Three seconds.
I felt the eighteen gates open around us.
I’d argued with Niko for hours over it. Saying it was worth the risk. He wouldn’t agree—it wasn’t going to happen—until I said the Auphe were following me. They wanted Niko dead. They wanted me alive. Either way, if Niko went through to Tumulus without me, there was no guarantee all the Auphe would follow him and his bomb. Some would stay for me, and Nik knew it. It was the only reason he’d given in. It was him, naturally, that came up with blocking my sense of sight and smell. Blocking as much of Tumulus as we could. And it seemed to be working.
And the time element . . . if I kept the gate open, like Niko had suggested when he’d wanted to go through alone earlier in the week for reconnaissance, if I kept it anchored to our world, it might keep the time flow there and here the same. Although, hell, at this point, the time difference was the least of our concerns.
They came through their gates. I heard the whisper of sand under their feet and claws. I felt their eyes on me the same as I’d felt them watching me the past days.
Two seconds.
I didn’t think they knew what the bomb was, but they did recognize a trap that would actually work. Smelled the confidence on Niko, the vicious triumph on me—not the fear they’d scented on the Vigil. Mad, feral, but smart as the most cunning of predators. A predator like that would retreat, think things over, see what would happen.
Too bad I slammed their gates in their faces. At Niko’s harsh “Now” and hard squeeze of my shoulder, I closed them all.
I knew how they did it. I knew it in me—when they had done it to mine, they’d taught me to do it to theirs—but knowing and closing one was one thing. Closing eighteen. Could I do that? Guess what. I’d learned last year, if you’re willing to die, physically you can do almost anything before you go. To kill the Auphe, I was willing to die. . . . But I didn’t. I closed their gates and my brain didn’t explode. Did it hurt? Jesus, yes, it hurt, but I was still conscious, and that’s what mattered. Niko hit me midchest and knocked me back through the only gate left—mine. I felt the concrete floor of the warehouse under my back, his weight on top of me and I closed the door to Tumulus instantly. It was gone.
One.
The world shook. I pulled off the rags from my face as the pounding in my brain continued. There was no light brilliant enough to burn away the flesh from your bones. No force strong enough to take out city blocks. There was nothing, but the world still shook. The glass didn’t quiver in the windows; the dust motes floating in the dim lights set in the ceiling didn’t drift a millimeter. I didn’t care. I still felt it. A part of a world—not this one—but a part of some other world had just died.
I started to ask Nik if he felt it too . . . but I saw it. Quicker than the other seventeen. More of that razor-edge intelligence. It couldn’t open its gate, so it used mine. It came through with us, fast and alive when it should’ve been dead. Metal teeth that had grinned through so many of my childhood windows and adult nightmares. Eyes more radioactive than any mushroom cloud. Claws, transparent skin, jagged joints, death . . .
No.
Red glass granules on my hands cutting them . . . like before.
No.
That thin, cold air that wanted to suck your lungs inside out.
The bitch should’ve died there.
I growled and threw Nik off me, before he saw it behind him. Threw him off like he weighed nothing. The sand, the cold, being naked in caves, being fed meat, and told what kind it was only after I was done. Discovering as bad as eating it was, being forced to eat it again after you’d vomited it on the ground was worse. Beaten and clawed and fed handfuls of it from the stone. Fed by what could’ve been the same goddamn bitch. Because they needed their tool healthy, to open a gate back in time to when the world was new and wipe out the humans before they had a chance to get the smallest grip on life.
My teeth were in its throat, ripping it with one smooth motion as I took it to the floor. It had moved to evade. I had moved with the same speed. Used the same throat tearing I’d seen them use on the weaker or wounded ones. Or sometimes they killed each other just for the hell of it—in the caves or under the boiling sky. A game. And now I got to play too.
Black blood flowed down its chest, but it wouldn’t kill it. It would only slow it down for half a second . . . a second. More than enough for an Auphe to take advantage of, and I did.
I’d seen them use their claws in those caves, not just their teeth. I didn’t have claws, not homegrown, but I had others. My hands went into my jacket and came out with two dirk daggers, one in each hand. Narrow blades, the perfect size to fit the eye sockets that held those pools of lava and blood. I sheathed them there to the hilts and punctured the malignant tumor of a brain. Its body bucked under me, its claws trying for my face, my side, but the spidery hands went limp first and fell to the ground.
“Unworthy,” I hissed. I withdrew the blades and slammed them home one more time. It bucked again, and the faint hiss of air bubbled through the blood that was still pumping from its throat, but more slowly. And slower still.
Then there was no more gurgling. No more fighting to escape. Only the last escaping breath ripe with the smell of Vigil flesh. There was a bead of moisture on my bottom lip. I’d ripped out its throat with such speed that only a drop of blood touched my mouth. I touched it with the tip of my tongue, sampled it. It tasted like poison and death and the rich earth of a long-forgotten graveyard.
It wasn’t half bad.
“Cal. Come back.”
I looked up, a boiling acid glare through the strands of black hair that fell over my face. “My kill. Mine.” The words hurt my throat. Weren’t right. They twisted and knotted the air, they didn’t flow through it.
“Cal, I told you I was bringing you back with me. All of you. I meant it. Now come back.” I recognized that voice. He was there the first time I’d come back from . . . that place. He’d been there, waited for me. My brother.
Like he was waiting for me now—in the warehouse, not at a burned trailer. No, not waiting. He’d been with me to hell and back. Blown hell to hell and back.
I laughed. It didn’t sound quite right either, but better than the words I’d spat.
“Cal, now.” There were hands on my arms, gripping hard.
I let go of one of the dirks and rubbed my eyes, then the blood from my mouth. “Nik.”
The random mixing of colors I’d seen settled into olive skin, with a touch of green from the gate travel, dark blond hair, warning eyes. My brother’s face. “The Vigil,” he said softly enough only I could hear and steely enough to let me know I was on the edge of Auphe-ing myself into the Vigil’s classification of overt as King Kong pregnant with Mothra’s baby, and telling Oprah all about his mood swings.
I’d been as fast as an Auphe, killed an Auphe in seconds, spoke Auphe, had been considering . . . no one needed to know what I was considering. I didn’t need to know. But I did know. I knew what Auphe did with their prey.
The Auphe’s heart stopped under me.
It had stopped breathing a moment before, but sometimes the heart takes some time to catch up. It did, and this time my brain did explode. I fell off the Auphe, over onto my back, and began convulsing. There had been lights in my brain. A dark and grim constellation, always there but I’d never known it. I knew now because they all blinked out. They very last one wavered, faded, and disappeared. The half-genetic, half-telepathic web was gone. I’d only known about the connection for days, but it felt like millions of neurons were dying. It was as if every single star in the universe went out. Every single one.