Finally Rita and I were allowed to see Devon.
He was sitting in a hospital bed, in a small enclosure with curtains for walls. He seemed to be aware of us when we entered the room, but he didn’t open his eyes.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he whispered weakly.
“You okay?”
“If I don’t move. Or try to look at anything.” He paused. “Or breathe too hard.”
He barely moved as he spoke to us. His hands were gripping the rails of the bed as if he was afraid of falling out of it. I placed my hand gently on top of one of them. His skin was clammy, and I felt him trembling.
Dr. Tilford came into the enclosure. “Tests all negative so far,” he told Devon.
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Well, it doesn’t tell us what’s wrong, but some rather serious possibilities have been ruled out, so that’s good. Sometimes this kind of thing just comes out of the blue. We may never know the cause.”
A nurse entered the enclosure, took Devon’s blood pressure, and gave him some medication. Then Dr. Tilford left for a minute to go talk to the doctors. And the three of us were alone together.
Devon whispered, “Do you think they did this?”
Neither Rita nor I had to ask what he meant. Was it possible that people from Terra Prime were responsible for his sudden illness? I couldn’t recall a case where any changelings had been struck down exactly like this, but that didn’t mean much. There were probably dozens of changeling deaths we didn’t know anything about. Tommy’s online research suggested that none of the others were being assaulted, but the three of us might be a special case. We were the only changelings who knew the truth about where we were from. The only ones who had crossed into the world of our birth and destroyed a major transportation hub on our way out. The Shadows might want revenge for that. The Greys might want revenge for that. Hell, a dozen other Guilds whose Gifts we’d never heard of might want revenge for that.
But they could have killed Devon if they’d wanted to, I reminded myself. This was just a warning shot. “They have people who can heal. I suppose they have people who can un-heal.” I spoke softly, so no one outside the curtain would hear me. “Maybe they’re trying to scare us off.”
“To keep us from going back to Terra Prime?” Rita asked.
I nodded.
She folded her arms over her chest, a gesture that managed to be both defensive and aggressive at the same time. “So what, then? Are we supposed to give up, just like that? What about your mom?”
I looked down at Devon. His coffee-colored skin was filmed in sweat. “We can wait a few days, until Devon gets better. I can talk to Seyer—”
“No,” Devon rasped. “No. You two have to go. Now. Don’t wait for me.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if you’re right, and they’re trying to scare us off, what will happen when they figure out you’re just delaying the trip, not cancelling it? They might do something worse than this, to drive the message home. Maybe go after Rita next time . . . or even you. But once you cross over, there’ll be no point in threats anymore; they’ll have lost that battle.”
“Shit,” Rita muttered. “He’s right.”
“And second . . .” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Seyer’s Gift may be terrifying and powerful and utterly beyond my comprehension, but nothing short of a direct message from God Himself is likely to convince my father I should go with you. I mean, it was nice to dream, but. . . .” His words trailed off into a pained silence.
For a moment no one said anything. I wondered if Dr. Tilford was rethinking his response to the story Devon had told him. No one on our world could cause sickness like this, but Devon had described a world where people could. Was Dr. Tilford wondering now if he’d dismissed his son’s tale too quickly? Was he wondering if the maker of our alien artifact might want to hurt his son? Or was he ascribing the timing of this to mere coincidence?
“I don’t want to go without you,” I murmured.
He sighed. “Yeah, and I don’t want to lie in a hospital bed worrying about whether you’re both safe or not. But we don’t always get what we want.” He attempted to shake his head, but winced as soon as the motion began. “I wish I could go with you too, Jesse.”
Something about the way he said my name made my heart lurch in my chest. I leaned down and kissed him gently on the forehead. His skin was cool and salty against my lips. At least he had no fever. That was good, right?
