“Love to.” The lights would probably be off inside, so I turned on Abomination’s flashlight. Julie moved out of my way, covering me with the Springfield. I raised one size fifteen boot and let it fly. The hotel door was really solid, but I was big, excited, and the deadbolt ripped right through the jamb. The door flew open with a bang, with me and Abomination one step behind it.

I skidded to a wet halt. Too surprised and confounded to move forward. “Fuck me…”

The water wasn’t from an overflowing toilet or a busted pipe…It was from the river. The fifty-foot-wide, gray, frothy river that I was standing on the grassy bank of. I looked down. The tan hotel carpet simply terminated in a straight line and on the other side was dead winter grass. I looked up. There was ceiling, regular old, textured white ceiling…and then it, too, ended in a straight line, and past that there were stars. It was a wide-open night sky, and it sure as hell wasn’t in Las Vegas. To the side, there were no walls, there were trees. Inside room 1613 was a river and a forest, at least as big, if not bigger than the entire casino we were supposedly in.

The hotel room wasn’t simply gone, it was like it had never been here, and I’d stepped through that doorway into a whole new world.

Julie was right behind me. She collided with me. “What the—” I could hear Milo, Trip, and Nate behind us. They could all see it too. I hadn’t just lost my mind. “Back up. Back up!” Julie ordered. I was glad to get back on the carpet.

“I just looked inside the room next door. There’s no giant forest in that one,” Milo said. The space which should have held that room was a copse of dense, gnarled, gray trees. “This is bad.”

As bizarre as this was, I’d seen something similar a couple of times, extra-dimensional spaces grafted onto an earthly entrance. “Pocket dimension?”

“They don’t normally appear out of nowhere,” Julie said.

“Got a better explanation—” There was a scream to my right. The coat closet opened and the source of the scream nearly got ventilated by several very jumpy Hunters. A woman fell out amidst a clatter of clothes hangers and the ironing board. “Help! Help me! It got him!” She was hysterical.

“Who’s she?” Julie asked, Springfield shouldered, ready to blast the stranger.

I recognized the silly, skimpy, and now soaked and muddy Oktoberfest outfit. It was one of the dancers. “She’s from the party. Trip, grab her.”

Trip took her by the arm and helped her up. She was hysterical. “It’s coming back. It’s coming back!”

“What’s coming back?” Julie asked calmly.