"What the…" Cam trailed off, unable to finish his thought. He had never seen a soul before. Frustration and disappointment seeped into every inch of me. This wasn't how things were supposed to go. We had tried our best, but we’d fallen short. We had misunderstood the creature, and now our only way back to the Pocket Space had been taken from us. I hung my head for a moment, unable to speak the hard words out loud. We failed.
This was the opposite of how I wanted our first mission to go. I felt strange. On the one hand, the mission had failed in many ways. On the other… Roxy cradled Kane close to her chest. We had found him. Chandry put a reassuring but awkward arm around Dan, who was crying bitter tears into the night.
I’d truly, wrongly thought we knew everything about the universe after fighting to prevent it from splitting at the seams. The Higher Plane was supposed to be the ultimate discovery, but there was something about the Pocket Space that went beyond what we previously understood about the planes.
Something wicked and weird. There's more going on than we ever considered. I let the familiar sense of sadness and loss of control over life crash over me. Tomorrow would be a new day, but tonight I would mourn what we had lost. I didn't understand anything about the Pocket Space or those strange people, but we could change that…
I stared at the space where the creature had died. We would need to find a way back to the Pocket Space eventually, but that wasn’t a possibility at the moment.
Roxy sighed heavily. "There's not even a body to take back to the Bureau." She adjusted Kane on her lap. His eyes remained closed, and the shadows under his skin were weak. He needed to feed soon. "This sucks."
"It does," I admitted. There was no point in pretending otherwise. "Colin said the beast was running itself to the point of exhaustion. What happened?"
Roxy's gaze flitted down to Kane, and her eyes softened. "The Ghost brought me to Kane. Colin realized that if I was thinking about him and talking to him, it would create interplanar energy and the monster would take us to him. It moved obsessively, though… like it couldn't help itself."
Like it couldn't help itself… On some level, most creatures had a basic instinct to survive, but this monster had weakened itself because of its compulsions. It was a special type of drive or desire that would make a being do that to itself.
"What happened with Kane?" I asked. His eyelids flickered weakly. Roxy hoisted him into a standing position, and Dorian came to her aid on the other side. He was useful with all those muscles.
"I found him starved. He's been passing out for long periods of time." Roxy shot an urgent look at Dorian. "He needs to feed as soon as possible."
I nodded. "We'll get him to the medic and see about arranging for him to feed." Thankfully, vampires were made to survive dire conditions. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least Kane wouldn't die. In the meantime, Arlonne approached and offered him her wrist to feed from to tide him over, since she had just fed. He bit down with a grateful sigh.
In all my confusion, I barely registered the rest of the group. On the outskirts of the small clearing, my remaining team members gathered. Chandry was sympathetically patting Dan's back, a vampire out of her element but doing a good job.
"She chose them over me," Dan said between soft sobs. "I don't understand."
I diverted my attention from him to make sure Bryce was still okay. Sike held steady, uninjured from the fight, as he helped Bryce. We're all safe, Lyra, calm down.
"There, there. It's okay," Chandry muttered. Her voice was stiff. "Uh, she was… someone special, I'm sure."
Dan didn't appear to be listening, which was probably for the best. He was wiping his face and nose on his dirty sleeves.
"Dan, what happened to you?" I asked, trying my best to sound sympathetic. In many ways, I was. Even if he would've made our lives easier by not getting involved, he’d still lost someone important to him and had been treated cruelly by that mysterious group.
He sniffed and lifted his head. "The monster left me… and Jessica… I heard her calling for me somehow. Maybe it was in my dreams. I was going in and out of consciousness." He rubbed an angry tear away. "If she just hadn't gotten so obsessed, none of this would have happened. Ever since the Leftovers appeared, Jessica became a fanatic about this stuff."
I raised a curious eyebrow at that. If Jessica did have powers—and clearly, the mysterious hooded figures agreed on that—then it sounded like she’d developed them right after the meld.
"How did it start?" I asked. “Jessica’s interest in the Leftovers.”
Dan huffed. "We were in the thick of it. We lived in Salt Lake City in Utah, you know? The chaos was right there. We’d been following the news about the vampires for months before, and Jessica started her show… but then that day came. When everything went strange, Jessica's classes were canceled for a week because half the city—including our entire apartment—was suddenly in a freaking lake. Everything went back to normal, and the city tried to continue on as if nothing happened."
Roxy murmured, "She made it into college?"
Dan hadn't heard her. "She complained of headaches and strange symptoms, like sudden nausea out of nowhere. It got bad. Suddenly, she
