Page 217 of Keldori By Daybreak

Pressure was releasing too fast.

“There she is. The girl who attacked her admissions officer,” Maxwell snarled. “I knew you were a violent thing.”

“You haven’t seen violent,” I warned.

“Wren.” Ciarán’s murmur was sharp, and I turned to look at what had stolen his attention.

The stone in Gams’s doorway was dissolving, flaking away into something that reminded me of the ash Nightmares left behind.

It evaporated in a wave, billowing inwards and I stepped into the shop to chase its receding outline.

While the stone had destroyed the windows and door, the shelves of Gams’s shop remained intact, as if they’d all been frozen within rather than displaced by the rock.

A shelf of blue painted chickens appeared opposite the register, and my heart ached as Gams’s shop was revealed aisle-by-aisle. When the rock had completely disappeared, the storm winds howled in from the busted back windows.

Ciarán steadied me in the gale, and I shouted over the wind.

“Mom?”

The wind howled back, and frustration started to mount when a voice, too rough, too cruel, and too masculine to be my mother’s, brought my heart into my mouth.

“If you want to see your mother alive again, come down here with your hands over your head!”

My chest turned cold.

“Who was that?” Maxwell hissed from the doorway, but he was the least of my concerns now.

I raced for the door that led to the basement to Gams’s chicken painting workshop.

The door that led to the Rift.

“Wren, be careful!” Ciarán’s warning was wasted on me.

There was a man threatening my mom.

“Mom!” I skirted through the basement door, nearly pitching myself down the steep steps that led to Gams’s workshop. Ciarán steadied me in the doorway, but I shook him off and led the way down the stairs.

“I want your hands up when you come down!” the man’s voice called from around the corner. “You come down here with Skal weapons, and I shoot, got it?”

My heart constricted, and the pounding of the mountains screamed in my head like a loose pressure valve hissing steam.

I took the last few wooden steps of the staircase slowly and came around the corner with my hands up by my head.

Breath escaped me, all of it leaving my lungs as if I’d been punched in the stomach.

I’d seen horror after horror in Skalterra, yet none of them compared to the barrel of a pistol pressed against my mother’s temple. Her brow was streaked with sweat and her cheeks flushed. Her blonde hair fell from its braid, and her pupils dilated with fear.

Stanley’s gun shook in his hand where he held it up to Mom. He was the ghost of his Nightmare form here in Keldori. Thinning hair, shorter than me, ill-defined musculature, and a curve to his neck that suggested years of poor posture at his bank job—he was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen because there was nothing scarier than an insecure man with too much power at his fingertips.

It was too violent of an image, my mom at gunpoint, for the modest workshop. Gams’s kiln sat in the corner. Her paints were still out where she’d left them. Her apron atop the workbench made it look as if she’d just stepped out.

“You made it through Lyria’s doorway,” Mom breathed. The tension she’d been holding her shoulders relaxed. “Wren, you made it. Oh, I’m absolutely furious with you, but you made it.”

“Put the gun down, Stanley,” I said.

“It’s Titus.” Stanley jammed the gun against Mom’s head. “And you can tell your precious Grimguard to come out. I know he’s still on the stairs.”

I jerked my neck to look at Ciarán where he crouched halfway down the stairwell. Maxwell stood at the top step, pale faced and stricken.