Page 16 of Monsters of Midnight

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Machu Picchu,” Ratchet said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Magnus shrank back into the room. I squinted at him. He would take the opportunity to not take the portal to our mother.

“Oh no, you don’t,” I said. “You go through the portal.”

There was no way I was leaving him here with Laney and the witches. And there was no way they were coming with us. It wasn’t until I saw Magnus disappear through the portal to our mother’s house, that I turned to Ratchet and nodded.

“Are you up to this?” I asked, looking at his bloodshot eyes and sagging shoulders. He certainly wasn’t the demon I’d always known. There’d been so much going on. I hadn’t given him proper support, but I moved toward him now.

“You know you need help, right?” I asked.

His eyes shifted self-consciously toward Laney, who turned away to not embarrass him.

“Can we talk about this somewhere else?” he asked.

“We don’t have time to talk about it at all, but we’re going to have to at some point.”

Ratchet nodded, looking down at the ground, but then he pushed energy out of his hand again and a portal appeared. “This one’s to Machu Picchu.”

“Let’s do it,” I said.

“I want to come with you,” Laney stepped forward.

Ratchet and I turned toward her at exactly the same time. “No,” we both said.

I glanced at Ratchet. He was developing a thing for Laney, if he had not always had one.

“Well, you just took that medicine,” Ratchet explained, and I could hear the care and concern in his voice. “We don’t know what it’s going to do to you. You need to stay here with the witches, and let them monitor you.”

“I agree,” I said roughly, heading toward the portal. I was drawn to Laney too, but there was no way I could give that even a moment of my thoughts.

I glanced over at Ratchet. “Come on, let’s go,” I said, preparing to step through the portal. With my emotions being the way, they’d been the last few days, some space from Laney was going to be a good thing, even if it was fighting monsters.

Ratchet moved over toward Laney, and I looked over curiously. “We’re going to go fight some monsters, and then we’re going to come back. Magnus is gone, so you should be okay.” He was calm and sincere, leaning into her.

Clearly, his feelings for her were greater than I had imagined so far.

I saw the way she looked up at him and it was pretty clear. She wasn’t so clear on her own feelings for him.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, glancing over at me. “Just make sure you bring him back.”

I felt a pain in my heart. Laney shouldn’t be wanting me to come back. I shouldn’t be wanting to come back. My heart was being ripped in two, and I had no idea what was going on. Caroline hadn’t been dead more than 24 hours and here I was attaching myself to her best friend like a lost child.

“Ratchet, come on,” I groaned. “Let’s go.”

I stepped through the portal with a sure foot and a confident gait I didn’t feel. For hundreds and hundreds of years we had fought against the monsters. There had been losses in battle and moments of near defeat. We had always come out on top. We had always been triumphant in the war that was being waged and kept the monsters at bay.

I stepped through the portal and found myself at the highest peak of Machu Picchu, looking down upon the top of what was once a thriving town, then ruins, and then a tourist attraction, gathering people from all over the world to look at how ancient peoples might have built a city of stone on top of a mountain in the middle of a jungle. Today all that was gone.

Today there were no tourists.

Today there were no ruins.

You couldn’t see the small walls that marked the grid of the city of Machu Picchu as I stepped through the portal and stood there aghast. All I could see was a thriving mass of dark monsters, all bowing, low to one creature who stood on the throne in the center, the sun rising behind his head.

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