The barb thrashed on the floor, taking several quick hops toward him before fading from existence. From inside the rift came the sound of something shrieking.
Black-blood-spurting from its severed end, the tentacle withdrew into the darkness. A moment later the rift peeled away from the wall and flipped from vertical orientation to horizontal. It appeared as a long thin line before him, as high as his throat—
Barrett launched into a back flip, over the banister railing, knowing that a rough landing was the least of his problems. Heels over head, he twisted his neck and caught a glimpse of the rift streaking toward him, crossing the row of banister supports with the sound of an industrial-strength wood chipper.
As expected, Barrett landed hard, but he caught the heel of Grainger’s black leather shoe and clamped down hard, tugging the chief of police down the steps with him.
The rift skimmed down the carpeted stairs, creating a series of explosions as it destroyed one step after another.
The two men tumbled down the staircase, moments ahead of the Outsider’s fury. Something soft and wet broke their fall—Chelsea’s dead brother. Barrett climbed to his feet, caught Grainger’s upper arm and hoisted him up before shoving him aside. Barrett’s overdrive—the preternatural adrenaline rush—had the side benefit of giving him a significant though equally temporary boost in strength. Afterward, his muscles often ached for days.
With Grainger out of harm’s way, Barrett stood his ground at the base of the stairs, staring down the approaching rift and wondering if this was his moment, his chance to prove he was worthy of the Walker name… to prove he wasn’t a coward.
He remembered as if were yesterday the day Gideon disappeared into the San Diego warehouse rift. Pinned beneath a pile of collapsed lumber, Barrett had been helpless to aid Gideon in that critical moment of crossing, not knowing if he would ever see his brother again. Though Gideon had returned from that crossing, those lost moments had been costly. Something had died within Gideon. Soon afterward he’d abandoned the Walkers and their way of life. Barrett blamed himself for that. He should have crossed with Gideon, stood at his side in the darkness. We walk in shadows, damn it, he thought angrily. And I failed him.
This time was different.
He was ready.
No excuses.
Shards and slivers of wood from the exploding stairs pelted his face. He winced but stood firm. “C’mon!” he shouted.
“Barrett, no!” Liana called. “It’s too small! Logan!”
“Stay back!”
They didn’t listen.
Out of the corner of his eye, Barrett saw Logan rushing toward him but wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted at the critical moment. “No!”
The kid was smart enough to know he lacked the upper body strength to shove Barrett out of the way. Instead he drove his shoulder into the back of Barrett’s knees, buckling them.
His defensive stance compromised, Barrett abandoned his plans for a solitary showdown with the rift. He grabbed Logan around the chest and hurled both of them clear of the path of destruction. He flung Logan aside and jumped to his feet, tracking the rift as it collided with the dining room table and seemed to chew up and spit out one of the legs. The back of a mahogany chair ruptured and then the darkness was gone.
Logan approached from the other side of the room, rubbing a sore elbow, which he’d probably dinged when Barrett tossed him across the room. A wide-eyed Fallon—when had she joined the chaos?—walked over to Logan as if grateful for a friendly face.
Barrett looked angrily from Logan to Liana. “Why did you stop me?”
Liana clung to a trembling, sobbing Chelsea and stared back at Barrett defiantly. “That rift was too damn small to cross and you know it.”
“I could have made it!”
“Like hell!”
“It was my choice to make!”
“We work as a team. If you have a death wish, kindly leave us out of it.”
“You need me here,” Barrett said stubbornly. “This family needs me.”
“We need fighters,” Liana said, her tone more reasonable, “not martyrs.”
“That’s not—! I’m not…” Barrett sighed, feeling the familiar wave of depression and exhaustion that inevitably followed overdrive. “Oh, hell.” He walked toward the front door.
“Just a minute,” the chief of police called. He’d been following their argument with interest, but with each exchange the confusion on his face had grown.
Barrett wasn’t in the mood for answering a bunch of questions. “I just saved your ass, chief,” he said to Grainger. “How about cutting me some slack?”
“Look, buddy,” Grainger said. “I don’t care about your family squabbles.” He nodded toward Chelsea. “This girl’s mother and brother were killed and I need answers now.”
“You think we’re responsible for that?”
“You charged in here with a sword for Christ’s sake, and this one”—he pointed to Liana—“tried to run me down. Either you were accessories to this… butchery or you knew it was about to happen. Either way, you don’t get a free pass.”
“Fine. You want answers, join the family debrief,” Barrett said as he turned back to the door. “Or shoot me in the back. At this point, I don’t really care.”
Chapter 23
As the Hadenford chief of police, Travis Grainger was accustomed to being in control of situations. When others panicked, his was the cool head navigating through the crisis. People counted on him and he had no problem bearing that responsibility. He had a practical approach to life and his career. Took things one day at a time. Handled problems as they arose. Not to say he didn’t plan for contingencies. Far from it. Part of his job was to plan for every imaginable emergency. And that was the problem, because nothing in his police training or in his regular departmental strategy sessions could have prepared him for what he’d witnessed this evening.
