Chapter 137
“It’s her,” Jo said quietly, her eyes still closed. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Her mom’s IAC was working. Not well--but it was detectable. She’d been waiting over ten years to see that light in her mind, so seeing it now was almost impossible to believe.
But it was there, nevertheless.
“What did you say, Jo?” Zane asked, his voice gentle as he touched her on the arm lightly.
Jo’s eyes opened and she turned to look at him. “It’s her. My mom. I can see her IAC.”
Zane’s expression seemed frozen for a few moments before he asked, “You can?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I can.” Even with her eyes open, it was still there in her line of sight, a tiny flickery light with her mom’s name above it.
“Where’s Christian?” she asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t stop. Do you know where she’s at?”
“No, and I can’t talk to her, but I can see that she’s near enough to where we are now that the signal isn’t being blocked by anything. Jo hurried ahead to try and find Christian, Zane following alongside her.
When they reached the end of the tunnel, they didn’t see him in the center of the portal, so she decided he had to have gone down the next tunnel. They’d been looping to the right, so that’s the way she went.
It took a few moments for her to see him, but he was there, ahead of them, near the center of the tunnel. He didn’t seem to be slowing down, nor was he looking back, which made Jo think that he couldn’t care less about the fact that they were no longer with him.
Still, he had made the IACs. He would have a better understanding of how they worked and why she could suddenly see her mother than anyone else, so she needed to catch up to him. “Christian!”
He had to have heard her, but he didn’t even turn his head. He just kept walking.
“Hey!” she shouted, not wanting to run after him but still wanting him to stop and listen to her. “Christian!”
Zane was right behind her. “Hey, asshole!”
That got his attention.
It got Jo’s, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Zane say anything remotely rude to anyone. She turned to look at Zane, and he shrugged.
“What did you call me?” Christian asked, coming back a few steps toward them.
“If the shoe fits….” Zane wasn’t backing down, which made a little spark of fire ignite inside of Jo’s core, one that she’d have to ignore for now.
“Christian,” she said, again, coming closer to him. “I can see my mom’s IAC.”
The older Guardian froze in his tracks. He stared at Jo for a few moments, as if he was having trouble processing what she’d said. After that, he simply exclaimed, “Bullshit,” and then turned around and walked away.
Jo and Zane exchanged flabbergasted looks before she darted after Christian. “What do you mean bullshit? I’m telling you the truth.”
“That’s not possible.” He didn’t even turn around to look at her.
“It is possible. I can prove it, you know.” Jo took a photo of what was going on inside of her IAC and sent it to Christian.
Once again, he stopped moving. “What are you talking about?”
“Look in the lower right-hand corner,” Jo told him. "You see it? That tiny dot of light?”
He must’ve seen it then because he turned back around. “When?”
Jo stared at him blankly, trying to figure out what he meant by the one-word question. She was confused.
“When, goddammit!” he shouted.
“Hey!” Zane took a few steps in front of Jo like he was going to knock Christian’s head off just for being an ass.
“A few minutes ago!” Jo shouted, her hand reaching out to catch Zane’s arm and keep him back. “I noticed it a few minutes ago when I stopped to see if I could feel her.”
“Feel her? What are you, some kinda New Age meditationalist?”
Once again, Jo had no idea what he was talking about--but that wasn’t unusual. “Christian, why is it that I can see it and you can’t?’
“I have no fucking idea!” he shouted. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. I made the goddamn things.”
“So much for getting answers from him,” Jo muttered. “Christian, do you think it’ll get stronger as I get closer to her?”
“I have no idea, Jo. Normally, an IAC message doesn’t get stronger when you get closer to a person, but since I’ve never seen anything like this before, I really can’t say.” His usual cocky tone seemed to have died down a bit. Now, he sounded more defeated than anything else.
“I think I should walk along the perimeter of the tunnels for a while, see if I can make the signal stronger.”
He arched one caterpillar-shaped eyebrow at her. “You can do whatever the hell you want.”
“I guess that means you’re not coming with us then?” Jo asked.
“Nope.” Christian spun around on one heel and headed off in the other direction as if she hadn’t said anything at all.
The realization that she’d wasted enough time trying to chase him down and get him to cooperate set in, and Jo took off, back toward the center section of the portal where all of the tunnels opened up.
Zane went with her. “Have you let Cassidy know about this?”
“No, not yet,” Jo admitted. “For some stupid reason, I thought I should let Christian know first.”
“Maybe your aunt can use her mind-reading abilities to locate your mom.”
Jo looked into his eyes for a second, thinking about how brilliant he was. And handsome. He was remarkably handsome. “Yeah, okay,” she said. Utilizing the IAC, she sent her aunt a message. “I can see Mom on the IAC. Well, her signal. Not her location.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Cassidy’s reaction was similar to Christian’s, except, instead of actually not believing her, her aunt just seemed to be shocked.
“Yeah. I was hoping that meant that maybe she was close enough that you could reach her with your mind.”
“I’ve honestly been trying,” Cassidy admitted. “So far… all I’ve got is a lot of static.”
“Why do you think that is?” Jo asked.
