to my e-reader though. He frowned as he looked down at the screen. “The door opens two times a day. I’ll check the latest sessions.”
“I seriously doubt anyone knows Summer is here. She was coming in from the witch plane. If she’s anything like her mother, she would have been careful.” I had to hope we wouldn’t have to add bounty hunters to our list of problems.
“Well, a small army had found her,” Quinn pointed out. “We have to assume if they knew where she was, Taggart might as well. If he’s smart he already knows she’s running. He would be monitoring any kind of communications he could, and don’t think he wouldn’t have cameras on other doors. He’s not a moron. Just a judgmental asshole.”
“Yeah, that’s what my dad says.” Dean’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit. He crossed over this morning. It looks like there are two of them and a transport hovercraft. He’s got an upgraded system and it’s almost silent. We need to take cover.”
I took off, following the path Quinn had lain out, and hoped we would get there in time.
Chapter Seventeen
Zoey
I landed hard on the ground, the breath slamming out of my body, and then I felt the ground thud beside me and realized I hadn’t come through that painting alone.
Danny. Danny had followed me through. I forced myself to turn and saw him lying a couple of feet away from me. Why?
“What the hell did you do?” I know that wasn’t the nicest thing I could have said given that we’d taken a hard tumble through space into another dimension, but I was pissed because he was the one who could have stood on the other side of the painting and coaxed a freaking rope through. I sat up and took a long breath, glancing around to try to see where we’d come in. I’d expected a door of some kind or a little strip where the fabric of reality had split, but there was nothing but blue sky and a sinking sun. We were in a field that seemed to be surrounded by forest. I should have gotten up and started trying to figure out what to do, but bitching at my husband was way easier and potentially more rewarding. “Why would you jump into the painting with me? You know where I am. You should be on the other side getting me out.”
A low groan came from my husband. “Zoey.”
I managed to get to my feet. “Did you even think about that? Our children are on another plane and we don’t know how to get to them. Only three people know where we are—Myrddin, Nim, and Liv. Zack doesn’t know. Trent has no idea we got eaten by a freaking painting.”
“Fuck, that hurt,” Daniel said, turning over.
It did hurt. It hurt like fuck but the vamp blood in my system had already taken care of the pain. It had done nothing for my indignation. Our kids were asleep in their beds and they didn’t even know that their parents were no longer on the same plane as them. I couldn’t treat this like some adventure. I looked around, but I couldn’t see Dev. “Suck it up. We need to figure out where Dev, Marcus, and Kelsey went and why they wouldn’t simply stay here and wait for a rescue.”
A horrible thought struck me. Time worked differently on different planes. What if in the hours since Dev had gone missing, years and years had passed here? What if Myrddin had done this so we could never get them back and now we were stuck here, too, and I wouldn’t see my kids again?
“Zoey, something’s wrong,” Daniel said.
“Yes, something’s wrong.” I had lost my cool, my ability to stay calm in the face of horrible circumstances. I used to be good at this, but then I had kids and they needed me and I was twelve kinds of freaked about being away from them. “Our kids are alone.”
“Zoey, something’s wrong with me.” He managed to turn over. “I can’t catch my breath.”
I dropped to one knee. He’d hit the ground hard, but he was a vampire. It shouldn’t have affected him at all. Danny had once hit the ground headfirst doing probably two hundred miles an hour and he’d been on his feet in seconds, ready to fight.
But we were on a different plane and that meant a different sun. Despite the fact that we’d been to the Seelie and Unseelie planes on a