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spot he’d last seen Prejean and Wallace through the binoculars.
    “Hold up,” Rutgers panted, winded already after too many years behind a desk. “Where are we headed?”
    “To where I last saw Prejean.” Gillespie stumbled to a stop in front of a ruined white tomb. He could make out the name carved into the shattered marble— BARONNE . A wisp of pale smoke curled from behind the tomb’s remains. He stepped over chunks of masonry and looked. What he saw catapulted his heart into his throat.
    A large hole, molten-rimmed and glowing yellow-orange, swallowed up most of the tomb’s only intact wall.
    But that wasn’t what scraped fear through Gillespie’s mind and across his heart. On the other side of the embered hole, he didn’t see what he expected to see—a tomb’s dusty interior. Instead, hallways stretched away from the hole, with sky blue marble floors and ridged marble columns that reached into pale night skies.
    Pale night skies full of rustling wings.
    “Dear God. What is that?” Rutgers’s voice was stunned, disbelieving.
    A faint whiff of smoky incense wafted from the hole. “Do you feel like stepping inside and finding out?” Gillespie asked.
    “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
    “Not yet,” Gillespie replied. He nodded at the smoldering portal. “But I feel zero hour rapidly approaching.”
    “Christ, what the hell am I looking at—a dimensional doorway?” Rutgers asked. “What could cause that ? Create it?”
    Remembering pale hands swallowed by blue flames, Gillespie said, “Not what, but who .”
    Gillespie felt Rutgers’s gaze bulls-eye in on the side of his head.
    “Are you saying that Prejean did this?” she questioned, voice flat. “Now I know you’re out of your goddamned mind. The bastard’s a True Blood vampire and a programmed sociopath, but—”
    Programmed? News to Gillespie. “That’s not all he is,” he said. “What do you know about his father?”
    “Nothing. Prejean’s mother never said word one about who fathered her baby.”
    “And you never wondered about that?”
    “Didn’t seem important.”
    “I’ve got something that’ll change your mind about that,” Gillespie said. “Something you need to see.”
    “And that would be?” Rutgers asked.
    Gillespie shook his head. “Later.”
    “Fair enough. So—Prejean and Wallace—do you think they’re inside whatever or wherever the hell that is?”
    “That’d be my guess.”
    “Christ.” Face grim, dirt-smudged, Rutgers reached inside her trench and pulled out a gun. Looked like a standard issue Glock.
    “If you’re thinking of going in, you’re going alone,” Gillespie said. His throat felt parched, prickling with a deep thirst for the flannel-blanket comfort floating inside a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “Me, I’m going for a drink.”
    In the distance, sirens wailed, oracles of disaster.
    “I just might join you,” Rutgers murmured as she eyed the ember-rimmed hole. She reholstered her Glock. “The first responders will be here soon. I don’t want to explain my presence.”
    Gillespie nodded. “Same here. Plus, there’s a few things we need to discuss before we take any action.”
    “ We, is it?” Rutgers looked at Gillespie. “How bitter a pill was it when Underwood ordered you to let Prejean walk away after the debacle in Damascus?”
    “Very.”
    “I’ll bet.” Rutgers swiveled around, then hurried back the way they’d come, dodging piles of rubble with surprising grace for a desk jockey.
    Gillespie followed her to the glass-glinting street, his fingers sweating against the rifle’s stock. A less thirsty part of him insisted that he remain in the cemetery, waiting out of sight for the monster to return—
    Monster? How about bloodsucking bastard god?
    —and put an end to Prejean the second he stepped out of the tomb and back into their world. Trouble was, Gillespie was no longer sure he knew how to do that.
    Or if anyone could.

4
A DARK AND RESTLESS SEA
     
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