“She’s not too far from campus, so if we head that way, I should get a better idea of where to go.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
We both chugged our caffeine and sugar laden drinks before we reached the highway. This time of day, the traffic sucked, so I was thankful when Gabriel took the next exit and opted to take another route, passing a pretty church with gorgeous stained-glass windows.
“Hey, Sky?”
“Hm?”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What’s up?”
“What are your plans this summer?”
“Mom’s due date is May 23rd, so I wanna be there for that. Help her out, you know? Why?”
“You planning to fly?”
“Pretty much. I figured since we’re going to keep the same townhouse, it’ll be easy to leave most of my stuff behind.”
“What if I drive you instead?”
“Really? I sorta figured you’d wanna go home and see your folks.”
“I do, but… I’m not in a rush. Besides, I’d really like you to come with me.” He looked straight ahead through the windshield, but both hands tightened on the wheel.
“Come home with you?”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to.”
“No—I mean, yes, I’d like that. But is it going to be okay with your family?”
“If they want me there, it better be.”
“Gabe—”
“I mean what I said, Sky. It’s… you’re special to me, all right? And it’s not that I’m choosing you over my family, just that I’m asking them to choose me.”
Over Jada. He didn’t need to speak the words for me to understand what was on his mind.
“I’d love to go to Texas with you. I just hope you don’t mind a couple weeks with a newborn in the house.”
“Nah. I love kids. Back when Alex was a lil’ dude, I’d try to steal him and make a nest in the closet for him like he was my kid. Mom has pictures of me hiding him there.” After a pause, he added, “I grew out of that, by the way.”
“That is adorable.”
He grinned at me. “Promise I’ll refrain from doing the same with your baby brother.”
“You had better. I’m not saving you if Dad turns you from a raven to a toad.”
We laughed together, and for a while, the promise of another cross-country drive back home made me wonder how much trouble we’d cause for the Sentinel Bureau of Affairs, and whether they cared enough to assign another relay of guards to track us from Chicago to Suffolk, and then from there west to Houston.
Traveling beyond PNRU property for the first time since unveiling Scary’s identity should have terrified me, but Monica’s behavior made it obvious she didn’t want to kill me. Just make me suffer.
And since she shirked her responsibilities with Sharon for two years, there wasn’t a shred of a bond between my charge and her former godmother for Monica to do a damned thing. Coercive glamours performed on Sharon would just roll off.
Yawning into one hand, I glanced down at my phone through blurry eyes. The Red Bull hadn’t helped much, lacking the usual kick. I stared at Holly’s most recent text and tried to make sense of it.
“Hey, Holly says Victor left on a sudden emergency mission. Did Simon and Sebastian call you in?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not really. They sometimes take different people out on jobs. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else if they always chose me.”
“Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. I wonder if it has anything to do with finding those babies.”
Endless Chicago suburb passed us by, each house as bland and dull as the last. I texted for a couple minutes and glanced up at the serene landscape of gray street slush and ivory lawn. Another church with stained windows. How many did Chicago need?
Maybe they were like Starbucks, available on every corner.
“Hey, didn’t we pass that church already?”
Gabriel peered past me and frowned at the white steepled building on their left. “Shit, it does look familiar, but I haven’t made any turns. I hate to say it, but most churches look the same to me.”
“Maybe…”
Except five minutes later, we passed the same church. I recognized the pine garlands and red ribbons decorating the signpost.
Twisting to my right, I paid closer attention to the neighborhood. “Gabe?”
“Hm?” He squeezed my knee. “What’s up, babe?”
“You really did pass that church before. Something is wrong.”
“I haven’t made a turn. We’ve been on this same goddamn stretch of road for…” He shifted, sitting straighter in the seat. “What time did we leave the campus?”
I looked down at my phone and frowned at the display. We’d left at four, I was sure of it, but the time showed only ten minutes had passed.
Which was impossible, considering we were at least thirty minutes out from the university.
Gabriel slowed and veered for the side of the road, but another car came up beside us and cut him off. He swore and swerved back into our lane.
“Where did they even come from?”
“No idea. I’m gonna turn here, okay? Something’s definitely up.” Gabriel slowed and took the next right turn. We hadn’t gone more than a mile before we passed the church again.
“What the hell? That’s not possible.” Gabriel stopped the car and stared out the windshield.
The ground quaked and shuddered, snow toppling from branches onto the ivory ground beneath their skeletal limbs. Another rumble set off several alarms from cars parked along the street, strong enough to rattle us in our seats.
Gabriel hastily threw the car back into drive and took off. A streetlight toppled over behind us. Another few seconds parked back there, and it would have crashed down on Gabe’s vehicle. I twisted around in my seat to stare at it and my stomach dropped.
“Um, Gabe?”
“What?”
“The road…”
Earthquakes weren’t a natural occurrence in Chicago, but the street fractured as if we were on a California fault line and became two distinct halves. Lightning fast, the crack spread until it was at our rear bumper and we were speeding just ahead of it.
