“Do I want to know what’s happening?” Cayman’s voice came from somewhere.
A high-pitched giggle that sounded neither male nor female answered, and then the air around Roth and I shifted again, as if it were parting as we crossed the gym.
“None of them are approaching me for help,” I said after a moment. “Which I would think they would do if they wanted out of here.”
“One would think,” Roth murmured, coming to a stop. “Cayman?”
“Working on the door now. It’s sealed—” Metal ground together and then gave way. “There we go.”
Dim light poured in, thank baby llamas everywhere—oh, no. This had nope written all over it.
A narrow ledge and a set of steps were in front of us, but they weren’t unoccupied.
Dead people.
There were dead people lining the steps, pressed to the wall. Dozens of them. I’d never seen anything like it. They stared at us as we came in, their faces all wrong. Some showed whatever had killed them. Bullet wounds. Missing cheeks. Skulls. Bruises and bloat. Deformities. Others showed no visible sign of injury, but they smiled at us, reeking of pure evil. I looked up, and my heart nearly stopped.
They swarmed the ceiling like cockroaches, clamoring and crawling over one another. There wasn’t a bare space.
“Can you see?” Roth asked.
“Unfortunately.” I pulled my hand free. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do.” Cayman walked through a ghost that didn’t have much left of its head. It spun, hissing at him before it rose to the ceiling, crawling over the others crowded there.
“No. You do not.” I stepped around one who blew a kiss in my direction. “We should hurry.”
And that’s what we did.
Racing down the steps, I tried not to look at them, but some stepped out, whispering too low and fast for me to catch what they were saying. Others reached for me.
Halfway down, I recognized one of the ghosts. It was the woman in the dark service uniform, but she looked...different. Color had leached from her skin, the shadows on her face making her eyes seem like black empty sockets. Her jaw extended, gaping opening into something inhuman and twisted.
She howled.
Roth whipped around. “What the Hell?”
“You heard that?” I eased around the woman, whose face was stretched beyond human possibility.
“Pretty sure everyone in a one-mile radius heard that,” Cayman commented. “And I got to say, I am feeling some wicked bad vibes.”
“I don’t understand. They’re all... I don’t know. They’re all bad.” My heart thumped. “Sam said they were trapped, but...”
“Shadow People.” Roth jerked his hand around his face like he’d walked into a cobweb. It wasn’t. It was the hair from a young woman hanging upside down from the ceiling. “Could’ve got to them. Corrupted them.”
That... God, that was terrible, and we should’ve gotten in here earlier, taken the risk, because these people...
We came to the end of the staircase, and the smell of rust and rot increased as we walked into a room. Flickering fluorescent light cast shadows along rows of wide lockers. Doors were ripped off, benches toppled over. I looked around, realizing we must be in the old locker rooms, where the Nightcrawlers had been...incubating.
There were no ghosts in here.
Cayman walked through an archway into another opening while Roth stood near me.
Something occurred to me. I reached out and pressed a hand against the bare brick wall.
The wall vibrated under my palm, and a heartbeat later, a golden glow washed over the walls and ceiling and then disappeared, revealing what Roth had suspected we’d find that day in the tunnel.
The entire school was full of angelic wards. “This trapped them here.” I pulled my hand away. The wards remained. “Those people could’ve been good. Just needed help crossing over. They could’ve even been spirits, because some of them weren’t in their death states, but they all looked wrong.”
I had no idea if Shadow People could do that, but as I looked back at the stairwell, I accepted what I’d known the moment I saw the ghosts and spirits. “They’ll all about to become wraiths, and...”
“It’s too late.” Roth said what I didn’t want to. “Ghosts and spirits are the soul exposed. It’s more vulnerable in death, when decisions and actions become permanent. It’s like they’re all infected, and it’s incurable.”
Heaviness settled in my heart as I tore my gaze from the stairwell. There was no one left here to save.
