“You have no idea,” DeMarco replied.
“Very funny,” his partner told him, then bent her attention to the map. “Okay. I think a few more yards should do it. From there, we should move on foot.”
Dalton looked at her. “Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, you look chipper as hell, but for a while there I thought we might have to call EMS.”
“I’m tougher than I look,” she told him.
“And too stubborn to argue with usually,” DeMarco added.
“I’ll get you for that,” Hollis told her partner, but didn’t follow it up with any details, rather to Dalton’s disappointment.
They had driven their vehicles to within fifty yards of the location marked on Hollis’s map, and were now approaching the area cautiously. Hollis, DeMarco, and Galen were all armed now, even though Hollis was certain nothing living awaited them. Nor did she expect spiritual energy, since the pressure and faint but pounding headache she was always conscious of whenever she was in this valley and outside DeMarco’s shields had never once reminded her of a spirit’s visit.
But it hadn’t gone away, either.
Mediums. I’m here. Logan’s here.
Why would we need mediums?
“Hey, look.” Dalton, several yards to the left of Hollis and DeMarco, was pointing at the oddly sheer cliff face they were approaching.
For a moment, Hollis didn’t see whatever he was pointing at, but then a shaft of sunlight fought its way through the clouds and touched the cliff face. There was a brief glitter as the light touched bits of mica embedded in the raw earth, and that was when Hollis saw the opening.
It seemed to dance before her eyes for a moment or two, a gash in the earth and hard rock that was less than a cave and more than a simple crevice. About twice the height of a tall man, the opening was clearly no more than a couple of feet wide.
And the tumble of granite boulders piling at the base of the shadowy opening was mute evidence that it was either recently created—or recently opened.
Sully said, “Didn’t Bishop say something about tremors being recorded here?”
Hollis nodded slowly, her gaze on that oddly inviting doorway. “Yeah. Very faint tremors over the last month or so. Not bad enough to damage anything man-made, but still worrying in a moderate earthquake zone.”
Victoria said, “Shield or not, I can feel something coming out of there. Almost like hot air.”
Ha! I knew she was sensitive to energy, Hollis thought.
While she was busy coping with a return of that odd sense of familiarity, it took Hollis a moment or two and a surprising amount of willpower to tear her gaze away to look at the younger woman, and then before she could say anything to Victoria, she saw just beyond her Galen, who was standing utterly still and staring at the opening with a completely unfamiliar, almost mesmerized expression.
Hollis felt a sudden stab of anxiety she couldn’t have explained. “Galen—”
“It’s familiar,” he said slowly. “I . . . want to go inside.”
“Nobody’s going in there,” DeMarco said.
Hollis was trying to juggle about a dozen different thoughts, one of them an echo of Galen’s desire to enter the portal.
That’s what it is. A portal. A doorway. Why shouldn’t we go inside? How could that be wrong?
“Hollis?”
We don’t have much in common, Galen and me. But there is one really big thing. Except that it can’t possibly be connected to this, can it? It was—what was it? A year and a half ago? And far away. Well, relatively.
“Hollis.”
She suddenly became aware of Reese’s hand gripping her arm, and stared down at that touch for an instant before looking up at him. And feeling the almost tactile sense of a cool breeze blowing past her, maybe even through her.
“Back with us?” he asked politely.
Hollis blinked at him. Then she drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Wow. Whatever you’ve got packs quite a wallop.”
“Hollis.”
“Well, it does.” She heard quiet laughter, and realized it was Victoria and, rather surprisingly, Dalton, who were laughing at her. Or with her. Whatever.
She straightened slightly, wondering if the urge to lean against him had blown in with the breeze. Reese didn’t let go of her arm, which she was glad about because that cool breeze was dissipating the last wisps of whatever had drifted into her mind.
And that was a sobering realization.
Very sobering.
“We need to close that up,” she said quickly. “Now, before the storm gets here.”
“Shouldn’t we—” Logan began in an unconsciously fascinated voice.
“No, we shouldn’t. Reese was right. Nobody’s going in there.” Hollis forced herself to remember every suggestion Bishop and his team had made about how to close and seal this portal.
Her instincts were peculiarly quiet about it.
“I can do it,” Olivia said suddenly. She was standing only a few feet away from Galen, her anxious gaze leaving him to fix on the portal still yards away from them.
Reno said, “Those rocks look damned heavy.”
Olivia sent her a quick smile. “I used to think that mattered. Studied all sorts of formulas about mass and density. Until I realized all I really had to do was want to move something.”
It had been one of the possibilities Bishop had suggested, Hollis remembered. Depending on what kind of portal they found, and whether there was enough relatively loose rock around it. It was, he’d said, one possible reason why Olivia had been summoned.
And it looked like enough rock to Hollis. “If you’re sure,” she began.
“It’s what I do,” Olivia said.
Then things began to happen so quickly it was almost a blur of motion and sounds and cold darts of fear.
Olivia began to lift both hands, rather like a small but very determined magician about to conjure, and when there was sudden movement from the portal, most of those watching realized on some level it was happening too fast, that Olivia had not had time to do this.
A huge boulder none of them had paid attention to several yards to one side of the portal rocked suddenly, then lifted and hurtled toward Olivia as though flung by some careless giant.
A threat, Hollis realized in those frozen seconds. I should have known only rage would have been the result when we stopped his bloody school massacre. He’s beyond angry. He wants to kill us all.
And energy, once freed, was not easily contained again. Except by a fury even greater and more powerful than disembodied energy could ever be.
“Olivia!”
Hollis wondered, later, when there was time to wonder, whether Galen’s instincts had kicked in. So many years spent watching over various SCU agents, guarding their backs, protecting them and what they were doing.
Maybe that was it.
Or maybe it was something else.
He moved with blinding speed, grabbing Olivia and both pulling her out of the way and pushing her to safety, out of the path of the boulder.
It slammed into him with an audible sound Hollis had never gotten used to, over half a ton of granite meeting flesh and bone, crushing and mangling.
“No!”
Wrenching herself away from Sully and Logan, who had practically caught her in midair, Olivia darted around the boulder toward the portal, and lifted both arms as she had before. But this time there was a roar like a tornado passing, and the rocks and boulders piled around the portal and for yards in every direction were swept up as if in that tornado, lifting and swirling, and then slamming into the portal with terrific force.
As if they knew, the smaller rocks and boulders wedged themselves into the cracks and crevices while the larger ones found larger openings, granite scraping across granite as they forced themselves in tightly, blocking the portal until there wasn’t a single chink where anything could have gotten in. Or out.
In the sudden silence, Hollis felt her ears pop, and yawned widely to ease a different kind of pressure. “Wow,” she muttered. “Cool ability.”