Page 207 of Caged

Riven’s smile falls. He unpins the map and lays it on the table in front of me. Then he pulls up an online map that mirrors the exact lines he drew on the data. I compare the two and realize…

He’s right.

Every single event took place at, or near, a major intersection of one or more of these fucking ley lines. Or on the line itself.

“That’s…” I trail off, hesitating as I meet Riven’s eyes. I swallow down the word ‘coincidence’ before it can escape.

“Every weird disturbance. Every unexplained event. Every dead cow or screaming deer or flight path that goes dark.” He points at the map. “They’re all happening right along these lines. Perfectly, Dax. That’s not a coincidence.”

I gesture at the paper lying in front of me like a taunt. “So you think these lines of energy are… what? Facilitating the strange shit going on?”

Riven slides his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels.

“I think,” He levels me with one of those no-bullshit looks, and I just know whatever he’s about to say is going to ruin my evening.

“‘She is the light. The light is the Gate. The Gate is awake.’”

“The Gate,” I mutter, shivering when a cold chill runs down my spine.

Riven’s fingers hover above the ley lines. “What I think is that these are seams. Paths, sure, but paths that correlate perfectly with the stitching between one layer of reality and the next. Most of the time, they hold. I think they’ve been holding pretty well for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. You might get a little something that presses through. Cold spots in a forest, fog where there shouldn’t be any, that kind of thing…”

He arches a brow meaningfully, and I’m reminded of the story he told us last time we were here.

“If you ask me, something is pulling on the threads. Stretching them. Allowing more of whatever’s on the other side through. And I think whatever’s there is affecting things here in a way that makes no sense to us, but does in that reality.”

He isn’t whispering or making it sound more dramatic than it is, and somehow that makes his words even more ominous.

“I don’t know what it means, but I think every time whatever’s there lashes out, it’s slipping through. Fucks with physics, or gravity, or what the fuck ever you want to blame it on. That’s why none of this makes sense to you.” His eyes soften. “It’s breaking laws in a way you can’t explain because it’s not backed by science. Because there’s no science to explain it, Daxen. At least, none that we know of.”

What he’s saying makes a sick kind of sense. And while he speaks, the words the Omegas whispered like warnings spin through my mind. “She” and the “gate” and the “threads.”

I wrack my brain for any explanation that makes sense without refuting Riven’s words. Literally any explanation besides “magic doesn’t exist.”

Because even that’s bullshit, isn’t it?

Everyone knows magic exists; we just dress it up in different definitions: Mutation. Evolution. Variation. Lots of pretty words to hide the fact that the scientific community knows fuck all about most things.

Thousands of years on this planet, and science still doesn’t have an explanation for where wolven and vampires came from. They don’t even have an evidence-based hypothesis that could explain why we’re so different from humans.

If we look at only what we know to be true, all that can be said for certain is that one day there were humans, and the next, wolven and vampires existed too. But there’s no historical record of the event.

There’s also no explanation for why only certain vampires can twist their blood into something new simply by willing it. By wanting it bad enough. Or, what about how we’re able to go longer between feedings when we drink the blood of another vampire but can only survive for a day on the blood of a deer, or a lion, or a fucking naked mole rat.

That’s the problem. The entire fucking crux of every argument I make, out loud or in my head, but especially as it pertains to the current situation. Everything we are—everything I’ve spent my life fighting to learn and understand—is built on a mountain of bullshit we don’t have the data to explain in the first place.

Riven chuckles and hands me another glass of whiskey.

“Did I break you? I didn’t mean for you to have an existential crisis in the middle of my gym, Dax.”

“I’m not broken,” I reply drolly. “Just… considering.”

“Considering that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”

I look at him flatly. “Considering whether or not I’d be convicted by a jury of my peers when I tell them you were unironically quoting Shakespeare when I tore your heart out of your chest.”

“Honestly, it could go either way. Really depends on how many on the jury feel personally victimized by assholes with a pie chart fetish.”

His smile’s unrepentant, and I find myself smiling back, even though I’m screaming on the inside.