“Guys?” Cayman’s voice rang out from the other side of the wall. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Roth and I exchanged looks before walking toward the opening. “This is where the Lilin was born, sort of in a nest. It’s the old showers.”
We stepped into a bare room, and I could make out Cayman kneeling. “What’s up?” Roth asked.
“Found something. A hole. There’s light down there.” He rocked back. “No way down other than to jump, but looks to be about ten feet. Was this here before?”
“No.” Roth edged around the eight-by-eight opening. “This is new.”
“Should we check it out?”
It took me a moment to realize Cayman was speaking to me. I nodded. “I think we have to.”
“All right.” Cayman rose. “Meet you down there.” He jumped, and after a moment, he signaled the okay.
I went next. My landing sent a poof of dirt and dust into the air. Coughing, I stepped aside so Roth wouldn’t land on me when he came through the hole a few seconds later. As the dust cloud settled, my vision adjusted to my surroundings.
It was brighter down here, lit by several spaced-out halogen lights on raised tripods and torches that jutted out of earthen walls.
That was a fire hazard if I’d ever seen one.
The place was a man-made cavern of sorts, opening into a larger space where the ceiling was far higher than the hole we’d jumped through. Piles of rocks and mounds of dirt were stacked and pressed to the walls. Several tunnels branched off, and I suspected at least one must lead to the tunnels we’d been in outside the school. But my attention was snagged by what was situated toward the back of the cavern.
Pale white rocks were stacked on top of one another, forming a six-foot-tall archway. The opening wasn’t empty. At first, it looked like a blank space, but as I stared, I realized that the area wasn’t stagnant. It moved in a slow churning motion, and every few seconds, a sliver of white whipped through like lighting.
“Is this what I think it is?” Cayman approached the crudely made arch.
Roth came down the center of the cavern. “If you’re thinking it’s a portal, then you’d be correct.”
My breath caught as my gaze bounced from him to the archway. “That’s a portal?”
“Yes,” he answered.
I’d heard of them but never seen one before. I didn’t imagine many had.
“It’s limestone.” Cayman stepped around it, nearing one of the tunnels. “And you guys discovered there are ley lines through here?”
Realizing Zayne must’ve filled him in, I nodded. “There’s an actual hub in or around this area, where several of them connect.”
“Damn,” Roth murmured. “With the limestone and the ley line, that makes this one Hell of a conductor for power.”
“Limestone is like a sponge, soaking in energy all around it, both man-made and electromagnetic, even kinetic and thermal energy. Everything that’s happened in this school? The Lilin being born? All the teenage angst? Those ghosts out there? It’s all feeding this thing.” Cayman moved closer to the side. “And pair that with the energy line it’s sitting on? This portal could be something we’ve never seen before.”
“Like...like a portal to another dimension?”
Roth grinned at me. “Possible. The portals we use look nothing like this.”
“This is what they’re hiding in here.” Cayman cocked his head.
“Then we need to destroy it,” I said. “Right? Because whatever it’s leading to is probably something Earth ending.”
“You can’t just destroy a portal,” Cayman explained, and I thought about Zayne’s plans. “At least, not by conventional means. Hitting something like this with explosives could make it go up like a nuclear bomb.”
“Jesus,” I whispered. There went blowing up the school.
Cayman reached out as if to touch it, and I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. My gaze shifted to the tunnel directly behind him. The shadows looked different there, thicker.
They moved.
Dammit!
“Cayman!” I shouted. “Behind—”
Too late.
A shadow peeled itself away from the tunnel, moving fast. Cayman spun, but it was already on him.
A Shadow Person.
Without warning, Cayman flew into the air, all the way to the ceiling of the cavern, which was much higher in the middle. At least twenty or thirty feet. He was flipped like a pizza, feet snagged by the shadow.
“Wow.” Roth’s head tipped back.
“You can see that?” I asked. “What’s holding him—well, swinging him?”
“Yep.”
Huh. Demons could see Shadow People. Made me wonder if Wardens could, too.