He hated to admit it, even to himself, but what he’d experienced less than two hour ago had rattled him to the core, spreading condemnation-class fissures in the foundation of his rational worldview. Nothing rational could explain the things he’d seen. His first instinct was to reject what he’d witnessed, to disbelieve his own senses. His gut told him to throw the whole damn Walker family into a holding cell and lose the paperwork. But that was fear talking. Fear of the unknown. Ultimately, that was what he had rejected. A quiet, contemplative corner of his consciousness had overruled the irrational fear and the churning nausea in his stomach. Locking the Walkers in a forgotten cell would not make the madness go away. On the contrary, their absence might give whatever… thing had come out of that darkness free reign over Hadenford. Deep down he didn’t believe they had abetted it, assisted it in any way. They’d been there to stop it, to protect the Conrad family. Barrett Walker had, with great disregard for his own safety, placed himself between Grainger and the thing that had tried to kill him. But what was it? And how did the Walkers know it would be there? Nagging questions.
Compounding Grainger’s fear of this particular unknown was the uncomfortable knowledge that his bullets—a policeman’s weapons of last resort—had done little more than irritate the thing the Walkers referred to as the Outsider. But the Outsider didn’t have the monopoly on strangeness this evening. Even before he’d glimpsed the creature—and that’s how he thought of it—Grainger had witnessed the strange abilities of the Walkers themselves. Discounting the spectacle of a man wielding a sword on a suburban street in the early part of the twenty-first century, Grainger had seen the woman, Liana, cast some sort of spell on him, using golden glowing tattoos on her arms and a language he’d never heard before. Then Barrett Walker had become a blur of motion. Grainger’s fellow officers would think he was crazy if he told them he saw the man dodge a bullet… but that was the impression he had of the incident outside the Conrad home. And inside the house, again with the sword, Barrett had become a blur of motion, engaged in a lightning-fast duel with a creature out of a fever dr
eam. Grainger had been unable to focus on Barrett’s movements, almost as if intermittent stroboscopic flashes revealed him in a series of disconnected images.
That he questioned his own sanity was the one reason Grainger knew he wasn’t insane. From what he’d read, the truly insane never consider the possibility of their own madness. But maybe that was simply a bit of homespun hokum. Maybe he was stark raving mad after all.
Before succumbing to doubts about his mental stability, Grainger had turned the crime scene over to his shift sergeant, Tony Delarosa, and to senior patrolwoman Lacy Novak with instructions to keep the press and any curious neighbors as far from the grisly slaughter as possible. He’d waited for the county ME to rule out a sword as a murder weapon, then followed the Walkers back to their house in his police cruiser. Actually, Calvin Scarborough had allowed for the possibility of a sword having been involved in the mutilation of Chad Conrad, but one small detail seemed to exonerate Barrett Walker: Chad’s severed arms were missing. Swallowed by that weird fucking black hole, Grainger thought with a shudder.
Now Grainger sat in the cluttered downstairs office of the Walker family patriarch and, while introductions were past, Grainger had yet to enumerate his growing list of questions for these strange people. Ambrose Walker had insisted they wait until everyone had a cup of coffee and a chance to gather their thoughts. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Liana Walker returned from the kitchen with a serving tray, bearing regular coffee for Ambrose and Grainger, decaf for Barrett and herbal tea for herself.
Grainger took a perfunctory sip, then placed the mug on the desk, slapped his thighs in a let’s-get-down-to-business gesture and said, “Okay, now—”
Ambrose held up a hand to interrupt the question.
“What?”
Ambrose looked away from him to address Liana. “The youngsters?”
“Still in the kitchen,” she said. “Logan and Fallon are comforting Chelsea, as much as possible given the circumstances. She’s better but clearly in a state of shock.”
“Other family?”
“Father, remarried, out on the west coast.”
“Will he come for her?”
Liana nodded. “I made the call. He’s dropping everything to catch the first flight. Should be here tomorrow. I told him she could stay with us overnight. She says there’s no way she can ever go back to ‘that house.’ That’s what she called it, ‘that house.’ She can’t leave Hadenford soon enough.”
Grainger leaned forward. “I need to question her about… everything.”
Ambrose placed his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. “Chief Grainger, she is not a witness in the traditional sense.”
“What are you talking about?” Grainger said. “She was right there when it happened!”
“When her mother and brother were brutally murdered?”
“Yes!”
“You know this?”
“Of course,” Grainger said. “What’s your point?”
Ambrose spread his arms as if the answer were self-evident. “What more could she possibly tell you?”
“What more…?” Grainger shook his head in disbelief. It was obvious, it was… what? “But she saw…”
“Yes?”
Grainger took a deep breath and blew it out forcefully. “She’s…”
“A survivor,” Barrett said. “One out of three.”
Liana cradled her tea mug between both hands, as if for warmth. After taking a sip, she said, “We’re not keeping score.”
Barrett cast an irritated look her way, but said nothing.
Very hard on himself, Grainger realized. He saved Chelsea Conrad, but that’s not good enough for him. He sees only the negatives.
“Unless the young woman crossed,” Ambrose said, “she will have little useful information for us.”
“Us?”
“Our investigation is a bit beyond the scope of traditional law enforcement.”
