead....
Cale parked outside of the archives building, and we headed inside. The sun was just coming up. I was more than exhausted, but I had a fire inside of me still, the kind that propels a person to keep picking up their feet even when they have abso
I had a huge lump in my throat and realized I knew who was missing before my sister even opened her mouth. Aurora asked her what was going on again, and when Cadence spoke, I felt my heart stop beating.“Alex.” She had to pause to force herself to breathe. “He was wounded in the leg, and he told Jamie he didn’t want to be healed.” She looked around the table. “He... passed away.”Immediately, all eyes were on me. Everyone began offering their condolences, how they were so sorry I’d lost a friend, maybe even Christian. I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe it—even though I’d had a horrible feeling earlier. I still never thought it would actually happen. Hannah said something about this being what he wanted.... I didn’t hear it all.“I told Tara I’d let her know as soon as we heard something since Dax can’t text her. I’ll be back.”My sister nodded, and I
His answer came from Ward. “The Guardians aren’t jumping out of the portal when it opens because sometimes it’s in outer space. This one, for example, number four, translates basically the same in ancient Gaelic as it does the current language. An toabh an ear de ghiuthas roughly means the east side of Jupiter. I can’t imagine it would be the best idea to step out of a portal into space.”Ashley was still sniffling. She rubbed a Kleenex across her nose before she asked, “How do we know it just doesn’t mean some spot in alignment with the east side of Jupiter?”I thought back to the texts I’d gotten earlier. I could still understand the confusion, but maybe Brandon’s message could help us all understand what was going on in there. “Brandon said that Heather told him it really is outer space. The first time the portal opened while they were in there, it was under the ocean, and she refused to go.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. A solution had come to me, a way to fix the problem of leaving someone behind in the portal. Slowly, I said, “So if we want to bring everyone back, we also have to put someone in there.” A thought entered my mind, and my eyes swiveled across the table beyond my control. “Someone we can do without.”Christian’s eyes doubled in size. “Don’t look at me, psycho.”“Why not?” I countered. “This is all your fault.” It suddenly occurred to me that if Christian hadn’t been such a total jerk face, Alex wouldn’t be dead.“How is this his fault?” Cale’s question was innocent enough, but even thinking about how to answer it had me irritated. I consider popping out of my chair and coming at Christian again. I wondered who would try to stop me.Clearly, Cadence would, as her hand was already on my arm. “Calm down! We’re not
It was almost 8:00 when I stepped into my apartment. We should be getting another text in three hours. It seemed crazy to only sleep until noon when I was so tired. I hadn’t slept a wink since the night we were in Shenandoah, which was almost three nights ago. I wasn’t even sure how I was still moving. But then, some Hunters don’t need to sleep, and Vampires don’t sleep much either, so maybe I was getting used to my new identity. Or maybe I was so tired I had forgotten how to sleep.Part of me wanted to run down to Brandon’s apartment and talk to his mom just as an excuse to be where his stuff was. I didn’t. I sat down on my couch and then slumped over, putting my dirty shoes on the sofa. I could do that. It was mine.I had IAC messages from Tara and Lucy, both checking on me, but I didn’t answer them. I felt my phone vibrate and knew it was my mother. With a deep sigh, I pulled it out of my pocket. “Hey, Mom.”
My panic was interrupted by Tara’s next statement. “By the way, while you were sleeping, one of Holland’s planes took off. We tracked it to Fiumicino.”“Fiumicino?” my sister repeated. I wondered if she knew where that was. She seemed to. “All right. Did anyone get off of it?”“Yeah, but no one we recognized. Italian LIGHTS is in pursuit.”“Thanks for letting me know. I’m going to go talk with Ward before I interrogate Stewart. Keep up the good work, Tara.” My sister flipped off her IAC and faded from my mind.“Why would they be in Rome?” I asked Tara.“No idea. But we should think about going there, too. It seems like they’re always a step or two ahead of us on this thing.”“I guess. But then... if Holland knew the portal opened every six hours, why did she bothe
Tara and Lucy both looked up like I was crazy, running into Christian’s office at full speed. “I need to use the computer for a minute.”“What about the planes?” Lucy asked me, puzzled.“It won’t take long.” They moved aside, and I pulled up our search engine, which is way faster than anything I’d ever seen before I joined LIGHTS, and started searching for the names Stewart was spewing out in his mind. He was dismissing some of them as he went. There were a couple that stood out to me, and I immediately felt into their brains at the same time. Within seconds, I’d found her.I typed the woman’s name into the search engine. I was surprised she was a normal human woman, a librarian in fact. Short, middle aged, with a brown bob, she didn’t look like the type of person who would help a Vampire Queen take over the universe. But it had only taken me a few seconds inside of her head to know she&rsqu
“Go on,” Lucy said, waiting for me to explain what Christian had figured out about the portal openings.It really was pretty smart. “Christian, Hannah, and Ward also used the latitude and longitude of all of the openings they’d figured out from the cell phones as well as the ones they figured out from the book. When they listed all of that information, they discovered that the portal is opening in a pattern from one location to the next, south to north. So it doesn’t matter how far east or west the location is at all—it only matters which one is directly north of the last portal opening.”“They don’t know where it opened at noon, though, because there was no cell signal,” Tara reminded me.“Right—the portal is also rotating as it opens, so sometimes it opens way up in the sky or way down below the ground or the ocean. They think the last opening was super high, but the next one might be clos
A fourteen hour flight is really only good for two things—eating and sleeping. And I intended to do both. Sitting next to my sister, who was not holding back either, I sank my teeth into a turkey and cheese sandwich the size of Elliott’s head—and that’s pretty big.I assumed we were going to Rome, even though my sister kept saying she didn’t know yet. For the first few hours of the flight, she was undecided. So I ate and tried to fight the butterflies in my stomach that had nothing to do with the breaded masterpiece before me. I sensed something major was about to happen, and I didn’t like the unsettled feeling it created.The plane was noisy. There were a ton of people on it. Tara, Ashley, Amanda, Aurora, Hannah, Christian, Cale, oh, and in the back, tied and gagged, Hamish Stewart. He was about to get a real insider’s look at this portal he’d helped open not so long ago. I liked jumping into his head just to see how ter