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I groaned again. Two hours was still pretty impressive.
“Jill went to get food,” Zack said. “There isn’t a damn thing to eat in this place except for some red beans that she turned her nose up at.”
I laughed weakly. “Yeah, she doesn’t think much of the instant stuff.” I carefully levered myself to stand, taking slow breaths until the wave of dizziness passed. “All right. So did we manage to get all of those things out of the library before I lost it?”
Ryan nodded, expression sobering. “Looks like it.”
“Then the next questions are: What were they, and how did they get in there?”
His face clouded again, then he gave a small shudder, as if throwing off a chill. “Zack said that they’re some sort of very nasty pest but … not from here.”
“From where?” I didn’t look at Zack. I wanted to see how much Ryan knew.
“From an alternate plane. The demon plane, I think. Like that dog.” Ryan’s frown deepened, and I could feel a chill walk over my skin. His eyes were shadowed pits as they lifted to mine. “Don’t ask me how I know this, Kara. I don’t know.”
There was so much I wanted to ask him. No, there was so much I wanted to shake out of him, like, Who the fuck are you?
“Okay,” I said instead. “So it didn’t kill me. That’s a good thing. Then I guess I need to figure out how it got into my aunt’s library.”
“That I think I can help you with. There’s a section of the library that feels really wacky.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Wacky?”
Ryan laughed, only slightly forced. “Yeah, that’s a technical term.”
“How can you even tell in that library? There’s arcane crap everywhere!”
He thrust his hands into his pockets, smiling sheepishly. “Um, we kinda moved a bunch of stuff around while we made sure that all of those things were gone.”
“Ooooh, you are gonna be in so much trouble when my aunt comes back. For all we know she had a system in place.”
He made a sour noise. “Well, it’s a system of a big pile on the floor now. And there’s a place that looks wacky. Are you feeling well enough to take a look at it?”
I started to respond, but the banging of the front door caught my attention. I heard pounding footsteps, then Jill came careening around the doorway, bags of fast food in each hand. The intense and worried expression on her face cleared instantly at the sight of me standing.
“Well, it’s about time you got over your little mosquito bite,” she said, flouncing into the room and plopping the bags on the desk. She crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing me. I grinned and hugged her.
“Get off me, you crazy bitch,” she grumbled, but I could hear the relieved laugh in there as well. “Here—Ryan and Zack said you needed to eat. And I need to as well. I’ve been spending the last couple of hours perched in the damn disaster area your aunt called a library with a fucking fishing net, waiting for another one of those psycho pixie things to pop out, while Ryan and Zack moved books around and muttered to each other.”
I had to laugh at the mental image. “Okay, food first, then fun with fishing nets.”
Chapter 20
Two aleve and a hamburger and fries later, I was ready to deal with my aunt’s library again. The ache in my back had settled to merely sore, and I managed to make my way down the hall with only one or two muttered invectives.
I brushed my hands over the library door frame. It felt odd without any wards on it. As I stepped in, I felt a crawl of sensation—not the usual beaded-curtain sensation of going through wards but more the feeling of approaching a source of wrongness. I now knew exactly what Ryan was talking about when he said “wacky.” There was a section of the floor in front of the bookcase on the east wall, an area almost two feet across, that was wrong. I forced myself to step closer, certain that I had to be stepping near a diagram or circle, because every sense I had was screaming at me that this was a portal.
What I couldn’t tell was if it was open. I frowned as I crouched. It wasn’t open in the sense that I was familiar with—the slit of light making a doorway from one sphere to another—but it sure wasn’t closed either. It was … mushy was the best word I could come up with. Stuff could get through but not easily.
I looked sharply back at the doorway. Ryan and Jill stood just outside the door, watching me warily, but it wasn’t them I was interested in. “The wards,” I said, unintentionally hissing softly on the last s.
Ryan frowned. “What about them?”
“I think they were twofold.” Damn it.
“Why? What is that?”
“It’s … a portal. Sort of. A weak spot.”
