“How can you even tell in that library? There’s arcane crap everywhere!”
He thrust his hands into his pockets, smiling sheepishly. “Um, we kinda moved a bunch of stuff around while we made sure that all of those things were gone.”
“Ooooh, you are gonna be in so much trouble when my aunt comes back. For all we know she had a system in place.”
He made a sour noise. “Well, it’s a system of a big pile on the floor now. And there’s a place that looks wacky. Are you feeling well enough to take a look at it?”
I started to respond, but the banging of the front door caught my attention. I heard pounding footsteps, then Jill came careening around the doorway, bags of fast food in each hand. The intense and worried expression on her face cleared instantly at the sight of me standing.
“Well, it’s about time you got over your little mosquito bite,” she said, flouncing into the room and plopping the bags on the desk. She crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing me. I grinned and hugged her.
“Get off me, you crazy bitch,” she grumbled, but I could hear the relieved laugh in there as well. “Here—Ryan and Zack said you needed to eat. And I need to as well. I’ve been spending the last couple of hours perched in the damn disaster area your aunt called a library with a fucking fishing net, waiting for another one of those psycho pixie things to pop out, while Ryan and Zack moved books around and muttered to each other.”
I had to laugh at the mental image. “Okay, food first, then fun with fishing nets.”
*
TWO ALEVE AND a hamburger and fries later, I was ready to deal with my aunt’s library again. The ache in my back had settled to merely sore, and I managed to make my way down the hall with only one or two muttered invectives.
I brushed my hands over the library door frame. It felt odd without any wards on it. As I stepped in, I felt a crawl of sensation—not the usual beaded-curtain sensation of going through wards but more the feeling of approaching a source of wrongness. I now knew exactly what Ryan was talking about when he said “wacky.” There was a section of the floor in front of the bookcase on the east wall, an area almost two feet across, that was wrong. I forced myself to step closer, certain that I had to be stepping near a diagram or circle, because every sense I had was screaming at me that this was a portal.
What I couldn’t tell was if it was open. I frowned as I crouched. It wasn’t open in the sense that I was familiar with—the slit of light making a doorway from one sphere to another—but it sure wasn’t closed either. It was … mushy was the best word I could come up with. Stuff could get through but not easily.
I looked sharply back at the doorway. Ryan and Jill stood just outside the door, watching me warily, but it wasn’t them I was interested in. “The wards,” I said, unintentionally hissing softly on the last s.
Ryan frowned. “What about them?”
“I think they were twofold.” Damn it.
“Why? What is that?”
“It’s … a portal. Sort of. A weak spot.”
“Oh, shit,” he breathed. “The wards kept stuff in as well as keeping things out.”
“Yeah,” I said with a groan. “There were wards all throughout the library, which I couldn’t understand. And when I had Kehlirik take down all the wards, that left that portal wide open, so to speak.”
Jill leaned against the wall, thumbs hooked into her jeans. “So why didn’t Kehlirik see that portal thingy?”
An unpleasant feeling settled in my stomach as I looked back at it. “I’m not sure. He was exhausted after clearing the wards, and with the books and other stuff piled all over, I guess he could have missed it.” I rubbed my arms. “Heck, it wasn’t until you moved all the stuff that we knew it was here.” But surely a demon of Kehlirik’s level would have been able to feel it. So why didn’t he say anything about it? Maybe because he had more reason not to? He’d wanted to speak to me—about Ryan. But after he cleared the library wards, suddenly it wasn’t as important. Because he’d found the portal? Now that I was close to it, I could feel a sickeningly familiar resonance about it. It’s probably big enough for that dog to have come through.
Could this portal also have something to do with the consumed essences? I considered it but then dismissed the idea. The portal had still been warded when Brian’s essence was eaten, so whatever was doing it couldn’t have come from this.
Ryan voiced the question that we were all thinking. “Can it be closed?”
I sighed. “I have no idea. I don’t even know if it should be closed.”
Ryan frowned, but Jill angled her head to the side. “Oh, like maybe this is a pressure valve or something?”
“Yeah. And that’s putting it a lot more clearly than I ever could have.” I eased my back into a more comfortable position. “I … have to see if my aunt comes back, and ask her.”