“I don’t intend to leave my post, but I’ll warn you if I’m forced to,” she promised me. “I’ll be surprised if anyone even comes onto this floor. The other witches who live here went with Liv. There’s a small security team monitoring Myrddin’s wards, but they’re on the fifth floor. And there’s some kind of meeting down in the temple. That’s what’s worrying me. I don’t know what that meeting is about. I don’t like being on the outside.”
“We’ll be as fast as we can.” Lee took a deep breath and started to reach for the door.
I moved in front of him. “I should do that. We know I’ll be able to get in.”
I unlocked the door with my key and it opened with a slight hiss. I stepped inside and Lee was next. He had no problem moving into the hallway. It made me worry that perhaps we’d brought the wards down simply by walking through. “Christine, do you still feel the warding?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes. I can’t go in there. Shut the door and you’ll be safe.”
“Be careful.” I wished she could come in with us, but our best bet was to get in and out quickly.
The door closed and I was left in a time capsule. For me it all looked normal, but like the rest of the building I could somehow feel the passage of time that had gone through here. Late afternoon light filtered through the balcony windows, and I held a breath because it was hard to believe Sarah wasn’t about to walk in from the kitchen and ask me where I’d been.
“It’s exactly how I remember it.” Lee stepped into the living room. “Goddess, we were working on that stupid project.”
There was a half-finished papier-mâché globe sitting on a table in front of the windows that opened onto the balcony.
“It was supposed to be the earth, right?” Sarah and I often switched off helping the kids with their projects. She took the more artsy ones and I edited book reports.
He nodded, standing over it and staring down like he could still see Mia sitting there, working on their geography homework. “Yeah, Mia picked it because it was the hardest one, and we would get extra credit. She didn’t need it.”
“But you did.” Mia looked after Lee in a way most kids wouldn’t think to.
I took a long breath and glanced around the living room where I’d so often sat and drank wine with Sarah and Neil.
It looked like they’d just vanished. Felix’s reading glasses were sitting on the kitchen table along with a now old copy of a psychology magazine. There was a big platter of pancakes that looked freshly made. I could even smell them and the coffee in the pot.
“Are they still here?” Lee glanced around.
I watched as the pancakes seemed to shrink. Mold grew, and in seconds they were nothing more than a desiccated husk. The coffee that had smelled so fresh only seconds before suddenly smelled loamy, and even the paper of the magazine seemed to shrink in a bit.
“The wards might still be up, but we unsealed this place,” I said. “Time is catching up here now. We should look for the bag. They’re not here, Lee. I’m sorry. I hoped they were, too.”
“But their bodies aren’t here either.” Lee sighed and started for the back of the apartment. “If they were, we would see them. So somehow they got out.” He turned down the hall and stopped. “Whoa.”
I raced to catch up to him and I stopped, too.
There were scorch marks down the hall. Where we stood they were merely tendrils, but I could see that they got bigger as they moved toward the bedrooms. At the ends they were ashy looking, but they lightened up as we moved down, a wave that went from gray to gold to an almost sunlit color.
“This leads to their bedroom. Lee, please let me go first. If they’re…” I began.
My son was stubborn. He jogged ahead of me.
The scorch marks reminded me of the corona of the sun, curling out from the center, and there was no question where the center was.
Lee threw open the bedroom door, and despite the fact that the lights were off, there was an ambient glow that came from the ceiling.
“What is that?” Lee stood in the middle of Sarah’s big bedroom and looked up.
There was the center. It was the lightest part of the marking, and I could feel a warmth coming from it. “I think that’s how they got out. What did Asta tell us?”
“She said there was a scar here.” Lee was staring up as though he could see through that yellow and orange light.
“She said someone ripped open the veil.” I thought that might be what we were standing under. “I think that’s the rip.”