“Your investigation? So that’s what you people are, investigators?” Grainger directed his gaze at Barrett. “You told me you were in security.”
“I am.” Barrett shrugged. “In a manner of speaking.”
“We’re a… full-service shop,” Ambrose said with a twinkle in his watery-blue eyes. “Detection, prevention, investigation, infiltration and, when necessary, extermination.”
“Uh-huh,” Grainger said, nodding skeptically. “Don’t suppose you’re licensed.”
“We’re a self-regulating body,” Barrett said. “We prefer no outside interference.”
“Sounds like a cult.”
“We keep to ourselves,” Ambrose said. He glanced back and forth between Barrett and Liana with an arched eyebrow. “Usually.”
“I tried to slow him down,” Liana said.
“After he tried to stop me,” Barrett said, anger flaring. “If he hadn’t whipped out his gun, I might have been able to—!”
Grainger sprang out of his chair. “You were kicking down a door, carrying a sword. What was I supposed to do?”
“Get the hell out of my way!”
“I’m the chief of police, damn it!”
“Gentlemen,” Ambrose said. “Please calm yourselves. Chief Grainger is guilty of ignorance, nothing more.”
“But he—!”
“Don’t fault the man for doing what he believed was right.”
“It was right,” Grainger snapped. “I still have half a mind to—!”
“Half sounds about right!” Barrett pushed himself out of his armchair to pace the office like a caged jungle cat.
“Enough!” Ambrose shouted. “This is getting us nowhere.” After a few moments passed in silence, Ambrose continued, “And, frankly, Chief Grainger, we need to decide what to do about you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let me put it in terms the chief can understand,” Barrett said tightly. He glared at Grainger. “This problem is way out of your jurisdiction.”
“But not out of yours?”
“You got that right.”
Liana heaved a frustrated sigh. “Is this pissing contest soon over?” Grainger and Barrett stared at her. “There’s a young woman two rooms away who watched her mother and brother die horribly. And the two of you are arguing about jurisdiction?”
“Fine,” Grainger said, looking from her to Ambrose and pointedly ignoring Barrett. “You’re the experts. Tell me what you know about this… about what happened.”
“Too much and too little,” Ambrose said with a slight sigh of his own. “Our line has been… dealing with these rifts for thousands of years.”
“Rifts?” Grainger said, sitting up straighter. “You said something about Chelsea crossing? Crossing this rift?”
“It is possible to enter the rifts,” Ambrose allowed.
With a pointed glare at Liana, Barrett said, “That’s what I was trying to do when Logan tackled me.”
Liana rolled her eyes in exasperation but directed her response to Ambrose. “The rift was too small to cross. He’d have lost a foot or a hand, possibly his head, not that he’d miss that.”
Grainger snorted. “Lost how?”
“Like the Conrad boy’s arms,” Liana said. “Rifts are volatile.”
“What exactly is a rift? It looked dark, like some kind of intelligent shadow.”
“Dark, yes,” Ambrose said. “But not always. Some might appear as heat waves above the asphalt. A ripple in the air, a shimmer across our reality. This one, so far, manifests as darkness. Not intelligent, but directed, perhaps, by the force responsible for the breach.”
“Somebody created it?”
“Not someone,” Liana said. “Something.”
“An Outsider,” Barrett said grimly.
“You keep saying that. What’s an Outsider?”
Ambrose frowned. “Something from outside our world, beyond our reality.”
“Imaginary?”
“No,” Ambrose said. “Quite real, but not reality as we know it. Another dimensi
on or a layer, if you will, of the multiverse.”
“Multiverse?”
“There are a multitude of universes,” Ambrose said. “All of them, each and every possible universe is part of the multiverse. A collection—the collection—of universes.”
“Like… parallel dimensions? Alternate history. Universes where the Germans won the Second World War or where dinosaurs never became extinct and humans still live in trees.”
“Along those lines,” Ambrose said. “But rarely anything so… tidy or recognizable. Some of these universes are strange and wonderful while others are antithetical and violent.”
Grainger began to chuckle.
“Something amusing?” Barrett asked.
“Don’t suppose you have any proof?”
Ambrose frowned. “I was under the assumption you had, earlier this evening, already witnessed the proof of all this.”
“I saw something,” Grainger admitted. “No clue what it was, other than pitch black. But I didn’t see Oz or Neverland or Narnia in there. Just darkness and some sort of clawed tentacle.”
“Pick up any book on mythology or folklore,” Ambrose said, “and you’ll have your proof. Sketches and descriptions of creatures—Outsiders—who managed to cross over.”
Grainger laughed. “Are you talking about unicorns and fairies and dragons?”
Ambrose sighed again. “Failures, all of them.”
“Whose failures?”
“Ours,” Ambrose said. “Walker failures. We were late getting to the rift, late sealing it, late in rounding up the Outsiders. Rifts were much more common hundred of years ago and we couldn’t be everywhere at once.”
Grainger stopped laughing. “You’re telling me all those things are—were—real?”
The twinkle was back in Ambrose’s eyes. “Once upon a time,” he said. “Yes.”
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