“I have no idea.” Cassidy seemed just as perplexed as everyone else. “You said you can see her--but you can’t speak to her?”
“Right.” Once again, Jo found herself sending a picture of what her IAC looked like so that someone else could judge the accuracy of her description.
“What am I looking at?” Cassidy asked.
“Bottom right-hand corner.”
“Oh. Damn! That’s crazy!”
“I know,” Jo admitted. “But it just appeared a few minutes ago. I was hoping that if I get closer to her, it’ll intensify or something.”
“Is that working?”
“Not at the moment,” Jo told her. “So far, it hasn’t changed at all.”
“Where are you guys?” Cassidy asked.
Jo looked around. They were at the opening to the next tunnel. “Fourteen. But it’s just Zane and me now. Christian went off on his own.”
“Aren’t you lucky,” Cass mumbled. “I can’t get rid of either one of these guys.”
Jo wanted to ask why she’d want to be all by herself in this place, but she had to figure her aunt was just joking. It was her disposition to be as salty as possible.
“Be careful, Jo,” Cassidy said. “Christian is an asshole, but he knows how to sense the monsters before they show up, and neither one of you do.”
“I know.”
With that, Jo cut the conversation off and headed past tunnel fourteen.
At the next tunnel, Jo stopped and stared down the passage. It looked familiar, like she’d been there before. That might’ve been because she had been down this tunnel before, or it might’ve just been because all of the tunnels looked basically the same.
“Do you want to go down this one?” Zane asked her after a few seconds of scrutinization.
“No, I don't think so,” Jo said, and they moved on to the next tunnel.
The two of them walked along, weapons ready to fire. It seemed strange that there hadn’t been any monsters after them since Christian had left them. Jo couldn’t help but hope that meant that he had drawn them all away from them, but she didn’t think that was actually the case. Maybe they were just getting lucky. Or maybe the monsters were all gathering together up ahead, preparing themselves to pounce on her all at once.
“We are at the door that goes to hell now,” Cassidy said in her head. “Ryker is telling me he thinks it’s a bad idea, but I want to go through.”
“For once in my life, I’m going to have to say that I agree with Ryker,” Jo told her aunt. “I think that seems like a pretty bad idea, too.”
“That’s exactly why I think I should do it,” Cassidy argued. “Wouldn’t it make sense that Holland would put Cadence down there, where she couldn’t get out, where she would think that none of us would dare to look? We know that Holland could come and go from hell as she pleased.”
“We do?” She wasn’t sure she’d gathered that bit of information.
“Yeah, I think that’s what I saw in her head, anyway.”
“I think Mom is in this portal somewhere, just not on the level that we’re seeing. I think there’s an opening that goes down, like into another dimension of the same portal, and that’s where I need to look. But I don’t know where the opening to that other portal is. That’s what Dad implied, and it’s what Christian keeps blabbering about.”
“If we can’t access it from where we are, maybe we have to go through this door to get there,” Cassidy reasoned.
Jo didn’t think so. “Christian claimed to have seen the opening before he left to come back to get us. He never went through the door.”
Cassidy growled in frustration. “Well, I’m going through. These two can stay out if they want to, but I need to check.”
“What if you can’t get back out?”
Scoffing, her aunt said, “I’ll get back out, Jo. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.”
Why did she suddenly sound like Christian?
Jo knew there was no point in continuing to try to persuade her aunt that it was a bad idea once she’d already tried and failed. “All right then. Be careful.”
“I always am.”
Jo knew that to be anything but true. Again, no point in mentioning it when Cassidy wasn’t going to listen to her anyway.
To Zane, Jo said, “Cassidy has decided to go through the doorway that allegedly leads to hell.”
“You’re kidding. I thought she was just saying that so we’d think she was tough. I had no idea she’d actually follow through with it.”
Jo shrugged. “She usually does what she says she’s going to do. Even if it is stupid.”
Before he could respond, a large black tiger leaped from inside the tunnel they were passing, slamming into Zane’s shoulder. He fired into it, but the tiger just knocked his gun away and lowered its teeth toward his neck.
Terrified, Jo fired at the thing at least five times. It recoiled a bit but didn’t fall off of Zane. Jo gave it a swift kick in the side of the head, which allowed Zane enough time to push its face out of his. The claws on the thing were at least four inches long, and when it lifted them, they were covered in blood.
Zane’s blood.
Jo launched herself off of the floor and into the monster, knocking it over. Fueled by her anger, she pulled her knife from her belt and jabbed it into the thing’s eye. The tiger screeched in pain. Jo pulled the blade out again and stabbed it in the throat a few times until it stopped moving.
“Scott, where are you?”
“Standing outside the door to hell, waiting for your aunt to come back. Why?”
“Zane needs you.” Jo ran back to where Zane was still lying on the ground outside of tunnel twenty-two. “How fast can you get here?”
“Give me a minute,” he said, seeing where they were through Jo’s IAC.
She didn’t know where they were in relation to the door to hell, but she hoped it wouldn’t take the Healer that long.
Because Zane was bleeding.
A lot.