Lucian's POV
The knock on the door came exactly twenty minutes after I'd hung up the phone.
I had spent those twenty minutes sitting on the hotel bed, staring at the crumpled letter in my bloody hands, trying to make sense of gods and doorways and the end of the world. The destruction in the bathroom was still visible through the open door, shattered mirror, broken fixtures, blood splattered across white porcelain.
I looked like I had been through a war. Which, I guess, I had.
"It's me," Elias's voice came through the door.
I opened it, and he took one look at me before his expression shifted from concern to alarm.
"Lucian. What the hell happened to you?"
I stepped aside to let him in. He entered carefully, his eyes scanning the room, taking in the destruction visible through the bathroom doorway.
