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Maddy opened her mouth to scream, but as the fire consumed her, no sound escaped.
Suddenly she found herself back in the kitchen, staring at her uncle as he took her by the shoulders.
“Maddy!” Uncle Kevin shouted. “Are you okay?”
She was standing upright, safe there with Kevin. The Dark Angel, the fire, the smoke—all of it was gone. Then she realized what had happened. It had been a premonition. She shook like a leaf in a winter storm.
This had been her strongest premonition since the one of Jackson’s death, right before she saved him.
“Was it . . . did you have one of . . . those things?” Kevin never really knew how to talk about her powers.
Before she could answer, the ground suddenly began to quake violently. China rattled in the cupboards as Kevin steadied himself against the counter. The glass of juice smashed to the floor, shattering. Just as he was standing up straight again, Kevin had to grip the counter tighter to stay steady as an
even larger tremor rolled across the Angel City basin. The quake rumbled louder than thunder.
Suddenly, an air raid siren began howling in the distance, rising above the din of all the car alarms set off by the quakes.
Maddy kept her balance throughout the event, just staring, almost blankly, out the kitchen window in shock. The absolutely terrifying vision she’d had was still frozen in her mind: an almost abstract, grisly scene of destruction.
But what was happening now wasn’t just a vision.
When she finally turned back to her uncle, her brownish-green eyes deepened into a gray sadness as she watched him struggle to keep upright against the force of another tremor shuddering the floor underneath their feet.
“It’s starting.”
CHAPTER SIX
In the ocean below the navy surveillance helicopter, the demon sinkhole spun and boiled. The blue-green whirlpool of the massive, mile-wide sink appeared to extend downward infinitely. Its watery walls were steep, dropping into the darkest of pits, opening up a fissure to a demonic portal.
And no one knew what was waiting at the bottom.
U.S. military helicopters, flying from a nearby aircraft carrier, took shifts monitoring the site, but were staying much higher than their first patrol crafts had. At the very beginning, when they hadn’t understood the danger, at least three helicopters had been drawn into the orbit of the whirlpool and had been lost. They weren’t making that mistake again.
“Hey, Chen. I’m beginning to wonder if these demons are ever going to come,” Private Dee Jacobson said to the guy next to him. “How long have we been up here, anyway?”
“Too long,” Private Chen said, yawning. He checked his watch. “And we got another three hours. And I’m hungry. You got anything to—?” Then his eyes grew large as he looked out the window at the swirling pit underneath the helicopter. “Jacobson, what’s that?”
The crewmen looked out into the dangerous waters. Below, the sinkhole seemed to be shrinking before their very eyes, growing smaller and smaller with every passing moment. They watched with hope as the swirling waters seemed to fold in on themselves.
Jacobson leaned out the window. “Is it going away? Is it?” He laughed in relief. “It’s going away! Chen, you see this?”
An enormous gust of air blew up toward the helicopter from the pit below as the sinkhole kept shrinking inexplicably.
“Hold on!” a shout came from the cockpit. The chopper shuddered and tilted sideways, violently, before the pilot steadied them again.
Jacobson radioed back to their carrier. “Giant Killer, we have action here at the sinkhole site,” the crewman said. “It almost looks like, well, you’re not going to believe this, but it looks like the sinkhole’s disappearing!”
“Go again, Charlie Niner Niner?” the voice from the carrier responded in disbelief. Below, the water had become darker and darker, until almost black.
The crewmen hadn’t noticed the change and were still laughing. But Chen was quiet as he looked once more out the window. “I have a bad feeling about this. . . .”
The others followed his gaze and saw the problem. For several moments, all the crewmen on the helicopter held their breath. The water below became still. Silent. The pool had become smaller than ever. It all looked so harmless, except for the inky black spreading out from its center like an oil spill.
Suddenly the pit began spiraling again. Faster, faster this time. The whirlpool started developing rapidly, expanding and expanding, and growing faster by the second.
“What the hell is that?” Jacobson screamed.
Crimson red tendrils began spiraling up from the bottom of the sinkhole into the churning black waters. More and more red frothed up to the top until the entire roiling waters spiraled into a giant, frothy sinkhole.
