by Jason Howard
Then reality came crashing in. He was laying on the snow, Cera still clasping his forearm.
“Now!” Ivor screamed, his voice no longer inhuman.
Zac heard Artem’s voice, felt strong arms, and saw Cera’s face. She was dazed and her eyes were half-lidded. Everything was coming to him in surreal flashes, like his mind could only perceive an occasional blip of reality. He’d experienced this type of incoherence before when he’d taken too many punches while boxing. He struggled to rise from the murkiness that his brain wanted him to plummet into. He remembered that he needed to get through the gate.
That thought was enough to focus his vision.
“Zac, come, we must go!” Artem said.
There were people sprinting past them.
“Cera—”
“Althos has her,” Artem said as he shoved him toward the gate, getting him to run. “Quickly!” Artem pleaded.
Ahead, the field of energy stretching across the arch looked like the gleaming surface of a lake that was reflecting sunlight.
Ivor was standing in front of it screaming, “Three . . .”
Zac’s mind was still fuzzy, and in his delirium he wondered why Ivor had said that. He was vaguely aware that he was standing and Artem was pulling him toward the gate.
“Two . . .” Ivor added.
Zac realized that he and Artem were the last Nightblades on this side of the gate and that Ivor was giving them a countdown.
“One!” Ivor yelled, then started to run toward the gate. They were right alongside of him now.
Zac’s fatigued legs screamed in agony as he sprinted. Zac and Artem burst through the skin of the gate’s energy field.
It was like diving into hot water. He couldn’t breath. He shut his eyes against the searing embrace and tried to scream. No sound came out.
For a timeless, terrifying duration the pain was so intense that all he wanted was to die.
Then the pain ended. There was a spray of salty water. Coldness enveloped his lower body. He realized that he was on his knees. And he was wet. He blinked. He could see again. Water rushed up underneath him. He heard a wave crashing near him. The wave hit him and knocked him over. Then the undertow sucked at him as the water receded. Salt water burned in his nose, mouth, and eyes. He staggered forward, attempting to stand. He finally managed to get to his feet.
‘This way!’ he heard Althos’s comforting voice in his head.
“Zac!” someone yelled.
Zac looked toward the voice. It was Mauler, waving to him. He was standing on a beach. But something was wrong with the beach. The sand was pitch black. There was a treeline in the distance, but something was wrong with the trees. They were white, and the sunlight was making them seem to glow.
He felt Artem put an arm around his shoulders to help him keep his balance. Artem was helping Ivor too, who looked to be in a daze.
When they got to the sand Ivor knelt and vomited. The black sand was hot on Zac’s feet, but he was too weary to care.
“You okay?” Zac overheard Kell asking Ivor.
Zac was woozy and the words he heard seemed unnaturally slow, stretching and twisting before they made it from his ears to his brain. The world swayed and Zac almost threw up, bile burning his throat. He gagged on the awful taste of it but forced it back down. Then his stomach clenched and he felt another wave of nausea. This time he didn’t resist it, letting the fiery vomit erupt. It was bright orange on the jet-black sand, like chunks of magma cooling on obsidian. Zac heaved again, his stomach cramping up with the effort.
Zac felt better when he was done. He stood, his senses clarifying.
“We made it,” Ivor said, smiling despite his pale face and trembling limbs.
Zac scanned the Nightblades that were gathering on the beach, trudging in bedraggled groups from the surf. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the second Gate of Evernear, towering from the water, waves crashing against it. He took a few paces, then collapsed and let himself sink into the sand. He laid still and took a few deep, restorative breaths to compose himself.
When he sat up he noticed Reyna sitting cross-legged atop a dune nearby, propping Cera’s head up in her lap. She was gently pouring water from a leather waterskin into Cera’s mouth. She was also talking to Cera, but the words were drowned out by the roar of waves crashing behind him.
He saw a movement in the white trees and jerked his gaze to it. His breath caught in his throat, and his skin tingled with primal fear.
The eyes staring back at him were beautiful, but eerily inhuman. They were all black with vertical gold pupils. The beast staring at him with those eyes looked familiar somehow, even though Zac knew he had never seen it or heard of anything like it. It was about six feet tall and stood on two legs. It was covered by dazzling white fur that made it nearly blend in with white trees it stood between. It had razor sharp claws extending from its hands. Zac squinted. No, they weren’t hands, they were paws. It had a grayish mane. He realized why it looked familiar.
“A cat . . .” Zac muttered.
But it had no mouth. It had the nose and the whiskers of a cat, but the features were different, elongated and sharper.
“Look!” Zac yelled, pointing.
In a flash the creature was gone.
“Look at what?” Artem asked.
Zac shook his head, trying to find the words. Fatigue bludgeoned him then, and his vision wavered. He wondered if it had been a hallucination. Then he wondered if he was dying. The world spun around him and began to lose color.
“Zac!” Artem yelled, but his voice was faraway and pitchless, just the ghost of a voice.
The last thing Zac was aware of before his world went black was the feel of the hot, rough sand on his skin.