“What are you doing?” he asked, and I shushed him. Case in point.

Barefoot and wearing only Garth’s T-shirt, I stood before the blank, white wall and uncapped the pen. I pictured the room in the back of the makeshift hospital, recalling exactly what it had looked like through that doorway with all those cots and the poor, sick kiddos. My drawings could be realistic, verging on lifelike, but I had no idea if this would work. Didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

I started by drawing a tall rectangle on the wall. That was the doorway in the hangar. I added rows of occupied cots, spending a few minutes giving each sick kid some memorable details. I closed my eyes, imagining what the scene would be like when Nik was there, collecting blood samples from the infected humans. I drew him crouching down at the second cot from the doorway in the middle row, his head bent over the kid lying there, blessedly asleep.

Eyelids remaining shut, I continued to draw, my hand moving with a mind of its own, the ink directing it. The universe directing it. I gave myself over to the magic, let the universal energies flow through my sheut, saturate the rest of my body, and pour into the drawing. The marker started to hum with power, the wall giving off a sizzling electricity that made the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. I was used to a gentle zing of power while drawing or doing a reading, but this was something else altogether. This was massive, a torrent compared to a trickle.

My breaths came faster, my heart beating harder, stronger. A surge of energy passed through me, a pulse like lightning compared to the steady current I’d been channeling before.

“Mon Dieu . . .” Dom’s voice was filled with awe.

My eyes snapped open, and I stared at the wall—at the thing that was much more than simply a drawing of a doorway on a wall.

“What—how did you do that?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, eyes glued to the thing on the wall. Or, rather, in the wall. It wasn’t just a picture of the sick room at the back of the makeshift hospital; those were actual cots with actual sick kids lined up in rows. I could hear their moaning. Their sniffles and muffled cries. It worked. It really worked. Somehow, I’d created a window to another place entirely.

Slack-jawed, I stared through the window. A man knelt beside the second cot in from the doorway in the center row. It was Nik, just as I’d drawn him. His head was bowed over a slumbering little girl of maybe six or seven, and he was collecting a sample of her blood in a vial at her elbow. He raised his head, focusing on something within the room, just to the side of the doorway. “Is there any way to get a sample from Sammy? Having patient zero’s blood might make all the difference.”