Page 1 of Wrong Door

PROLOGUE

Nadia's studio smelled of linseed oil and dried paint. Only, by that time of day as evening rolled around, it wasn't just her studio. The smell had also settled into the walls, her clothes, and even her hair. She had been painting for seven hours, but it felt like much less. She had the windows cracked, but the breeze off the river was barely enough to shift the gauze curtains. Honestly, she didn't mind. She had worked in worse conditions, and the light coming through the windows in the final hour before dark had a quality she would not have traded for any amount of comfort.

She was cleaning brushes at the utility sink, working through the fan of bristles with turpentine and then soap. It was a sad ritual, as it meant the day’s work had come to an end, but she still did it with pride and a bit of happiness, running each one under the water and checking the rinse until it ran clear. There were eleven brushes laid out on the wire rack beside the sink, drying in order of size.

Behind her, the canvas she'd been working on most of the week stood on the largest easel, partially finished. It was a harbor scene, not photorealistic but not fully abstracted either, sitting in the territory she had always found most interesting. She knew she wasn't quite good enough to do legitimate still life scenes, so she never tried; she always preferred to put a bit of the abstract into it, making natural objects and scenery look surreal and just a tad, but uncomfortable or fantastical. The water was mostly done. The boats needed another session. The sky at the top quarter was still in its blocking stage, raw sienna over a white ground, and would need at least two more passes before she committed to the color and abstraction.

She would get to it tomorrow. She was feeling worn down, maybe coming down with something. In fact, she'd felt off for a few days now. But the painting helped, and the idea of getting back to it tomorrow was enough to make her smile. Her day was mostly clear tomorrow, and she was pretty sure she could devote at least ten hours to the studio.

The jazz she had put on two hours ago was still going, a Coltrane record she kept coming back to without particularly thinking about why. It filled the studio evenly, and she worked in it without really listening. She preferred jazz because it sort of seeped into everything and became part of the room.

She was just about done with her brushes when she noticed the smell. It was faint and barely there, but just sharp enough for her to understand that it was not a natural smell—not something she usually picked up in the studio, no matter what paint or cleaners she was using. It was metallic in nature. She'd thought she smelled something strange about two hours ago, but had assumed it was coming from the new batch of pigment she had ordered, a viridian from a different supplier than she usually used. The color had been slightly off from the start, not wrong exactly, but different enough that she had wondered if the formula had been adjusted. The smell seemed consistent with that theory, something slightly chemical and dense beneath the usual smell of the paint itself.

But when she turned off the water and turned to face the room, the smell was stronger than ever. It seemed to hit her like a wave all of a sudden.

The nausea came without warning.

It snuck up on her because it came out of nowhere…there was no gradual build-up or warning of any kind. There was simply an abrupt and total heaviness in her stomach, and with it came a sudden warmth in her face and hands. She turned back to the sink and gripped the edge, either waiting to expel her dinner, or for the feeling to pass.

Initially, it did neither. It deepened, and within half a minute she understood that she was not going to simply stand here and feel better.

She let go of the sink and turned toward the worktable where her phone was sitting face-up near the tube of cadmium yellow. The distance was not far, perhaps ten feet, but the room had taken on a quality she could not account for. She took a step, but her legs didn’t behave the way they were supposed to. They held her, barely, but the signal from her brain to her feet was arriving with a delay. For a moment, she was pretty sure she couldn’t even feel her legs. The muscles in her body that were working seemed to understand that something was terribly wrong.

She put a hand on the worktable and worked her way along it toward the phone. The jazz was still playing, the chaotic melody of it going somewhere careful and unresolved. She focused on it because focusing on the familiar music was easier than thinking about what was happening to her body…mainly because she had no idea what the hell was going on. The nausea had become a stabbing sort of cramp, and she was starting to feel tired.

She reached the edge of the table and her hand fumbled out for her phone. In doing so, she hit a tube of paint. The cadmium yellow went skidding off the table and she went down with it, her knees finding the concrete floor of the studio. She stayed there for a moment on all fours, trying to organize the signals her body was sending her into something that made sense. As she tried to make sense of what was happening, she also realized that it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

The phone was above her on the table. She could see its edge from where she was kneeling. She pushed herself upright with one arm and the arm didn’t hold. She went sideways against the leg of the easel, which rocked but didn’t fall. The canvas shifted above her. She could see it from the floor, from her back now, looking up at the harbor scene. She saw the raw sienna sky and the boats that still needed another session, the purposeful smudges and odd highlights to odd that surreal quality.