Gabriel looked in the rearview mirror, and his eyes grew large. “What the fuck?” He slammed his foot on the pedal and pressed it to the floor. His car picked up speed to keep ahead of the damage flying down the roads.
A sinkhole opened to the rear of us, and cars parked on the curb tumbled down into a smoldering abyss below. Balls of flame exploded upward, red light casting an ominous glow over the lip of the widening crevice.
“Gabe, drive!”
“I’m driving as fast as I can!”
When I twisted around in my seat again to look behind us, I saw houses crumbling into the snow and sending up plumes of dust and debris. Gabriel took a right onto the next street, but the fissure in the road followed us, like some living, conscious thing wanting to devour us as well.
“Sky.”
“What?”
“Unfasten your seat belt and prepare to go out the window. Phase into the Twilight if you have to. Just get those wings out.”
“What? No way.”
“You promised you’d do what I said.”
I had, and I regretted making the vow. “What about you?”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be.”
I went to unbuckle my seat belt, but the little red eject button had vanished. When I tugged the strap, it only tightened against my chest.
“Sky, get outta here!”
“I’m trying!”
Desperate to escape, I gave up on the seat belt and tried to will myself through the Twilight. Nothing happened.
The road exploded in front of us. Gabriel tried to swerve, but we remained on a straight course. Helpless and trapped, we plummeted into the yawning abyss toward the fl
aming hellscape below.
I jolted in the seat, holding the armrests so hard one of my fingernails had snapped. Gabriel sat beside me, staring straight ahead and holding the steering wheel just as tight. We were stopped on the road by a long stretch of trees.
“We just—did something weird just happen?”
He swallowed and nodded. “Something’s up.”
“It felt so real.”
He glanced at the rearview mirror then checked our surroundings. We hadn’t made it more than ten minutes from the school and had apparently hallucinated over thirty minutes of driving. “Yeah. It did. And it happened to both of us.”
Still shaking, I pulled my phone to check the time against the clock in his car. Four seventeen.
“Phone the school. I’m gonna turn us around and head back to campus until we get backup.”
“Okay.”
Gabriel put the car into drive and pulled out onto the road again while I dialed the sentinel office. I described the unusual event to a bored senior on the other end who promised to report it to Simon and Sebastian.
We coasted five miles above the speed limit before the rainfall began in a gentle drizzle against the windshield, hardly anything more than a fine mist.
Remaining on edge, I watched out the window, determined to focus on our surroundings this time. The mist thickened and became a steady drizzle. After another minute, the rain pounded against the windshield until Gabriel was forced to slow down to a crawl, distress whitening his knuckles and creasing deep lines across his brow.
“Fuck, I can’t see a thing.”
“I didn’t think rain was even in the forecast.” It had been clear skies when we left.
The rainfall intensified, and the car lurched forward at a sickening angle. Before I even had a chance to wonder what the hell was happening, we plummeted. Water splashed up against the windshield and over the roof, transforming the world of gray haze beyond the storm into a black canvas.
“Are we… are we under water? How are we under water?”
Gabriel stared, gripping the wheel so hard I expected it to crack. “No. No way. This has gotta be an illusion. We’re just seeing things.”
Except there was frigid water seeping into the car through every crack, and the floorboards were already soaked. The car was descending faster by the second, no doubt growing heavier. I summoned light in my palm and screamed as a school of fish flashed by, their glittering scales reflecting my faerie light.
Gabriel unsnapped his seat and reached for mine. The little red button that had been missing before was present, but when he pushed it, nothing happened. Jammed. Water pooled around my feet, soaking through my sneakers.
“Burn it, Sky!”
My glamour sparked in my hands. Instead of burning through the seat belt, it fizzled out. Gabriel tugged on it next, gritting his teeth and tearing at it while water rose to our legs. Desperate, I pushed the eject button again.
“It’s gotta be another illusion.”
“What if it isn’t, Gabe? What if we’ve been driving through illusions all this time and we’re really in Lake Michigan?”
He fought harder with it, tugging until the strain turned his face red with exertion, until his shifter strength yielded nothing but a few cuts on his palms and fingers from the belt edge slicing through his skin. “Would an illusion prevent you from shadowstriding?”
I tried, but nothing happened. I remained firmly restrained by the seat belt, submerged to my knees in icy water, and we still hadn’t hit the bottom.
We were going to drown, and no amount of magic, no glamour, and no Dream Boxes could help us.
27
Creepster
The seat belt bit into my shoulder when I bolted upright in my seat with a startled gasp. Warmth lingered against my neck, a soft red glow fading from the Heartflame. We were parked on a narrow, one-way residential street lined with brick houses and a single church on the right-hand side. The sun had already set, but a few smudges of pale violet light remained in the darkening sky. A few minutes ago, the sun had been bright against the snow-kissed ground.
At least, it had only seemed like a few minutes.
One quick look at my phone declared the hour to be a quarter past seven, which meant we’d been dreaming for almost three hours.
