Page 37 of Hospital for Immortal Creatures

Zacharia hadn’t encountered a living being capable of it. Unless…

He played the video again, focusing on the image. The main gate was in the frame. Zacharia watched closely. He replayed it over and over.

And, he caught it.

Thousand fucking devils!

When one door closes… A portal opens?

Another beer was in order. He downed it, copied the footage on a flash drive, and headed straight for Mikhail’s office on the twelfth floor.

The manticore cast him a distracted glance. “Something bothering you, my friend?”

The hybrid arched an eyebrow. “Aside from the fact that the politician I’ve been searching for in every nook and cranny is dead?”

That drew Mikhail’s penetrating gaze. “What?”

“That’s not all. I figured out how the box materialised at the gate.” Zacharia took the flash drive out of his jeans pocket. “A portal. The box was delivered through a portal, opened for a brief second, but long enough for the box to pass through and appear on our doorstep.”

“A witch’s portal?” Mikhail frowned. “Impossible. I’ve heard that casting such spells causes all sorts of anomalies. The cameras haven’t detected anything like that.”

Zacharia plugged the flash drive into the laptop sitting on Mikhail’s desk. “It seems so. At first glance… Because we’re looking in the wrong place. The box shows up at 21:19, but if we go back to a minute earlier…” He paused the video. “What do you see?”

Mikhail observed the image of the main gate. “You’re not talking about the owl on the fence, are you?”

“Yes, I am.” Zacharia pressed play, and the bird flew away as if startled.

“I still don’t see anything…”

“That’s because your attention is on the bird. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with what’s going on here. I will replay it, but I want you to watch closely.” Zacharia rewound the footage until he hit the frame where the bird was still perched on the fence. “Ignore the bird. Focus on the gate, in the lower right corner. Right at the edge of the wall.”

Mikhail did. The gate, the bird… “What was that?” He shot up his finger to point at something on the screen that had caught his attention, but it had already disappeared.

Zacharia crossed his arms over his chest, a satisfied grin on his face. “That, my friend, was the opening of a portal.”

Mikhail played the video again. The wrought-iron gate hung between the two ends of the stone wall, with thick hinges on both sides. At the exact moment the bird flew away from the fence, at the other end of the gate, right between the lower hinge and the stone wall, the image flickered. The straight lines curved for a fraction of a second, as if an amateur had Photoshopped the image. In the next moment, everything was normal again, forcing the brain to believe that what it had seen was just a figment of the imagination.

“It happens so fast, it’s hard to notice. Even if you do notice it, you might well think it’s an insignificant defect of the video itself,” Zacharia said.

“Let’s say someone did open a portal…” Mikhail ran a hand over his jaw and glanced between the footage and Zacharia. “How could he go through, leave the box and return, without being detected by the camera?”

“That’s the thing. He never went through it himself.”

The manticore’s gaze narrowed on Zacharia. “What do you mean?”

“He threw the box through it.” The hybrid mimicked the movement.

Mikhail pursed his lips. “If someone had just thrown it, wouldn’t we at least have seen it flying and landing on the ground?”

“In regular circumstances, yes. But there’s a catch. Going through a portal means that an object or body breaks down to its basic components – a million small atoms – and is then carried instantaneously from point A to point B. The process is not much different from what a creature experiences during transformation. When the object or body passes through to the other side, in order for it to become whole, all the pieces need to reassemble. It’s a speedy process, but it’s not that fast. Someone quick enough reaches through the portal, leaves the box and pulls himself out before we can spot him. We see the box, but not him, because he’s just not there anymore.”

“How is it possible to leave a box when there isn’t a box? If it and the person carrying it had fallen apart into atoms?”

“Structure is determined by the consciousness of living things. If the carrier had chosen to rid himself of the box at the other end of the portal, his mind would have issued an order to his atoms to detach from those of the box.”

Mikhail frowned. “How do you know so much about portals?”

The hybrid grinned. “The traditional witch clans, especially those dealing in high-end black magic, are closed communities. They’re usually very secretive about their work. But I’ve heard things… For instance, only a witch can open a portal, but those who do it rarely beat their drums about it. It’s not exactly considered the purest of tasks. They say those who fool around with portals pay a heavy price for the ability.”

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