Veil of Reality

Zara had run this track a hundred times. She knew every crack in the asphalt, every painted lane marker, every wobble in the air when the stadium lights hummed too warm. She knew exactly how her lungs would burn at the two-hundred-meter mark and how the crowd noise would blur into a single, roaring frequency when she pushed through it. She knew all of it. None of it prepared her for what happened at the finish line.

The state qualifiers were the biggest meet of her high school career, and for the first sixty meters, everything was perfect. Her stride was clean, her breathing locked in, and the girl in lane four was already two steps behind. Zara felt the familiar surge rising in her chest, the one that always came when she was about to win, that bright electric feeling that tasted like iron and adrenaline.

Then the world stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. The girl in lane four hung frozen mid-stride, one foot off the ground, her braid suspended at a forty-five-degree angle. The crowd was a wall of open mouths and raised arms, every single person locked in place as if someone had pulled the plug on reality. The stadium lights, all twelve of them, began to flicker. One by one, they popped.

Glass rained down from the overhead array.

Zara's body reacted before her brain caught up. She threw her arms out, and something dark and enormous answered her. A wall of violet-black shadow erupted from the ground around her, curling upward like smoke turned solid, swallowing the falling glass before it reached her skin. The shadows roared and churned, crackling with a low, bone-deep frequency that she felt in her back teeth. Then time snapped back into place with a sound like a rubber band breaking, and the screaming started.

She stood in the center of a crater of charred track. The asphalt around her feet was scorched in a perfect ring. The crowd surged backward, and phone cameras went up everywhere at once. The girl from lane four was sprinting in the wrong direction. A referee dropped his clipboard and didn't bother picking it up.

Zara ran. Not toward the finish line. Away.

Her apartment was a twenty-minute bus ride from the stadium, but she covered it in eight, cutting through alleys she knew by heart, pulling her hood up even though it was pointless. Her hands were shaking. Her violet eyes, the ones she'd spent seventeen years explaining away as a rare genetic thing, were sparking at the corners. She could see faint static jumping between her fingertips in the dark of the stairwell as she took the stairs two at a time.

She pushed through her apartment door and stopped dead.

A man was sitting in her kitchen chair. He was spindly and tall even sitting down, with skin like aged parchment and long silver-white hair tied back with a leather cord. A meticulously groomed goatee framed a thin mouth that was currently arranged into something that wanted to be a reassuring smile but wasn't quite landing. His eyes were violet, the same shade as hers, half-hidden behind brass-rimmed spectacles. And chained to his waist, heavy and iron-bound, was the largest tome she had ever seen.

"You are not, I am delighted to assure you, losing your mind," he said. His voice was measured and slightly archaic, like someone who had learned to speak from old books. "You are, however, running approximately four hours behind the schedule I had hoped to keep. Please sit down, Miss Nightshade."

"Who are you and how did you get into my apartment?" Zara's hand found the door frame and gripped it.

"My name is Balthazar Vane. I came through the window. The lock on the third pane is quite compromised, incidentally; you should have it repaired." He set both palms flat on the table. "I have been monitoring unusual energy concentrations in this city for nearly a decade, and for the last three years, those concentrations have been centered almost entirely on you."

"That's not as comforting as you seem to think it is."

"No," he agreed. "I imagine it is not. But the comfort is coming, if you will allow me to get to it." He leaned forward slightly. "You are not a freak of nature. You are a mage, and a powerful one. The magic within you is old. Ancient, in fact. It has been building pressure for years, and what occurred at that stadium tonight was not an accident so much as an inevitability. You have been generating energy signatures visible to certain parties across both this world and another, and those parties are now very close."

Zara opened her mouth. The front door exploded off its hinges.

They came through the gap in a rush of cold air and silence, three figures with no faces, their shapes smearing at the edges like ink dropped in water. Wraiths. She didn't know the word yet, but the cold that rolled off them settled into her bones like she'd always known what they were. One of them turned its blank head toward her, and the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

Balthazar was already on his feet. He drove the butt of his chained tome against the floor and spoke a single sharp word she didn't recognize. Starlight, literal and blinding, erupted from his palms and caught the nearest wraith full in the chest, scattering it like smoke in a high wind. The other two recoiled, and the walls of her apartment shuddered.

"We have approximately ninety seconds," he said, completely calm, already moving toward the far wall of her living room. He pressed three fingers against the wallpaper and dragged them downward, and reality tore open. The gap shimmered, violet and silver, breathing like something alive.

"You want me to walk through a hole in my wall," Zara said.

"I want you to survive the night." He looked back at her over his shoulder, and for a fraction of a second, the composure cracked, just enough for her to see how serious he was. "Those are not separate requests."

Behind her, the second wraith reformed from the shadows in the corner. The cold deepened. Her fingertips crackled with violet static.

Zara looked at the tear in her wall, at the strange, breathing light beyond it. Then she looked at the place she'd called home for five years. A cramped apartment with a broken window lock and not a single person who would notice if she disappeared.

She stepped through.