Page 62 of Invidia

The elderly Shade who’d owned the Carneath cottage had accepted a pittance for it, which I felt somewhat guilty about, even though I would have paid more had she asked for it. Much of the furniture would remain, but I wanted to tell Tallulah the news and ask what new pieces she’d like.

Especially for the nursery.

The thought was both a thrilling and a terrifying one. A child. Our child. I’d been so overwhelmed with emotion—and no small amount of panic, considering we had no home of our own, we weren’t mated, and I was a blight on the realm—when Tallulah had told me, I couldn’t even recall exactly what I’d said to her. Had I been supportive enough? She was prone to worrying, and I wasn’t confident that I’d given her the reassurance she needed.

If I hadn’t, I’d do it tonight, I resolved, sparing a nod of acknowledgment for one of the guards who was reluctantly taking a shift in here.

I’d shower Tallulah with affection, and do my best not to scare her off with the intensity of my feelings for her, and tell her that I’d secured the cottage. And perhaps, if I was very fortunate, we could discuss when it was she’d be looking to move in.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t had a chance to speak to Captain Soren yet, but I didn’t envision any obstacles there. He’d always been wary of the amount of time I spent in the in-between, and would probably happily encourage me to reduce my hours.

I’d half expected him to pull me aside after Tallulah and I had so publicly greeted each other at dinner. Perhaps it had been unfair of me, but I assumed that he would have some opinion on me getting involved with an ex-Hunter, and that opinion would be a negative one.

Not everyone held such narrow-minded views about my affliction. Most of them did, but not everyone.

I paused midstep, my shadows rippling with a sense of foreboding. A heaviness, like the very caspite that made up the in-between was holding its breath.

And then the air was vibrating, and I found myself trying to shield my ears from the overwhelm of noise, though it was impossible when it was coming up through the ground itself.

Once upon a time, the in-between had always sounded like this. The silence had only descended when the portals had gone dark.

They weren’t dark now.

There was a group of Shades in the distance, who’d frozen at the sudden portal activity. They were too stunned to even move away from me when I started speaking to them.

“Alert the palace!” I shouted. “By order of the Guard. Tell them all the portals are open.”

They began running in the right direction to get to the palace, which was a positive.

There were more of us in here, but I still wasn’t abandoning my post. Not when I knew the layout of this place better than anyone.

I moved from portal to portal, inhaling constantly, searching for any trace of a Hunter nearby, and finding none. That didn’t mean there weren’t any, though. It just meant that they were moving sneakily.

While Sebastian and Lochan had been reporting back on negotiations to the Hunters Council, there was no way that this was some act of altruism on their part. We would have definitely been informed if a decision had been made to reopen the portals, which meant that either Sebastian and Lochan hadn’t told the king, or they weren’t involved in this decision either.

And I wasn’t prone to giving them the benefit of the doubt.

“Evrin!” Soren called, running toward me with Astrid following close behind. “How long?”

“Minutes—”

We both fell silent, glancing around as the vibrations began to change, flickering and bouncing around.

“This is coordinated,” Astrid said. “There are physical keystones that have to be inserted into place to activate the portal and removed again to deactivate them. They’re messing with us.”

She looked up at Soren, determination written all over her face. “Get me through there, back to Denver. I want visuals on that side. Then, you come back. You need to be here.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’m leaving you there alone,” Soren snarled.

“Where are Lochan and Sebastian?” I interjected, because the captain was never going to be rational when it came to his mate. “Has someone got eyes on them?”

Astrid made a sound of impatience. “Get me through, Soren, or I’m going to wait for the next time the Denver portal flickers on and run through myself—screw whatever is waiting on the other side. You are the captain. You need to be here.”

Soren growled, scooping her up and taking off at a run toward the Denver portal, searching for a dark spot to walk her through to. “I’m sending someone in after you. Not you, Evrin,” he called over his shoulder. “Stay here. Delegate areas to any members of the Guard you can find.”

It was chaos.

I barked orders to anyone I could find, and in the absence of any other leadership, they seemed to listen to me. But they weren’t actually useful. None of them had a good sense of direction in here unless they were walking toward a specific end point. The in-between itself had a good way of making one lose focus.

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