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"Don't touch it."
Mark's voice cut through the warehouse before Lucas could get within three feet of the wall. The blood was still wet. Still dripping. YOU LET ONE IN, painted in something that had been alive ten minutes ago.
Lucas froze. "What is that?"
"Nothing good." Mark moved past him, eyes on Daniel. The vet sat in his usual chair like someone had nailed him there. Hadn't looked up. Hadn't blinked. Just stared at the message like it was written in a language only he could read.
Mark crouched in front of him. "Daniel. Talk to me."
Nothing.
"Daniel."
Daniel's mouth moved. No sound. His hands were flat on his thighs, fingers spread, trembling.
"Should I call someone?" Lucas asked behind him.
"Who?" Mark didn't look back. "Nine-one-one? Hey officer, my support group for interdimensional kidnapping survivors just got a threat in mystery blood, send a car?"
Lucas went quiet.
Mark leaned closer. Close enough to smell coffee and sweat. "Daniel. It's Mark. You're in the warehouse. You're safe."
Daniel's pupils were blown wide. Animal panic. Then something clicked.
"I didn't write it." His voice cracked. "I walked in and it was there. I sat down and I couldn't—couldn't move."
"When'd you get here?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe thirty." Daniel's breath hitched. "It wasn't here yesterday. I checked. It was clean."
Mark believed him. Daniel always showed up early. Walked the perimeter. Checked the locks. Old habits from whatever he'd been on the other side.
"See anyone?"
"No."
"Hear anything?"
Daniel shook his head.
Mark stood and turned to Lucas. The kid had backed away from the wall but his eyes kept flicking to it. "You got here when?"
"Right before you called. Maybe five minutes."
"See anyone leaving?"
"There was a guy walking a dog but he didn't look—" Lucas stopped. "What does someone who does this even look like?"
Mark's phone buzzed.
Amy.
Running late. Off at seven. You start without me?
Mark looked at the blood. At Daniel still pinned to his chair.
Don't come.
Three dots. Then:
What happened.
He called her.
She picked up on the first ring. "Mark?"
"Where are you?"
"Hospital. About to clock out. What's going on?"
"Don't come to the warehouse."
Silence. Then quieter, "Why."
"Someone left a message. It's bad. Not safe."
"What kind of message?"
Mark looked at the wall again. YOU LET ONE IN. "The kind that means someone knows where we meet and wants us scared."
"Are you there now?"
"Yeah. Me, Lucas, Daniel."
"Is anyone hurt?"
"Not yet." Mark turned away. Lowered his voice. "Amy, I need you to go home. Lock your doors. Don't go anywhere alone."
Hospital sounds behind her. Intercom. Voices. Her world. The one she'd fought to keep.
"Who do you think did it?" she asked.
Mark glanced at Lucas. The kid was staring at the floor now, arms wrapped around himself. He looked young. Scared.
Or trying to look that way.
"I don't know," Mark said. "But until I do, nobody meets. Nobody goes near this place."
"You're shutting down the group."
"I'm keeping people alive."
"Mark." Amy's voice went hard. "You shut this down, you're doing exactly what they want. Whoever left that message wants us scattered. Scared. Alone."
"Yeah, well, it's working."
"I'm not running." Flat. Final. "I have a shift tomorrow. I have patients. I have a life I built after two years of hell and I'm not letting some cryptic bullshit take it away."
"Amy—"
"You want to cancel the meeting, fine. But don't tell me to hide."
Mark closed his eyes. His burned hand was throbbing. The scars tight and hot. "I'm trying to protect you."
"I don't need protection. I need answers." She exhaled sharp. "We all do. That's why we're in this group, isn't it? Because nobody else believes us and nobody else is going to help."
She wasn't wrong.
Mark had started this thing because he was tired of being alone with it. Tired of the three nights a month when he couldn't sleep, when the burned hand ached and he could still smell the burning air of the other side. He'd thought maybe if he found other people, people who'd been taken and sent back, maybe it would hurt less.
