a good life. Lots of friends and a family who truly cared for each other. But three events stood out. Three tragedies.
The first was a car accident when she was a little girl. The one in which she’d lost her beloved father. She remembered it. The screeching of the tires. The loud, solid crash as another car T-boned them. The glass spraying across her face and arms.
There was simply life before and life after. It divided her existence into two separate parts and took a year for her to be able to get into a car again.
But that didn’t explain why a demon had shown up, wanting a piece of her. Amber moved past that traumatic memory to the next. She’d been robbed at gunpoint in Dallas outside a pub. She’d handed the guy in a ski mask her clutch. Then he wanted her necklace—the one her father had given her two days before the crash. She’d told him no, so he clocked her with the butt of the gun and ripped it off her neck anyway. It had taken two surgeries to fix her orbital socket and two years to get her necklace back. She’d hired a PI. It was worth every penny.
But, again, nothing to explain the demon. Unfortunately, the third event didn’t explain much either. Dora was a bus driver and had been taking her last and youngest student home—a first-grader named Madeline. She lived in a compound off the grid with a few families several miles outside of Madrid. The mobile homes were ancient, the campers dilapidated and lopsided.
Dora had pulled down the dusty road and found that the cattle guard had collapsed. She couldn’t cross it, but the houses were barely a quarter of a mile up the road. So, she’d dropped off the girl and watched to make sure she walked all the way into the compound—not that she had anywhere else to go.
That night, the cops came to Dora’s house. Madeline had never made it home.
It was her worst nightmare. The entire town spent days trying to find the girl. They scoured the desert countryside, searched every structure in the compound, put bulletins all over the town, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. The local police, state police, and the FBI questioned Dora repeatedly. She’d watched Madeline walk over the hill to the commons area of the compound. Something had to have happened afterward, but nobody saw anything. They didn’t even see her go into the home she shared with her mother, which was little more than a camper shell. The girl was never seen again. And while utterly heartbreaking, it still didn’t explain the demon.
Maybe she could get back to that someday. Help Dora get closure. But for now, they had to focus on the danger at hand.
Disappointment spread through Amber like acid. She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. A clue. A hint of something supernatural happening to Dora that might link back to this. But there was simply nothing.
She could see Quentin watching her through her periphery. His head tilted to one side. His eyes shimmered. His hand rested on the table, one finger tapping as though in slow motion. She didn’t even try to see into Dora’s future. She didn’t know if she could with Dora being in the afterworld. So, she decided to take advantage of the situation in front of her.
She took another coaster and timed its flip perfectly. She shifted her gaze to Quentin’s, flipped the card, and laid it in front of him a millisecond before he realized what she was doing. He started to get up, to stop her, but it was too late. She dove inside him.
Or more like fell.
Shapes hit her first. Lots of movement and shadows, like a colony of bugs in the dark. An entire dimension, scurrying and smoky and blue. And then the eyes came into focus. The black eyes. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
“Rune,” she whispered. Quentin didn’t have a demon inside him. He had hundreds of thousands. He had an entire dimension. A dimension named Rune.
Chapter Eight
I try to act nonchalant,
but underneath, I’m chalant as fuck.
—T-shirt
“You shouldn’t be here, Traveler.”
One of them spoke to her—or maybe all of them—and the surprise that shot through Amber almost knocked her out of the dive, but she had fallen inside and didn’t know how to get out. She searched frantically but couldn’t find an exit, so she faced them. Hordes. As far as the eye could see.
“What did you do to him?”