“Let’s go.” I marched to the door.

Derek followed me. We exited into the hallway, crossed the house, and went out the front door.

Six shapeshifters waited by my porch, four men and two women. Zahar I already knew. The rest I had seen on the street when Derek and Ascanio had almost had their idiotic showdown, but aside from that, none of them looked familiar.

I turned around and strained. Magic broke free of me, pulsing through the wall of my house and sparking on the tappum, the clay tablets with ancient cuneiform I had affixed around the inner chamber. The Enki shield snapped into being with an audible thrum, and for a second the translucent dome towered over the house. It faded almost instantly, an invisible, impenetrable barrier.

“Cool alarm system,” Zahar said. “Where can I buy one?”

We turned down 17th street, heading straight into Unicorn Lane.

“What happened with the Beast Lord?” I asked.

“The usual,” Derek said.

Derek Gaunt, chatty Cathy. “Could you elaborate?”

“We have three days to conclude our business in the city,” Zahar told me. “If we overstay our welcome, there will be consequences nobody will like.”

If we survived, Derek would leave in three days.

“Not a lot of time,” someone said behind me.

“It’s enough,” Derek said.

We were a hundred feet into Unicorn Lane when Derek picked up the beggar’s scent and the nearest lamppost sprouted teeth and claws and tried to eat his face.

17

The portal measured about six feet wide and ten feet tall. It wavered, its edges ragged and glowing softly, hidden deep inside a ruined parking garage. Inside the portal a wide plain stretched, awash with green grasses, and in the middle of it, a good couple of miles off, a house rose on a low hill.

Around me the shapeshifters formed a circle, all still human. It had taken us half an hour to get to this spot, and they paid for it with blood. Their flesh wounds knitted closed, but one of the men had a broken arm, and one of the women, a tall redhead, had taken a giant insect pincher to the abdomen. She was breathing in short, shallow gasps. I was pretty sure her intestines were lacerated.

“What is this?” the other woman asked. “Is this an illusion? It doesn’t smell like an illusion.”

It smelled like the steppe, of grass, and wind, and water meandering from a hidden stream.

“It’s the home of the man we’re looking for,” Derek said. “It’s his refuge. He always was a coward.”

“I don’t understand,” a short male shapeshifter said. “If we go through this, where are we going to end up? Is this someplace far away but on this planet?”

They looked at me. Apparently, I was the designated tear-in-the-fabric-of-reality expert.

“I don’t know,” I told them. “It could be. It could also be a naturally occurring pocket of deep magic or a crafted realm, something a powerful being made for themselves.”

“He isn’t that powerful,” Derek said. “Most likely he found it, and he’s squatting there.”

“Or,” I told him, “he may have made a deal with whoever crafted it, and the moment we go through it, they’ll dump a meteor shower on our heads.”

“Are we going in?” Zahar asked.

“I’m going in,” I told them. “I can better protect myself from magic. I’ll tell you if it’s safe.”

They would follow me. The ma’avirim hadn’t found this hidey hole, because the house wasn’t on fire, but Derek knew they would be coming. If we could find it, they could too, and leaving shapeshifters by the entrance to face Moloch’s priests alone would be stupid.

“Single file,” Derek said. “Once we’re through, we may have to run. Nia, how’s the stomach?”

“Could be better,” the injured shapeshifter said.

“Krish,” Derek said to the man next to her, “if she slows down, pick her up and carry her.”

Krish nodded.

The shapeshifters formed a column behind Derek, and I had a vision of a wolf pack padding one after another through the wilderness.

I blinked my sensate vision on. A ward surrounded the gap, a narrow column of tense magic. No surprise there.

I stepped forward into the magic field. Pressure clamped me, piercing my eyes with painful needles. The spell crunched me, trying to break my defenses. I concentrated, pushing outward. Using a power word would crack it like a hammer hitting a walnut, but I had no idea what the day would bring and my magic barely had four hours to recover.

“Do you need help?” Derek asked.

“No.”

The ward chewed on me. Thin veins of dim green light formed in the empty air—the spell trying to expel me. I held my magic shield. Defensive wards came in different flavors. Some were walls, barriers you had to break through with sheer force. Some, like this one, were designed to cause pain and squeeze the intruder until they retreated. This wall type had to be shattered. Most people thought that the squeezing type couldn’t be broken. Most people were wrong.

“What are we waiting for?” someone asked behind me.

“Quiet,” Derek ordered.

The ward squeezed and squeezed, the pressure grinding on me. It would keep squeezing until it broke me or ran out of power. Pain was temporary. It would pass like the water of a moving river.

The green veins flashed with white. With a sharp clap, the ward crumbled around me, its magic exhausted. The pain vanished.

“I just broke his ward. If he didn’t know we were here before, he knows now.”

Derek nodded.

I jumped through the gap and landed in the grass. The soft stalks reached just above my knees. Sunshine spilled from an impossibly high sky. The air carried scents of herbs and grass. A bee flew by me.

I waited to see if the ground under my feet would open up and swallow me whole. It didn’t.

Ten seconds. Fifteen. Long enough.

I jogged toward the house. Behind me, Derek leaped through the gap. In a few breaths, his wolves overtook me, fanning out in front of me. Nia caught up to me, her face flushed.

“Do you need me to slow down?”

“I need you to speed up,” she said. “At this rate, I’ll be old by the time we get there.”

I picked up the pace. We ran through the plain unhindered.