I was occupied wrapping a cloth over my nose and mouth and tying it behind my neck. It smelled strongly of the oil Niko used on his swords. I was going to use my gun oil, but something that smelled of Niko . . . it had a better chance. Gave me a better chance.

“How many seconds?” Niko asked as he opened the case.

We’d discussed this at least twenty times in the past few days, but it came down to me. How fast I could open a gate and how fast I could shut eighteen down. Then there was moving through and . . . shit. Shit. I didn’t know. I could only guess.

“Cal.”

Niko had his hand hovering above a computerized trigger. The Vigil were being torn to pieces around us. Bullets, bullets everywhere, but these were the Auphe. If they couldn’t dodge it, and most they could, it didn’t matter unless it took their head off, and I didn’t see a single headless Auphe torso. Which I happily would’ve wanted an eight-by-ten glossy of if I had. I did see human guts, heard screaming, limbs ripped from bodies, and throughout it all the switchblade stab of hyena laughing. I saw it all—the future of the world. If the Auphe had their way.

Fuck ’em. They weren’t getting it.

I wrapped the second cloth over my eyes. “Five seconds. Go.” I heard the click of the timer being switched on, and I opened the gate to hell. Tumulus. It was half of the plan. Forget gating. The Auphe can run too. We needed someplace we could blow up the size of a few football fields. Even the Auphe couldn’t run that fast. Especially with what Niko was packing.

When I said “Go,” I tore a hole in reality. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it—inside me, howling in glee, all but screaming my name. And I discovered there was something better than meditation for pushing down my inner monster; the thought of a nuke three feet from me.

Niko’s hand grabbed my arm and yanked me through. I felt the ripple of pure power and then we were there. I couldn’t smell it, only the oil-soaked cloth over my mouth. I couldn’t see it, thanks to the blindfold. But it touched me. The biting cold on my face, the grit of glass sand under my hands and through the knees of my jeans. I was back.

Four seconds.

Niko had said no when I told him back at Rafferty’s what we needed to do. He’d seen me the first time I’d returned from Tumulus. He’d heard and seen what I’d done when hypnotized to recover the lost memories of this place and what had happened to me here. We both thought the same. If I went back, that’d be it. No lost memories to save me. No juvenile traumatic amnesia this time. More likely the two years I’d lost to begin with would all come flooding back and do to my brain what the Auphe had done to the Vigil.

But it could be that wasn’t true, I’d argued. Maybe every time I thought of going back to Tumulus and losing my sanity, I was thinking of being dragged there by the Auphe. Maybe it wasn’t just the place but the monsters that went with it and what they would do to me if they ever took me there again.

Three seconds.

I felt the eighteen gates open around us.

I’d argued with Niko for hours over it. Saying it was worth the risk. He wouldn’t agree—it wasn’t going to happen—until I said the Auphe were following me. They wanted Niko dead. They wanted me alive. Either way, if Niko went through to Tumulus without me, there was no guarantee all the Auphe would follow him and his bomb. Some would stay for me, and Nik knew it. It was the only reason he’d given in. It was him, naturally, that came up with blocking my sense of sight and smell. Blocking as much of Tumulus as we could. And it seemed to be working.

And the time element . . . if I kept the gate open, like Niko had suggested when he’d wanted to go through alone earlier in the week for reconnaissance, if I kept it anchored to our world, it might keep the time flow there and here the same. Although, hell, at this point, the time difference was the least of our concerns.

They came through their gates. I heard the whisper of sand under their feet and claws. I felt their eyes on me the same as I’d felt them watching me the past days.

Two seconds.

I didn’t think they knew what the bomb was, but they did recognize a trap that would actually work. Smelled the confidence on Niko, the vicious triumph on me—not the fear they’d scented on the Vigil. Mad, feral, but smart as the most cunning of predators. A predator like that would retreat, think things over, see what would happen.

Too bad I slammed their gates in their faces. At Niko’s harsh “Now” and hard squeeze of my shoulder, I closed them all.

I knew how they did it. I knew it in me—when they had done it to mine, they’d taught me to do it to theirs—but knowing and closing one was one thing. Closing eighteen. Could I do that? Guess what. I’d learned last year, if you’re willing to die, physically you can do almost anything before you go. To kill the Auphe, I was willing to die. . . . But I didn’t. I closed their gates and my brain didn’t explode. Did it hurt? Jesus, yes, it hurt, but I was still conscious, and that’s what mattered. Niko hit me midchest and knocked me back through the only gate left—mine. I felt the concrete floor of the warehouse under my back, his weight on top of me and I closed the door to Tumulus instantly. It was gone.

One.

The world shook. I pulled off the rags from my face as the pounding in my brain continued. There was no light brilliant enough to burn away the flesh from your bones. No force strong enough to take out city blocks. There was nothing, but the world still shook. The glass didn’t quiver in the windows; the dust motes floating in the dim lights set in the ceiling didn’t drift a millimeter. I didn’t care. I still felt it. A part of a world—not this one—but a part of some other world had just died.

I started to ask Nik if he felt it too . . . but I saw it. Quicker than the other seventeen. More of that razor-edge intelligence. It couldn’t open its gate, so it used mine. It came through with us, fast and alive when it should’ve been dead. Metal teeth that had grinned through so many of my childhood windows and adult nightmares. Eyes more radioactive than any mushroom cloud. Claws, transparent skin, jagged joints, death . . .

No.

Red glass granules on my hands cutting them . . . like before.

No.

That thin, cold air that wanted to suck your lungs inside out.

The bitch should’ve died there.

I growled and threw Nik off me, before he saw it behind him. Threw him off like he weighed nothing. The sand, the cold, being naked in caves, being fed meat, and told what kind it was only after I was done. Discovering as bad as eating it was, being forced to eat it again after you’d vomited it on the ground was worse. Beaten and clawed and fed handfuls of it from the stone. Fed by what could’ve been the same goddamn bitch. Because they needed their tool healthy, to open a gate back in time to when the world was new and wipe out the humans before they had a chance to get the smallest grip on life.

My teeth were in its throat, ripping it with one smooth motion as I took it to the floor. It had moved to evade. I had moved with the same speed. Used the same throat tearing I’d seen them use on the weaker or wounded ones. Or sometimes they killed each other just for the hell of it—in the caves or under the boiling sky. A game. And now I got to play too.

Black blood flowed down its chest, but it wouldn’t kill it. It would only slow it down for half a second . . . a second. More than enough for an Auphe to take advantage of, and I did.

I’d seen them use their claws in those caves, not just their teeth. I didn’t have claws, not homegrown, but I had others. My hands went into my jacket and came out with two dirk daggers, one in each hand. Narrow blades, the perfect size to fit the eye sockets that held those pools of lava and blood. I sheathed them there to the hilts and punctured the malignant tumor of a brain. Its body bucked under me, its claws trying for my face, my side, but the spidery hands went limp first and fell to the ground.