I sent the sphere of light forward. It revealed a low row of skeletal offices and a door at the far end.

An open door.

“Now there’s an invitation if I ever saw one,” Jackson said. “Anyone care to bet on it being a trap?”

The sphere hit the doorway and went through. There didn’t appear to be anything more than rubble and rubbish in the street beyond, though that wasn’t to say there wasn’t a cast of thousands hiding in the shadows beyond the illuminated area. I released the mother’s light and allowed the darkness to close in around us again. If it was a trap up ahead, then I needed to conserve as much energy as I could.

Sam led the way forward again, stirring up the remains of the newly cindered. I cupped my hand over my nose and mouth. I knew it was unlikely the ashes could infect me, but I had no desire to draw them into either my lungs or my body.

“We should be almost level with the top of the barrier that sits atop the rubble now,” Sam said. “Em, feel anything different?”

“No heat or fire, just the lash of magic. What about you?” I asked. “Sensing any life out there?”

“Not human life.”

“What about nonhuman?”

“None of them, either.” He shrugged—and it was only then that I realized the heavy darkness was beginning to lift. “If there’s anything else waiting out there, we’ll have to uncover it the hard way. The senses of a pseudo vampire aren’t up to dealing with the spirit kind.”

And yet he’d always been able to sense my presence in a room, even before he’d become aware that I was something more than human. But maybe that stemmed from a connection of hearts and souls than anything else. That connection still seemed to exist, and part of me hungered to believe that somewhere deep down he still cared, even if his actions of late suggested the exact opposite.

But as much as my crazy heart might wish otherwise, he was this lifetime’s heartbreak. And given fate had allowed no other outcome in all the many centuries I’d lived, loved, and lost, I couldn’t see it having a change of heart this late in the game.

The sting of magic suddenly got stronger, the weight of it so powerful, I stumbled. Sam half twisted around and somehow caught me before I could run into his back.

“Okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “We just hit the barrier.”

“I know.” His voice was flat and filled with frustration. “I can’t move.”

I frowned and stepped sideways as he moved back a step. “But you just did.”

“Yes, backward, but I can’t move any farther forward.”