“Come on,” I mutter, extending my hands. “Open up.”
At first, nothing happens. Just me, standing like an idiot in my hotel room with my arms out. Finally, I feel a flicker. A smallpurple spark glows in the air in front of me. The space around it begins to shimmer and distort as the light expands.
“That’s it,” I whisper. “Keep going, keep growing.”
The spark grows, purple light widening into a large sphere of energy, an opening.
“Holy shit, I’m doing it!”
I focus on stabilizing the passage. It’s working. I step back, admiring my handiwork, and pump my fist in the air. “Yes! Nailed it!”
The passage is actually kind of pretty when you’re not running from it in terror. It reveals fleeting glimpses of another place, a mystical region of shadow and mist, an in-between that few people from this world get to see.
Open a passage on purpose and stabilize it: check. Now I just need to close this inter-dimensional door. I stretch out my hand, focusing all my will on making it disappear. Nothing happens.
“Abracadabra.” Waving my hands at the purple light, I try to shoo it away. “Bye-bye, passageway!”
Nothing.
Damn it, what the hell? I circle around it and try to find out what’s going wrong. Wait a second, what the hell is that?
A dark smudge clings to the shimmering purple boundary.
“What the actual...” I mutter, inching closer.
The dark spot pulses slightly, and my stomach drops as I realize what I’m looking at. It’s something gripping the passage from the other side. A tentacle? A slick, obsidian-black appendage no thicker than my pinky finger has wrapped itself around the edge of my passage.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” I whisper. I reach out one trembling finger and gently prod the tentacle.
Big mistake.
The appendage instantly reacts, constricting tighter around the portal’s edge. Another one emerges beside it, slightly thicker than the first. Then another. And another. Four inky-black tentacles now grip the edge. In the darkness beyond the purple light, something massive shifts, something connected to these probing tentacles.
“Ah!” I jump back reflexively when faced with some nightmare tentacle monster from another dimension. I hit the nightstand and sent the lamp and phone there crashing down.
There’s a swift knock on the door.
“Dodger, are you okay?” Harper asks from the other side. “Thought I heard something.”
“Fine, I’m fine,” I shout back, my voice higher pitched than usual. “Don’t come in.”
“Are you sure? You sound—”
“I’m fine!” I holler, then lower my voice to whisper frantically at the tentacle slithering onto the hotel floor. “Shoo! Shoo! Get away from me!”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Harper calls through the door.
Whipping my head around, I glare at the closed door. “Using werewolf hearing is cheating!”
“Not if you’re a werewolf.”
“Look, just”—I cut off as more tentacles start to emerge from the portal—”Oh god.”
In desperation, I chuck the first thing my hand lands on. A tissue box.
I chuck the box at the slithering limbs and watch as it bounces off them uselessly. The tentacles shift, pulsing and changing from slick black to a furious red.
Oh shit. I made it mad. It occurs to me too late that the enchanted whip I was given for situations like this is on the otherside of the room. It’s supposed to help channel my powers when interacting with creatures I summon. Can this get any worse?
