He needed to stop thinking about other things and focus on the issue at hand. He walked slowly, every muscle tight, until Aria and Nikolai reappeared behind him.
They were close to the gate now. Lucas guided them past another group of residents, entered the alley, and froze.
It was empty. The guards weren’t there.
As he let go of his morph and returned to his natural state, alarm bells rang in Lucas’s head. Something was very wrong here.
Aria came up beside him. “Where are the guards?”
“Excellent question.”
Nikolai loomed over them. “I can feel the gate. Where is the person we pay?”
Lucas glanced up at him. “Do you sense anyone else?”
The dark brows drew down. “Not in the alley. Or in the surrounding buildings. They are all empty.”
Gatekeepers never left gates unattended.
Aria glanced at Lucas. “The gate doesn’t feel right. Something’s changed.”
Lucas’s gut twisted. This had all the earmarks of a trap. And at the top of his list of suspects—“Where are the Watchers?”
The big man’s head turned, as though his eyes sought something only his mind could see. “The two that follow remain at the town’s outer limits. But I sense they are linked to others.” He tilted his head. “Those others are not here, though.”
Lucas swallowed. “They aren’t here? As in physically?”
Nikolai nodded. “There is a lot of energy focused on that gate.”
Damn it. What to do now? “Without a gatekeeper, we can’t orient the gate to where we need to go.”
Aria’s breath hissed through her teeth. “It will be focused somewhere. Whoever used it last went to a realm. If we can get to it, we can pass through. Once in that realm, we can get the gatekeeper to reorient the gate on the human one for us.”
Lucas grimaced. “Yeah, great. So long as it doesn’t deposit us in the middle of an ocean.”
Nikolai’s brows shot up. “It might spit us into an ocean?”
“Not all the realm gates are land based,” Aria explained. “But the majority are.”
“We could hitch a ride on a whale.” Nikolai said it as though it were a viable possibility.
Lucas snorted. “That’ll work if there is a whale handy.”
Aria planted her hands on her hips. “I take it a whale is a large sea creature?”
Lucas sighed. There was really no point in discussing this while standing in the alley. The gate was their only way out of here. It was that, or sit here until the Watchers got brave enough to tackle Nikolai. And Lucas would do almost anything to avoid ending up back in that cursed forest.
“We’re going?” Aria asked as Lucas strode forward.
Lucas gritted his teeth. “We’re going.”
23
The door that led to the gate was unlocked
Aria poised on the balls of her feet, and kept one hand on her tail spike as they entered. If it would have been possible for her Dragon to walk into the building, she would have shifted form. She was that edgy about all this.
As it was, her wings itched to burst free from her back, and talons kept erupting from her fingertips. If someone had popped out of the shadows, she likely would have shredded him before she even blinked.