And in those hours, Sharon’s anxiety had transformed to absolute terror. I still felt her, the bond that connected us telling me she was nearby in a house farther down the road. This time, when I unsnapped my seat belt, it released and slid into the retractor. For a moment, I’d worried it wouldn’t.
I rubbed my bleary eyes and turned to look at Gabe. His head leaned back at an awkward, uncomfortable angle.
“Gabriel, wake up.” I patted his face, and when that didn’t work, I shook his shoulder until his chin fell down to his chest. He didn’t stir. “C’mon, please. Gabe, please, I need you.”
Was this another illusion or a crazy nightmare? My heart still raced from the last one, but something told me this time I was really awake.
I fished Gabriel’s cell phone out of his pocket and pressed his thumb against the unlock button. The moment it lit, I scrolled his contacts list to the entry Sebastian Kane.
The phone line went straight to voice mail. Calling Simon yielded the same result, and when I hit up the local field office, I received a familiar message warning me of placing a call during a period of high call volume. Please hang up and try again.
The moment I dialed in the school office, a different student picked up from the one I’d hallucinated calling in the dream.
“PNRU Sentinel Office. Junior Sentinel Patrick speaking, how may I direct your call?”
“This is Skylar Corazzi, and I have a big emergency. Something magical happened, and my sen—my partner won’t wake up.”
“Partner name and location?”
“Gabriel Fujimoto.” I rattled off the street and the address of a house beside us as Gabriel made an alarming gurgle beside me.
“All battlemage sentinels are occupied at the moment, but I’ll dispatch someone to drive out.”
“It’ll take them way too long to get here, and he needs help now. There are no hostile parties visible, but he’s in distress.”
“I can patch into the Lake County field office and try to get someone to you. It’s a long shot. There’s some largescale investigation going down right now, and all battlemage units were called in to duty. Like all of them. Even the guys over in Gary. I don’t have anyone here capable of a teleport to your area.”
“Please. If there’s any chance…”
“I’ll do my best, Skylar. Please keep the phone at hand.”
After ending the call and setting Gabe’s phone in the beverage holder, I twisted around in my seat to study our surroundings. The neighborhood was only five blocks over from where Sharon lived, its street occupied by many single and two-story brick homes.
I glimpsed at it through the Twilight, and to my right, the lovely little white chapel with the gorgeous stained glass became a murky glob sucking in the surrounding light.
Bingo. Whoever it was, whatever they were, they had to be there.
And it could be forty-five minutes or longer until aid reached us from across the Indiana state line.
“Think, Sky, think.” It took immense power to do the sort of illusion or mind altering we’d experienced. I couldn’t even remember driving here, let alone parking.
It couldn’t be a mage. Magician’s tricks could only affect sight and hearing, never a sense of smell. Ravens could do it all, but Gabriel wouldn’t be dead asleep, trapped in his own nightmare.
Nightmare.
Understanding came to me with a shiver when I realized the source of the magical attack was another of my kind.
Gabriel’s gurgling ended, but I could imagine what had happened in the dream, because the wrinkle in his brow remained and he made a low groan of anguish even in his sleep that ripped the heart from my chest and sent fury boiling through my veins.
>
He became visibly paler, the warmth of his natural golden glow fading.
The nue harming him was eating his life, devouring his soul bite by bite, one dream death at a time, and if I sat in the passenger seat wringing my hands until a real sentinel arrived, I’d watch him die for good.
In the old tales, when Emperor Nijō fell into a deep sleep plagued by a prolonged illness, a master archer pursued the beast and slew him. I didn’t have a bow, so Gabriel’s handgun had to suffice.
I thrust Gabriel’s phone in my pocket then tore open his jacket to claim his sidearm. Due to Scary Godmother, all the junior sentinels and the licensed officers were carrying rounds packed with iron shavings along with their stakes. I took both and stumbled out of the car.
In my head, I heard the voices of everyone I’d disappointed for charging blindly into a danger zone, but this time, I knew my enemy and what I was walking into.
Besides, in this scenario, I really had no other option.
I picked my way carefully down the icy sidewalk toward the church. Locks barred normal people from entering the closed building, but I stepped inside through the Twilight and into a dim church lit only by a few candles on the altar. A figure in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt sat on the floor in front of it, surrounded by an indigo miasma.
Counting on the element of surprise, I raised Gabriel’s gun, spent one split second glancing down the sight, and I pulled the trigger. My shot went wide and hit the altar instead, splintering the wooden panel in front.
The nue jerked its head up, eyes gleaming pinpricks of dark green in the shadows of its black hood. Before it could move, I squeezed the trigger again. The second round glanced off the crucifix behind the altar, but then the third struck my target in the shoulder. The iron inside the round didn’t sizzle or make the telltale sound of reacting with darkling faerie flesh.
Bile flooded my mouth when the fae howled in pain—a very masculine shout—and rushed to his feet. By the time I realized he was gone, I’d emptied Gabriel’s gun. I’d never shot anyone before.
The Scary Godmother: The Paranormal University Files: Skylar, Year 2 Page 29
