Somewhere, an insect buzzed faintly. It sounded just as off as the rest of this place, like the wings were too fast and too heavy. I braced myself as I slid through the first corridor, searching the dark corners for motion. Weathered leaves sprinkled the ground. The hallway was dirty beneath my feet, kicking up a fine coat of dust around the edge of my new boots as I moved through the area. Besides the buzzing insect and the occasional bird trill, I heard nothing. Dorian followed, keeping close.
Behind Dorian, Cam paused in a doorway, sweeping it with the practiced attentiveness of a soldier. His eyes missed nothing. I was beginning to think he had a photographic memory. He’d obviously memorized those reports. It was enough to impress me, but I wouldn't say anything just yet. I trusted Bryce’s instincts—not necessarily about the hazing, but I knew that we needed to make sure Cam got the right experience. I would be careful not to step on Bryce's toes with that. After all, I knew that he’d brought his nephew along because he believed in Cam. The young man was fresh from his military service in Scotland; he’d wanted to work with the supernatural, and he had the potential to be a formidable part of our team.
My toe found the discarded wrapper of a granola bar next to the tiny skull of a dead animal. Initially, I thought the wrapper a result of scavengers, but a closer look revealed that it had been opened by human hands with a single tear. We moved on. Bryce kept watch at the front door.
As we entered a new room, Sike pulled out his own scanner, one provided by Reshi. This one was meant to sense auras in a more comprehensive way than the Bureau scanners, which relied solely on human technology. Sike fiddled with the button. Reshi had taken to modifying human technology well—but we still didn’t have a perfect formula for transporting technology back and forth between the Mortal and Immortal planes. Sike noted the tech stopped functioning a third of the time as we neared the Leftovers. As brilliant as Reshi was, even she couldn’t plan for an area that was absolutely unstudied.
"Nothing much, still," Sike reported. I had to trust him on the readings, unable to make much sense of the complicated graphs flitting across the screen.
We forged deeper into the building. I came across turned-over trashcans, looking like sad artifacts of a fallen office, scattered with smashed glass and destroyed staplers. It looked as if a massive wind had come through this hallway. Everything was strewn about, and it was hard to say what the office had originally looked like.
An unsettling sensation from the thick air made me stop. I looked down another wing of the building, but it was partially gone. When the meld happened, it had cut the flimsy wooden structures easily, like a hot knife through butter. On the other side, I saw the vines and overgrown plants thriving in the faint sunlight coming through the treetops. It was strange to see the mortal sun on immortal trees. It highlighted their eerie beauty, but dread clawed at my insides. Had everyone truly vanished?
Whether or not that was the case, at least the vampire technology appeared to be working... when it wanted to. Sike held up a different scanner now, puzzling over it.
"What's that one for?" I asked him. They all looked the same to me, although the scanners came in a few different colors of black, gray, and khaki. He held a khaki one at the moment.
"It's measuring the strength of the barrier. It says there might be a gate nearby, but, just like the others, the range of the scanner is limited." He tapped his chin. "I can basically sense the same thing with my own abilities, but this scanner actually maps things out for us mathematically. It'll give us a good picture of where we need to go if we ever got separated since only Dorian and I can sense the actual gates. Plus, I can send the map between all our scanners."
A map of the barrier sounded good. I liked data and tangible things that I could work with.
I glanced up at a partially destroyed roof. A nearby tree grew aggressively into the building, littering the ground with leaves and bits of vine. I stepped over them, ignoring the sensation of my hairs lifting up. It was hard to ignore the constant soft movement of the vines. I was just glad they didn't whisper, like some of the immortal vegetation we’d encountered on my first trip to the Immortal Plane.
A rodent squeak made me turn in time to see something shadowy and blue darting past. I raised an eyebrow as it disappeared into a pile of rubble in the corner. My parents used to work in this place. Worse creatures than this could have found them. I frowned at the unpleasant thought.
A dank, sweet scent of decay in the humid air of the next room made me gag. A pipe had burst and soaked the entire area. Wild mushrooms in bright eggplant hues grew in clusters around us. Some stagnant puddles remained behind, our footsteps splashing through them.
When I returned to the main hall to continue the search, I spotted another granola bar wrapper by a crumbling wall. Coincidence? After finding one opened by human hands? Dorian watched me stoop over to pick it up. As I did, a blue shape came bounding out of the nearby underbrush. There was a hiss and a flash of tiny fangs snapping—one
