All around us students start yelling and running for cover. But there is no cover out here. The dorm is too far away, and there’s nothing else. We’re sitting ducks.
“Mom, we have to—”
I break off as another huge hailstone slams down right in front of my mom, so close that it catches the toe of her boot.
She jumps back with a startled scream.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, bending to check her foot.
“Get in the portal,” she tells me urgently.
“What?”
“Get in the portal, Clementine.” She raises the megaphone to her lips. “Everyone, get in the portal, now!”
Pandemonium ensues as everyone left on the beach stampedes for the portal all at once—except for Ms. Picadilly and Mr. Abdullah, who stay exactly where they are so they can hold the portal open.
“Go, go, go,” my mom shouts, rushing students in three and four at a time.
Behind us someone screams, and I turn to see one of the senior witches on the ground, her head cracked open and blood slowly leaking out.
“Come on,” my mother yells into the microphone as Ms. Picadilly and Mr. Abdullah widen the opening of the portal. “Everyone in!”
She turns to me. “Get in there, Clementine!”
“I’m waiting for you!”
She doesn’t bother to answer me. Instead, she just puts a hand on the center of my back and shoves me into the portal as hard as she can.
I’m not expecting it, and I fall forward just enough that the portal grabs me.
And then I’m falling, falling, falling.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
IN GRAVE AND
PORTAL DANGER
I’ve never been in a portal before—they’ve been blocked on the island my whole life—so I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like when you’re in one.
But this feels weird. Really, really weird. As if my whole body is being stretched out like one of those rubber pop tube toys. It’s like with each second that passes I’m getting longer, narrower, flatter… And then suddenly I’m not. The stretching stops in an instant, and then I boing back together, my body going from elongated to normal in the blink of an eye.
I take a deep breath and try to adjust to the feeling of being normal again. Then wonder why I bothered when abruptly the walls of the portal start to close in on me. I throw my hands out to try to stop them, but it just keeps pressing and pressing and pressing in on me until I can feel myself getting smaller. Feel myself compressing down, getting shorter and flatter with the contraction of the portal.
At first, I’m just a little alarmed as I wait for it to spring back like the first time. But it doesn’t. It just keeps squeezing inch by inch until it’s like a piano sitting in the middle of my chest.
I know there are a lot of people in this portal with me—I can hear them banging around, knocking into its weird, elastic walls. Some are even screaming, though I have no idea where they get the oxygen for that. Is this normal? And if it is, who would travel like this? I know it’s supposed to be faster and safer than a boat, but right now I’d rather take my chances with the storm-tossed Gulf of Mexico.
But I can’t even lift my head to look around, to try to find someone else going through this same thing. All I can do is lie here, suspended, and try not to freak the fuck out while the portal does its best to crush me to death.
It’s not easy.
All of a sudden, the weight on my chest gets heavier, and it goes from hard to breathe to impossible. Instinct takes over, and I start to claw fruitlessly for air. But everything hurts and things start to go fuzzy, until there are just a few small points of light in the distance.
The fuzziness gets worse as darkness takes over inside my head, and I start to float away on a sea of—
The compression stops as abruptly as it started, and I free-fall several feet in an instant.