37. Chapter 37

It was cold here. Lifeless. Breathless. But when the cold started to fade, I knew that wasn"t a good sign. I wasn"t getting warmer. I was simply getting less able to feel, as the warmth was leeched from my body.

Dark, shadowy things peered at us from behind half-formed buildings and wispy trees that looked like something from a surrealist art piece, half-formed and hungry. "Is this where you"re from?" I asked Ambrose, clinging to the boogeyman with one hand while I gripped the messenger bag full of magical artifact in the other. It certainly said a lot, if he had been born in this realm.

Ambrose was different here, larger and less humanoid to my eyes. His colors were darkest black, more real and saturated than the beings who lurked nearby. His red pupils blazed brightly in the colorless landscape, setting him apart. But even he wasn"t completely solid. Twisting tendrils of smoke-like blackness floated around him, dancing in an unseen breeze, pulled at by the hungry presence that filled this place. He gripped my hand so tight it hurt. "Yes," he said distractedly, his deep voice warped and terrifying. "This is my place. But you don"t belong."

I didn"t argue with him. It was clear that Dyre and I were not welcome in the in-between. "Let"s go home then," I said evenly, refusing to acknowledge the panic that beat against my ribcage.

Ambrose met my eyes, then glanced at Dyre, his terrifyingly handsome nightmare face twisting into a grimace. "I"m trying," he ground out. "But you seem to be… stuck. The shadows don"t want to give you up."

I felt it then. He was tugging at us, trying to take us somewhere. I could sense it in my aura. In the atoms that made up my being. But we remained firmly in the realm of shadows and nightmares.

"Fuck," I said helpfully.

Dyre was silent, watchful. His eyes had gone full black. And when Sunshine spoke, the wraith"s voice was chilling, as if his darkness was amplified by this place. "What is left of Dyre"s life spark is nearly extinguished," he hissed. "We must leave. Now."

My eyes went wide as I stared at the deathly looking necromancer, a whole new terror rushing through me. Turning to Ambrose, I yanked on his hand. "Get us out of here. He"s barely alive as it is!"

The boogeyman grimaced. "I had deduced that. And you are in just as much danger. But the realm doesn"t want to give you up."

Letting go of the messenger bag to let it rest against my hip, I fought against the terror that wanted to swamp me and took Sunshine"s hand. "I don"t know how to get out of here. I can"t make a portal or manipulate the magic here. It"s made from a different sort of fabric than what I"m used to." I met Sunny"s black eyes as I spoke. "But we can give him power, can"t we?"

Sunny nodded once, curt and final. "We can. But there may be consequences."

I huffed. "Consequences worse than me and your host dying?"

"No," he intoned in that dark, creepy voice. "But if we are going to do this, we should probably act before the last of Dyre"s life force drains away. And before those monsters over there get bold enough to come take a bite of our living energies." He tossed his head, and I followed the gesture to find a trio of misshapen shadows with glinting, needle-shaped teeth slowly creeping toward us.

Closing my eyes, I pulled deeply from my magic reserves, feeling Sunny and Dyre do the same through our bond. Then Sunny gathered the energy, spooled it between us, and held it at the ready. "On the count of three," I told Ambrose. "Yank us out of here."

Ambrose nodded, and I counted down. When I got to "three" Sunshine shoved all of our energy outward, pushing it into Ambrose somehow, flooding the boogeyman"s aura with strength and power. Ambrose yanked at us again, and this time, the world blinked out around us.

We spilled out of the darkness and into the disorienting brightness and sound of a crisp winter day in Magea. We all stumbled. Dyre hit his knees on the sidewalk with a painful thud and a wheeze. Ambrose kept me from falling, yanking me upright by my arm. My head ached, and I felt… itchy all over. Like I was settling back into my skin after having it pulled off and reshaped.

Overall, a disgusting experience. Zero out of five stars.

A shout reached my ears, and I realized that there was no time to catch our breath. The SA had clearly been scanning the area for weird magical surges. I reached out blindly and tore open a portal to the pocket world. Ambrose yanked Dyre to his feet and through the portal. I followed a heartbeat later, barely dodging a killing curse lobbed at me from the agents down the street. The portal snapped shut behind me with a displaced fizz of energy that zapped me like a freaking lightning bolt. I yelped and rubbed my ass, where I"d just been zapped. Then I looked around to find my odd little family standing around the courtyard, staring at us.

