I rolled out of bed and yanked open the door. “What’s wrong?”
“Pellini got past me while I was in the bathroom,” he said. “He’s on the nexus, and Idris just went out to confront him.” With that, he strode off toward the back of the house. I started to follow then double-checked what I was wearing. A tank top and undies. No bra. I grabbed a pair of running shorts and tugged them on as I hurried after Bryce, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d forgotten something important. Not the bra. Something else.
No time to stop and rack my brain. With Pellini on the nexus and an already suspicious Idris on the way there, bloodshed would soon follow. I flew out the back door, across the porch and down the steps to see Pellini at the center of the nexus, his back to the house. Idris prowled around the edge of the concrete slab like a predator seeking a way to reach its prey.
“Pellini!” Idris yelled. “Come out of there now!”
“What happened?” I asked as I slid to a stop on the dewy grass beside Idris. Déjà vu. I’d stood in this same spot a few days ago when Szerain commandeered the nexus. “What did he do?”
Idris spun toward me, face flushed in anger. “This!” He thrust his hand toward Pellini and struck a veil of transparent potency. Iridescent waves rippled away from the point of impact. “I can’t get through. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I suppressed a groan. “Pellini, what are you doing?” I called out.
Pellini ignored us and turned in a slow circle at the center. Bryce descended the steps, gun in hand, and watched everything carefully.
Idris glared at me. “Happy now?” Once again he tried to penetrate the obstructing veil, this time with a punch so hard and fast I wondered if he’d backed it with potency. Pretty incredible feat if he had. The veil shimmered dark purple and green, but remained intact. He made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat. “We should’ve locked him down!”
“I don’t need an I-told-you-so right now, okay?” I hated that he might have been right. “Give it a minute. He hasn’t hurt anything.”
Pellini continued to turn, waving his hands in front of him as if playing invisible bongo drums in slow motion. Where his hands passed, tangled strands of glowing chartreuse potency coalesced in the air. A moment later a ring of the weird-yet-familiar potency floated around him.
Idris let out a strangled cry of frustration. “What is that?”
“I’ve seen it before,” I said. “When I helped stabilize Paul in the demon realm.” No way was I going to mention Kadir to the already livid Idris. Not yet. My gaze lingered on the strands of potency. I’d seen it elsewhere too, hadn’t I? Once again, the feeling I’d forgotten something important passed through me.
Pellini cupped a section of the ring between his hands, then withdrew them to reveal a strange floating sigil.
Idris went still, face a portrait of shock. “No way.”
I stared at Pellini, mouth open. “He . . . created a floater.” Neither Idris nor I could trace floaters on Earth. That required mastery of all eleven rings of the shikvihr. Moreover, Pellini hadn’t traced the sigil—he’d created it all at once. Before either of us could process that bit of information, Pellini transformed the ring into eleven vibrant chartreuse and violet sigils.
“Kadir,” Idris said through clenched teeth. He might not have recognized the chaotic raw potency, but there was no mistaking the unique Kadir-style sigils. “Bryce, can you shoot him?”
“Hey!” I said. “No one’s shooting anyone!”
Idris leveled a glower at me. “So, the dude imprinted by Kadir—the one who claims to know nothing of the arcane—is out on your nexus, fulfilling Kadir’s agenda. And you’re okay with that?”
“Will you please stop being an asshole for a few goddamn minutes?” I gestured toward Pellini and the ring of sigils he’d set spinning around him. “I have a way to stop him if I have to. It worked on Szerain, it’ll work on Pellini.” As the words left my mouth, the important thing I’d forgotten slammed into me with crystalline clarity. Kadir and Pellini in interdimensional space. I sucked in a breath. “I know what he created. It’s a way to teach us how to symmetrize the valves.”
“How do you know?” Idris asked with outright disbelief. “And why for chrissake would we want to do that?”
“I saw Kadir last night,” I said with measured calm. “He drew me into a non-physical place between worlds, like Pellini described.” I forged on despite the increasing What the fuck? on Idris’s face. “He said the demon realm is in chaos, and Katashi moves too fast with the work he does, and that we needed to learn how to symmetrize the valves.”
Idris eyed me warily. “You get that your explanation doesn’t put me at ease, right?”