FINAL GATE (#3 GHOST PORTAL series)

THIRTEEN

She stormed up to Landon and shook him; he'd been standing there, caught in a trance, pupils dilated. He'd watched—or ignored—as barbed wires snaked up around her and threatened to choke her, to pierce her to death. "Hey, did you not hear me? We need to talk!"

Landon winced at her touch and gently removed her hands from his arms. "I heard you, yeah. Sorry, I was... what happened?"

Jessamine's eyebrows bunched as she glared at him. "You weren't watching? You didn't see any of it? None of the wires, my feet planting into the ground, me not being able to move?"

"I saw you struggling, yes." He tousled his hair with a frown. "But not what you were struggling with. The door... was it there? I couldn't tell. At one point, it seemed like you were yelling at something, and I was ready to interfere but... well, you looked like you were in a lot of pain—"

"—I was, dammit!" She panted, recalling how the barbed wire had been about to squeeze the life out of her.

He threw out a hand to slow her down. "I'm sorry, but I can't fight what I can't see, so I... left you be. I hoped you'd figure it out."

"Can't fight what..." She blinked at him. "Figure it out? Figure out what? What are you talking about?"

"Whatever was bothering you, hurting you... it was invisible to me." Landon kept squinting at something behind Jessamine, but she was too distraught to turn and piece together what. "I'm assuming it was some kind of test, some means to determine if you were worthy of returning to your realm?"

"You didn't see anything?" She peered down at her arms, expecting scrapes and scars, deep gashes from the things that had slipped around her, trying to squirt the blood out of her. Her rib-cage still ached, and her lungs still grappled to fully take in the oxygen she needed to breathe. But her skin... was bare. Nothing was there. Not a trace of her suffering on her arms, legs, anywhere. "The vines? Barbed wires? Needles? Chains? You saw none of that wrapping around me?"

Her forehead overheated; had she made all this up? The vines were real, she'd seen them, felt them, watched them coiling up her body one inch at a time. But the needles, she never actually noticed, only sensing them poking into her. And the chains... she'd sensed cold on her skin, like the metal of a chain gliding over her, about to yank her against a wall to keep her prisoner.

Landon shook his head. "This place can make you hallucinate pretty bad, doll. And it doesn't want you to leave, so of course it produced freakish visions and sensations when you were close to the door. It'll do what it can to keep you from going anywhere. Makes sense."

"Nothing makes sense down here." Jessamine scoffed, massaging her shoulders, easing all the tension. What she really needed was an hour-long session with a masseuse, incense in a smoky room, and a plunge in a steamy hot tub. But she'd likely never get access to any of those again.

"Look, to tell you the truth..." Landon peeked behind her again. "I was a bit busy myself while all this was happening to you. I was, uh..." He jutted his chin at whatever he'd been fixated on. "I was talking to a demon."

Jessamine swung around in time to see a red being pop up, seemingly out of nowhere—and Landon wasn't toppled over in pain or overcome with nausea with its presence.

"What the—" Jessamine backed away, glancing between the two. The red glob of a demon with its enormous black eyes, and Landon, her friend, her ally, the one who'd been lying to her? She hadn't even noticed a red blob floating there, while she'd been busy trying not to die.

"It's not what you think." Landon shook out his hands in front of him, frantic. "I'm not affiliated with them, I didn't betray you."

"That's—" Jessamine hiccuped, unable to tear her gaze from Landon's stomach, from his unusually steady posture. "That's not it."