The Shattered Gates by Ginn Hale Page A

there?” she asked.
    “A key.” John slowly rocked forward and held the key over the keyhole. It looked perfect.
    “I don’t think your house key is going to fit,” Bill said.
    “It’s not my house key,” John said.
    John lowered the key directly down and felt it slide perfectly into place. He had known it would. Somehow, he had felt an absolute assurance of it.
    “Oh my God,” Laurie whispered. “It fits.”
    John crouched there, staring at the key and the stone.
    Laurie asked, “Do you think something will happen if you turn it?”
    “You’ve got to,” Bill said. “You can’t just stick a key in and then not turn it.”
    A key opens a door, John thought. That’s what would happen. Some door, somewhere, opens. Then what?
    “Go ahead.” Laurie moved a little closer to him. “Bill’s right, we’ve got to try it.”
    “All right then,” John said.
    John turned the key. It moved easily. He could feel something slide and click inside the stone. He held still. Laurie and Bill leaned over with him.
    Nothing happened.
    “Damn it,” Bill said.
    Laurie frowned.
    “Maybe it’s broken or—” The rest of her sentence split into a squeal as the ground dropped out from under the three of them.
    A sudden crushing pressure enveloped John in a wall of blinding whiteness as if he had plunged into a pool of blazing water. He squeezed his eyes shut against the brightness. His lungs burned. He struggled to swim upward. A desperate hand clutched at his arm. He felt another body bump into his side. He caught hold of them and kicked hard.
    They had to get through this. They had to get air. John kicked upward. The weight of both Bill and Laurie dragged him down, but he had gotten them into this, and he couldn’t let them go.
    Then suddenly a gust of dry, cold wind rushed over John. He opened his eyes and dragged in a breath. Laurie lay on his right and Bill on his left. Both of them gasped in the thin, frigid air like dying fish. Banks of snow loomed up on either side of the three of them.
    John sat up and stared out over the empty white land and bare black trees. The pale sky met seamlessly with the snow-covered mountains.
    He looked at his empty hands. He had lost the key.

Chapter Six

    Kahlil turned a shard of yellow marble over in his hands and thought that the day was only getting worse.
    He had come home to find the key missing, his sword shattered into dull gray splinters, and trash strewn all over the kitchen floor. The trash shouldn’t have bothered him, but it had. Perhaps the scattered garbage had struck him as too much of an omen of how the fragile domestic comfort of the last ten years would soon end. He’d cleaned it up but it hadn’t made him feel any better.
    Then he had gathered his weapons and ammunition from the locked kitchen cupboard; he had put on his heavy coat and he’d gone up the mountain to find John.
    He pocketed the yellow stone and stalked through the trees. He felt sick and ugly, deciding which one of John’s two friends he would trade for the key and which one he would kill outright. The witch would have to be killed, he decided. He couldn’t take a chance with her.
    He hated the thought of murdering a woman only a few hours after she had held his arm so warmly and smiled at him without a hint of malice. It was too easy to imagine her expression of happy surprise at his arrival. He could see that expression lingering on her face for a moment too long, as if she were unable to comprehend how his knives could be tearing through her flesh. She wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t know anything in her last moments but pain, horror, and confusion.
    No. In this world it didn’t matter how he killed a witch. She wouldn’t be skinned down to her bones afterwards. He didn’t need to keep her skull intact. He could simply put a bullet through the back of her head. That, at least, would be fast. She wouldn’t see him. She wouldn’t know anything but the instant of impact. It would be