He opened his eyes and looked at me. His left eye was twitching less than it had in Rose’s kitchen. “Come home in the right time frame,” he whispered. “Even if you have to stay there a while to figure out how to do it right. Don’t end up like Sebastian, coming home after everyone you love is long dead.” Including me, his eyes pleaded.
“We will,” I told him, and Rita said, “We promise.”
Dr. Tilford came back then, so I let go of Devon’s hand. The doctor told us he was going to spend the night by Devon’s side, and promised to text us if anything changed. So we left them both there. What else could we do? Whoever had struck Devon down had played his hand well.
One third of our team was lying helpless in a hospital bed, we hadn’t even left home yet.
As omens went, it was a pretty lousy one.
8
BERKELEY SPRINGS
WEST VIRGINIA
JESSE
SEYER SHOWED UP IN THE MORNING, right on schedule. My mother hadn’t been all that happy about our plans, when we’d discussed them the night before, and with Devon’s midnight emergency having shaken us all pretty badly, she was even less happy about them now. Despite our assurances that Seyer had once been “an old family friend,” Mom said she didn’t know her now, and that was what mattered. As Seyer drove up she stood on the porch with her arms folded across her chest, and it looked like we weren’t going to be traveling anywhere.
Seyer had brought a young girl with her, a thin waif in a flowered sundress, who she introduced as Samantha. The girl stuck by Miriam’s side, her wide blue eyes taking in the scene as Seyer explained to my mother how good it would be for me to get away for a while. A kind of vacation. It all sounded pretty lame to me (vacation from what?) but within minutes Mom was nodding and smiling, and saying yes, yes, it might be good for me to get away, and she was glad that Seyer was giving me the opportunity to do so. She agreed that while it would be nice if Seyer’s mountain retreat had good cell phone reception, so she could keep in touch with us, of course in the mountains of West Virginia, service might be spotty and she understood that. Ten minutes later I had her permission to go, and even Rose—who had been more wary of the trip than Mom was—beamed as she gave us a tin of chocolate chip cookies to take with us. So Rita and I fetched the bags we’d packed for the trip, including a large black portfolio with the painting in it, and she climbed into the car while I said goodbye to Mom.
As we hugged I pressed my cheek against hers, drinking in her scent, her warmth, and her affection, trembling as I tried not to think about all the things that might keep me from returning to her. True, I was only going to Terra Prime to talk to someone, and Miriam Seyer had promised to bring us home right after that, but neither Rita nor I was so naïve as to think that it would all go off exactly as planned. The universe just didn’t work like that. Terra Prime was a frightening and unpredictable world, and we barely knew a fraction of its rules. When we left our own world behind, we had to accept that there was a small chance we might never come home again.
I will come back to you, Mom. I buried my face in her neck so that no one could see the tears forming in my eyes. I’ll find a way to heal you, and I’ll come home to you. I promise.
Finally it was time to leave. I threw my backpack into the car, waved a final farewell to Tommy, and climbed into the back seat, next to Rita.
It wasn’t until Seyer’s SUV pu
lled onto the main road that she formally introduced us to her companion: Samantha Cassidy, Journeyman of the Domitors. It didn’t take a degree in Latin to figure out the nature of Cassidy’s Gift. Suddenly my family’s unexpected change in attitude made total sense, as did a few other things, considerably darker in nature. I remembered how many of the other changelings had died because they’d made foolish choices. One had gone surfing in hurricane waters, I recalled, and another had dived into a concrete pool at the wrong angle. And one person with a bee allergy had walked right into an angry hive. Back when we’d first heard about those deaths we couldn’t imagine how an outside agency could have caused all that, but if there was a Gift that allowed one to nudge people’s thoughts in a particular direction, quieting the inner voice that normally kept them from doing stupid things, maybe it wasn’t so great a mystery after all.
I wondered if Samantha had been involved in any of those killings.
