The Eighth Gate

17 | Dark Deception

“What do you mean, ’he’s gone’?” Mason demanded.

But Mary hardly heard him. There was a loud rushing in her ears, drowning out his voice, her heartbeat, the sound of her bated breaths escaping past her lips.

“I don’t see him anywhere, either,” Mr. Salazar said, his voice distant from somewhere behind Mary. “Do you think he could have gone somewhere—“

“No,” Mary interjected sharply, all her fear and frustration and desperation evidencing itself in her wild eyes, in the unsteadiness of her voice. She felt like she was poised at the edge of something dark, something that could swallow her up whole and undo the stitching that held her together, unraveling her apart. And she was teetering, as unstable as her emotions. “You don’t know Noah like I do. He would never wander away from here without letting me know first—and even then, he wouldn’t leave my side, much less leave Avery alone and unprotected. No,” Mary finished darkly, “something happened to him. Something bad.”

 “You think a demon attacked him?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know,” Mary whispered, hugging herself. A bad feeling had begun to churn in the pit her stomach, causing it to pinch with cramps. Mary tried unsuccessfully to steady her breathing, her emotional state; she closed her eyes and a slew of possibilities of what happened to Noah played out behind her lids, each one worse than the next. “Maybe. It seems like the only possibility. Either a demon attacked him and sent him to wherever it is ghosts go after being attacked—“

“Purgatory,” Salazar put in.

“—or he was… he was kidnapped by a demon and...” Mary trailed off, afraid of saying the words aloud. She shared a wide-eyed look with Mason, whose face was grim.

“And he was dragged through the gate,” he finished. “To Hell.”

“But that can’t have happened,” Salazar insisted. “Remember what the demon said the night of the crash? Noah can’t go through the gate, for some reason. The demon said some sort of curse won’t allow it.”

Mary wasn’t convinced. “And you believe the words of a demon? They’re sinners; they lie all the time.”

Salazar pursed his lips. Mary had a point and he knew it.

“Well, maybe Avery knows something,” Mason suggested. “If anyone is a witness to what happened to Noah, it’s her. I know she’s not herself, but try asking her anyway.”

Mary knelt down to the little girl’s level, placing her hands on her knees. An icy breeze, tinged with sea brine, strung Mary’s brown locks across her face. “Avery,” she said, gazing into Mason’s sister’s blank, pastel green eyes with all the urgency and desperation that poured out of her like a fountain. “Did you see where Noah went?”

Almost imperceptivity, Avery shook her head, an insignificant twitch of the neck. She looked so pale, as if she were ill; her eyelids drooped lazily, her blue lips set in a thin line. Water, as transparent as she was, clung to her lashes and made slow streaks down her cheeks like tears.

“Are you sure?” Mary pushed. “You have no idea—nothing whatsoever? Did one of those ugly monsters come for him?” She waited for Avery to answer her, and when she didn’t, Mary tried a different suggestion. “Did he just—disappear into thin air?” Mary paused; no answer. Just a blank stare. “Did he say he was going somewhere?” No response; not even the bat of an eye.

By now Mary’s hands were clenched tightly around her kneecaps, her frustration threatening to boil over as she grit her teeth. She rubbed a hand down her face, stopping at her mouth so that she was heaving calming breaths into her palm with her eyes shut.