Only, now it seemed the colors were wrong.

She understood this in a detached and clinical way, as though it were a problem she was observing from a distance. The viridian she had laid down that afternoon was not the color she was seeing. The cadmium yellow scattered on the floor near her hand was muted, almost gray at its edges. The harbor water, which she knew she had mixed from cobalt and phthalo blue with a touch of white, had flattened into something unrecognizable. She looked at her hands and then at the studio around her and the colors continued to withdraw, not all at once but in succession, one register at a time, like a signal degrading.

She tried to reach for the phone again. Her arm moved …or did it. She couldn’t tell anymore. Nothing worked and each breath she drew became more and more shallow.

The jazz played on. The curtains shifted once in the faint river breeze, and the canvas above her held its shape—but the colors had gone almost entirely now, and what remained of the harbor and the boats and the unfinished sky was a wash of gray and white and the deep, receding dark.

She didn’t know what was happening to her. Panic rose up within her, but it was hard to even focus on that.

She knew only that the colors were going out, and that the last thing she saw clearly, before even that was gone, was the thin streak of cadmium yellow on the floor beside her hand.

Soon, that faded away, too.

CHAPTER ONE

The document on Miles's screen was two hundred and forty pages long, and he had been staring at it for the better part of an hour without absorbing much of it. It was loaded with information: names, places, theories, backgrounds. But for him, in that moment, it may as well have been nothing more than a huge word search puzzle.

The document was one part of the task force's compiled intelligence on potential Elementalist disciples. To say it was thorough was an understatement. It had to be. There were behavioral profiles and financial cross-references…social network analyses and flag summaries dating back three years, all organized into a format that was easy enough to navigate, but still overwhelming. Miles had his own section to review, a subset of cases involving individuals with chemistry or materials science backgrounds who had come to the task force's attention through indirect channels. He had read the same profile twice this morning without really retaining it.

Through the glass wall of the lab, the rest of the division moved at its usual pace. Reports were being handed off, equipment was being checked, and the quiet procedural rhythm of the building carried on around him. He had been back at Quantico from Austin for ten days and had more or less rejoined that rhythm. Lab reports, a debrief with Hayes that lasted two hours and covered ground he had already covered in Austin. There had also been a session with Dr. Mitchell in which he said the things he was supposed to say and Mitchell wrote notes and nodded in the way that told Miles she wasn't being fooled.

After two days with these reports, he had stepped away from the busyness of the conference rooms and offices. Here, back in the lab, he felt a bit more comfortable. Ever since stepping up as a field agent in the face of these Elementalist cases, he’d had to put his lab work behind. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d missed it until he’d retreated here two days ago—just him, the reports and the occasional text or call from Vic and Sarh Kim.

They were both just checking in on him, aware that these Elementalist cases were wearing on him. Sarah was more comforting and warmer about it, maybe because there was still something building between the two of them. Vic took things from more of a professional standpoint, but she also knew when to leave things. Still, Miles had seen her watching him a few times in the past week in a way that made him feel almost untrustworthy. It was almost as if Vic was waiting for him to snap, believing that he really wouldn’t be able to hold up under this sort of pressure.

And really…maybe she was right. First of all, there were the nightmares. They’d been happening since the case in Los Angeles, and they had started happening more and more since Austin. The nightmares were not dramatic. They didn’t feature any of the cinematic terror he might have expected from the things he had seen. No, they were quieter than that, more subtle. And for some reason, that seemed to make them worse.

He would dream of a room he recognized from a case, and it would always be empty. With a muddy sort of dream logic, he would understand that the murders had already happened, that this room had been someone’s final view of the world. And with that understanding, the place would be filled with a rumble of thunder before Gabriel Kane walked inside. They would stand there, staring one another down, until the room would slowly start to catch on fire. At that point, the room would change. Sometimes it was Celestine's studio on South Congress. Sometimes it was Kane’s old lab. Once it was a hotel hallway he didn't recognize at all, which bothered him more than the ones he did. He had not mentioned the nightmares to Dr. Mitchell. He’d nearly mentioned them to Sarah but had decided not to.