Since the Gate in Luray was now buried under tons of rubble, Seyer said she was going to take us north, to something she called an E-Gate. Apparently the ‘E’ stood for ephemeral. Unlike the portal in Luray, this one hadn’t been around for centuries, but was a fleeting phenomenon, like the rift Sebastian had run into at the North River. Seyer assured us that the Greys had stabilized it for now, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something named ephemeral was probably temporary in nature. Did that mean that the portal might vanish at any moment? Maybe while we were passing through it?
The Greys are experts at this stuff, I told myself. Surely they wouldn’t let people enter the Gate if it was dangerous.
We drove for a while without anyone talking. Not that there weren’t a thousand and one questions I wanted to ask Seyer, but the situation with Devon had left me badly shaken, and his absence hung like a dank cloud over our journey. Rita spent most of the trip leaning against the window of Seyer’s SUV, staring out at the passing landscape in silence, so she must have felt it, too. It was strange for the two of us to be going to Terra Prime without him. Like leaving part of your own body behind.
Just before hitting the main highway, Seyer pulled over for gas. There was a nearby convenience store, and the Domitor took some money from the glove compartment and headed inside to buy us all drinks. When she was gone, I turned to Seyer and asked, “How long were you watching me?”
She raised an eyebrow slightly, said nothing.
“I know that you scoped my house one day, before I met you. Tommy saw you there. So, was that the first time you spied on me? Or is this something that’s been going on for a while?”
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me for a moment longer, smiled slightly, then got out of the car and went to where the squeegees were stored. A minute later she was cleaning the windshield. A faint smile creased her lips, maybe part amusement, maybe something else. Something darker.
She never answered me.
Damn her.
If you’d asked me a year ago what I thought the portal to another world would look like, the last thing I would have said was The Department of Motor Vehicles.
Life is full of surprises.
After a couple of hours on the highway, Seyer turned off onto a narrow dirt road. At the end of it was a large open field surrounded by a primitive stone wall, and a weathered barn at the far end that had seen better days. The field was full of vehicles, not all of them neatly parked: cars, vans, pickup trucks, even one eighteen wheeler. Some looked brand new, others like they had just come from a demolition derby. Seyer parked at the end of the last row and then told us we would have to leave our cell phones in her glove compartment for safekeeping, as we couldn’t bring electronic devices through the Gate. I noted that she took it for granted that we both had our phones with us, which of course we did. I couldn’t answer for Rita’s motives, but I figured if we wound up returning to Terra Colonna in some unexpected time or place, I wanted my phone with me. With a sigh I checked to make sure my phone was locked, then turned it off and stowed it in the glove compartment alongside Rita’s and Seyer’s.
I had far worse contraband in my backpack, but of course I wasn’t going to tell her that.
It turned out the barn wasn’t an old building at all, just a big stage set. What had appeared from a distance to be mildew turned out to be speckled green paint, and a power sander had clearly been used to grind off some of the color in strategic spots, I could see little dents where someone had beaten the wood with a chain to make it look weatherworn. Shabby chic alien portal.
Inside was a small foyer, where a pleasant looking woman with nondescript features greeted us politely from behind a cheap Formica counter. “Good afternoon,” she said in a quasi-British accent (modified by a Southern twang). “How may I help you?” Wordlessly Seyer removed three small black booklets from her purse and handed them to her; the Domitor apparently had her own. As the woman flipped through the booklets I saw my picture in one of them and Rita’s in another. Some kind of passport? The clerk gave each one a cursory glance, compared our names to those on a list on her clipboard, then handed them back to us.
“Departure in twenty-three minutes,” she said pleasantly. “Any special dispensations?”
“No,” Seyer responded.
“Customs declarations and waivers are over there.” She indicated a shelf I hadn’t noticed before, also cheap Formica, a narrow ledge running the length of the wall. There were papers stacked neatly in bins and pens in little black cups, the universal symbol for Hey, you need to fill something out. “We have lockers for contraband, if you need one.”
“Thank you,” Seyer said, and she ushered us toward the shelf.