"You did it?" Aahil asked, waving a hand at our messenger bags. "No one is dead or bleeding, and you have the artifacts?"

I nodded, sucking in air like I"d been running a marathon. "Yep. Piece of cake. Just another day at the office. No biggie."

"They almost died in the in between," Ambrose said flatly.

""Almost" being the operative word," Dyre said dismissively. One of his pupils was still black. But the other was violet, and he spoke with his own voice, not Sunny"s eerie tones. So… he was probably fine, right?

"What do we do with the artifacts now?" Niamh asked, ever practical and to the point. Even though she didn"t look too impressed about our almost dying and all.

I shrugged. "They"re contained and warded in their cases," I said tiredly. "Should be safe enough for us to stash them somewhere for the moment while we regroup and catch our breath." I glanced at Dyre. "I don"t know about you, but my aura feels raw right now."

He nodded.

Bis gave a little chirp, then he trundled over and clambered up my pant leg, prompting me to scoop him up and hold him at eye level. My furry little child seemed unimpressed. "What"s the matter?" I asked with a sigh. "Did you blow up one of your experiments in the workroom again while I was gone?"

He huffed at me indignantly, and the magic that allowed him to speak glimmered through his aura. "I haven"t blown anything up this week! But there"s something wrong with one of the artifacts," he informed me in a no-nonsense tone.

I arched my brows at him. Bis was oddly sensitive to magic—probably because of whatever dark spells were used to create him—and I had learned not to dismiss his concerns after he noticed a tear in our pocket world that the rest of us had overlooked, and all. "What do you mean?" I asked slowly. We had barely survived our little escapade. The last thing we needed was one more complication.

Bis pointed a tiny hand at Dyre"s bag. "That one is alive," he said evenly. Then he pointed at the bag I carried slung across my chest. "That one is not."

I shrugged, feeling a bit relieved. "Oh. Well, that makes sense, doesn"t it? I"ve got the nullifier. Of course it feels like a lack of magic."

But Bis adamantly shook his little striped head. "No. It"s not the same. When we had the nullifier before, it felt different. Even behind its wards, it still felt… like a presence. This feels like nothing. Like an inanimate object."

I rolled my eyes. That sounded like splitting hairs to me, but I sat my little abomination friend-slash-son down on a nearby bench and opened the messenger bag. Pulling the nullifier out, I stroked my hands over its carrying case. I recognized the same type of warding that Dyre and I had used to contain it before the SA stole it from us before. They probably copied the spells and placed them on both carrying cases. Pressing the metal tabs that opened the case, I readied myself to lose all connection to my magic as the nullifier was unleashed.

But nothing happened.

My magic remained there in my awareness, flowing comfortably through my body and twining through my aura, ready to be used at a moment"s notice. "What the hell?" I muttered.

"He"s right," Zhong said as he inched closer. "Theres no life to it. No intent or… magical signature, really. It just feels like stone."

I scooped up the inert orb and weighed it in my hand. It felt like stone. Exactly like a mundane rock carved to look like a crystal ball.

Elijah drifted closer, misting into existence under the orb, then swirling around it. "There is some magical signature," he said, his hollow, ghostly voice flat with displeasure.

"Angelic," Dyre chimed in. "It has traces of angelic magic on it."

I closed my eyes and let out a long, low groan of frustration.

"Son of a bitch," Ambrose said succinctly.

I opened my eyes to regard Elijah as he formed up into person-shape before me. "They took it, didn"t they?"

The nullifier had originally belonged to the angels. We had borrowed it from the angelic realm on behalf of the SA, back when we thought they might be on our side. Then the SA took the artifact and tried to murder or imprison us. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the angels had decided they wanted their toy back and planted a fake. It would almost be funny, if we didn"t need that artifact to help give us leverage over the SA and the witch supremacists and all.

"Fuck me," I muttered. "Can"t anything, just one goddess damned time, go as planned?"

But of course not. That would be easy. That would be normal. That wouldn"t tempt me to go all Lovell on the universe when we finally reached the last straw. I rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes. "I"m going to take a nap," I declared. "Maybe then we can figure out what to do."

Aahil"s sultry voice was droll. "You already know what we have to do," he informed me as he studied his claws. His golden eyes met mine, flames dancing there. "We need the nullifier to help our cause." He shrugged. "So, we go get it."

I shook my head in denial. Even though I knew he was right. It looked like we were going to give the angels a chance to kill us next, since the SA and the in-between hadn"t done the job. "Damn it."