Maybe he wouldn't feel like he'd abandoned something he couldn't even name.
"I left someone behind," he said.
The words came out before he could stop them.
Amy went quiet.
"When they sent me back." Mark's voice sounded far away. "There was someone else there. Another human. They'd been there longer. I don't even remember their face. But they asked me to stay. To help them finish whatever the quest was. And I said no. I just wanted to go home."
He opened his eyes. Stared at the blood on the wall.
"I don't know if they ever got out. I don't know if they're still there. I don't even know if they're alive. But I left. So yeah, Amy, I'm telling you to hide. Because I know what it's like to not have someone there when it matters."
The hospital sounds seemed louder. A cart rolling past. Someone paging a doctor.
"Okay," Amy said finally. Softer. "Okay. But Mark? Hiding didn't save you. It just made you alone."
She hung up.
Mark stood there with the phone still pressed to his ear. Alone. Yeah. That sounded about right.
"Mark."
Lucas's voice. Tight and strange.
Mark turned.
Daniel was standing. He'd moved so quietly Mark hadn't heard the chair. He was staring at the floor.
No. Not the floor.
Their shadows.
Mark's stretched toward the wall from the overhead light. Lucas's pooled around his feet. Daniel's should've been right there behind him.
It wasn't.
Daniel's shadow was moving. Sliding across the concrete. Stretching too long, too thin, reaching toward the door like it was trying to get out.
"Oh hell," Lucas whispered.
Daniel's hand moved. Smooth. Automatic. Muscle memory from another world. His fingers closed around something that wasn't there.
Except Mark saw the air ripple. Saw the faint blue-white line of light that formed in Daniel's grip.
The invisible blade.
The one Daniel swore he'd carried as a general. The one nobody else could see.
Mark could see it now.
"It's in the room," Daniel said quietly. His eyes tracked something Mark couldn't make out yet. Something in the shadows. Something moving between theirs. "It came through with the blood. It's been waiting."
The temperature dropped.
Mark's burned hand went ice-cold.
And in the corner where the light didn't quite reach, one of the shadows peeled itself off the floor and stood up.
"Run," Daniel said.
The shadow lunged.
Daniel moved faster. The invisible blade slashed through empty air and the shadow split—no, doubled—and Mark's burned hand screamed and he saw it now, really saw it, the thing that shouldn't be here, the thing that had followed them back from the other side.
It had Daniel's face.
No. Not his face. A copy. A wrong copy. Eyes too wide, mouth stretched too far, skin that moved like water.
"That's not possible," Lucas said. His voice broke. "That's not—"
The Daniel-thing smiled.
"You let one in," it said in Daniel's voice. "And now I'm going to find the rest."
It reached for Lucas.
Daniel's blade came down and the thing shrieked—a sound that wasn't human, wasn't anything Mark had words for—and the lights overhead exploded.
Glass rained down.
Darkness swallowed the warehouse.
And in the dark, Mark heard two sets of footsteps running.
He couldn't tell which one was Daniel.
"Lucas!" Mark shouted.
No answer.
His phone was still in his hand. He thumbed it on. The screen glow was weak but it was something. He swept it across the warehouse.
Empty chairs. Blood on the wall. The door hanging open.
No Daniel. No Lucas. No shadow-thing.
Mark's burned hand was still ice-cold.
He turned toward the door and something crunched under his boot.
He looked down.
A piece of glass. No—not glass. Something else. Something that glowed faint blue in the phone light.
A shard. Thin as a razor. Humming.
Mark crouched and picked it up. It was warm. Alive. It pulsed against his palm like a heartbeat.
Like the thing he'd touched on the other side right before they sent him back.
His phone buzzed.
Text from Amy.
I'm coming.
Mark looked at the open door. At the empty warehouse. At the shard in his hand that shouldn't exist in this world.
"No," he said out loud. "You're really not."
Because if that thing wearing Daniel's face was telling the truth—if it had come through with the blood, if it had been waiting, if there were more—
Then the door wasn't closed.
It had never been closed.
And something on the other side had finally figured out how to