There were two documents there, and Seyer told us to sign them using the names in our passbooks, and date them. The first had a bold heading that read CONTRABAND DECLARATION, and below that a statement in smaller type: I, ___________ verify that I am not carrying on my person, nor will I attempt to bring through the Gate, any of the following items. Below that was a list of items the folks of Terra Prime didn’t want in their world. Some of them we already knew about—electronic devices of any kind topped the list—but some were surprising, and a few were just plain weird. Seriously, how much would it threaten their world if someone brought a pack of chewing gum? I reviewed the list, then got to the part where I had to initial a box to verify that I’d read and agreed to it. I glanced at Rita. Did she also have something in her backpack that was less than kosher, or was she playing it straight? Her expression offered me no clue. Finally I sighed, checked the box, and then looked in my passbook to see what alias Seyer had assigned to me. Jennifer Dolan. I signed on the dotted line, thus establishing that my first official act in traveling to Morgana’s world was to lie to authorities.
The other document was a legal disclaimer. I, , hereby acknowledge that the portal I am about to enter is a natural phenomenon, neither created for or by, nor controlled by, the Guild of Obfuscates. I acknowledge that while the Guild has established a Gate to help facilitate safe passage, minor temporal disturbances are still possible, which the Guild may not be able to predict or nullify. I verify that I am choosing to enter the Gate fully cognizant of these risks, and will not hold the Guild liable for any temporal disturbance I may suffer, or for any other adverse effect attending my passage.
It was more than a little chilling, but I figured we were already past the point of no return, so I signed that one, too.
Once we handed in our paperwork we were allowed to proceed to the main room, which was so utterly mundane in appearance that I felt like I’d walked into the DMV. It was a large room with a counter running along one wall, rows of molded plastic chairs in the middle, and a big sign overhead that proclaimed in capital letters, SERVING NEXT: E43. Surely any minute now we would hear an announcement about where to go to get a photograph taken for our portal-crossing license. Thank God Seyer had all our papers in order, so we didn’t have to wait i
n any lines. It was only a short wait before we were ushered through a door at the far end of the room, along with a dozen other people.
Having only seen the Gate in Luray, I’d assumed that the other ones looked much the same: mysterious archways hidden deep underground, flanked by rows of insensate bodies ready to be used as transportation tools. But this arch was a much less imposing structure, smaller and simpler than its Luray counterpart, and without the layered crystals that had lent the other such a fantastic air. Still, I felt my heart flutter with fear as I looked at it. I still remembered the icy breath of the void that lay beyond that Gate and had no desire to ever experience it again.
Suddenly the space inside the arch began to shimmer. A golden pattern began to take shape line by line, in its center. The design wasn’t something I saw with my eyes but rather with my mind. Faint strains of music wafted toward me, as if floating on an unseen breeze. Random chords, haunting and somber, as if an orchestra worlds away was fine-tuning its instruments, and we were hearing their echoes.
Then a Shadowlord stepped through. His sudden presence was like a blast of icy wind, and the hair on the back of my neck pricked upright as I stared at him, mesmerized by the unearthly quality of his appearance. Bloodless skin, empty black eyes, a body whose edges shifted and faded even as I tried to focus on him . . . the sight of him stirred a visceral fear deep within me, and I instinctively stepped back from him. A few of the locals did the same, though more discreetly than I did. Apparently even people who were used to ghosts and shapechangers didn’t want to get too close to his kind.
What if this Shadow knows who I am? I thought suddenly. What if he recognizes me as one of the Colonnans connected to the destruction of the Gate in Luray? The Shadows might not have considered it worth their time to hunt me down back home, but now I was re-entering their world—their territory—and the rules might change. Every survival instinct in my soul was urging me to turn and run out of here, to get as far away from this unnatural creature as I possibly could. If I could make it outside, into the sunlight, he wouldn’t follow me there. Shadowlords hated the sun as much as vampires did.