Hell, no. I turned and ran back down the other side of the rise, away from the aperture, away from the flatlands. Just away.
But the movement of air behind me, the rustle and grind of sand, told me that I wasn’t alone and that the clawed thing was behind me. Don’t look back, don’t look back, don’t—oh, fuck it! I glanced over my shoulder, and then a scream tore from my throat.
The monster’s neon blue eyes blazed brightly in the gloom; its obsidian talons reached for me. My boot slipped in the sand, and I went down. It leaped. Oh, fuck. Oh, shit.
It sailed toward me, claws at the ready to shred. I was done. I was—
At that moment, it was as if something inside me cracked. A sharp snap, like the ice of a frozen lake breaking under pressure. There was a moment of release, an involuntary sigh, and then light burned my vision. Gloriously bright and tinged blue, it surrounded me. The monster hit the light and fell back as if he’d encountered a wall. Whining and grunting, it came at me again, but the light was having none of it.
Where was it coming from? Where … I raised my hands and stared at the glowing orbs that clung to my palms. The glow was on me. It was coming from me.
I was fucking glowing like a beacon. Howls rose up around me. The monster growled and glanced over his shoulder, and then it head-butted the light in a manner that was more warning than attack.
Its eyes, which had seemed so menacing when it was chasing me, now looked desperate and frightened.
What the heck?
It whined and glanced back over its shoulder.
Dark shapes were cresting the rise and headed this way. More beasts? More monsters?
Fuck this shit. I was on my feet and running. The monster with the neon blue eyes loped beside me.
Faster and faster. As if I could run my way out of here. Back to Henri, back to the mansion, back—
The gray streaked and stretched, the world warped, and then I was slamming into a wall.
Hands grabbed me.
“No!” I punched and fought.
“Kat. Kat, it’s me, Henri. You’re safe. You’re okay.”
The fight drained out of me, and then my arms were around his neck, my face buried in his shoulder. “Oh, God. Thank God.”
His body tensed, and then he wrapped his arms around me and hugged me back.
* * *
I shivered, huddled in the passenger side of the Fiat as Henri drove us back to the mansion. My chest burned where the monsters had ripped into me, my shirt was bloody and torn and stuck to my chest in ribbons, and I couldn’t stop shaking.
“You’re in shock,” Henri said. “What the fuck happened?” He flicked his gaze over me then back to the road.
I couldn’t. Not right now. “Later.” My teeth chattered.
“We need to pick Tris up. I’ll drop you at the mansion then fetch her. Mai and Kris can’t see you like this, but hopefully, they’ll be in bed.”
Mai had left a message on my phone saying she couldn’t find me so she’d see me back home.
Home.
The mansion was actually starting to feel like home, and why the heck couldn’t I stop shaking?
“My jacket?”
“Fuck,” Henri cursed. “Maybe Mai picked it up?”
“I love that jacket.” I closed my eyes, wanting to block out the monsters. The rage, the torment that had saturated the very air when they’d surrounded me. They’d been drawn to the light. They’d wanted that light. They’d wanted me.
A shudder ripped through me.
Henri cursed softly again. “As soon as Tris gets back, we are having a long conversation. You are going to tell her about the not sleeping, about the fomorian in the basement. You’re going to tell us what the fuck just happened.”
I nodded. He was right, but first I needed to stop trembling. Fuck this shit. What was wrong with me? I’d taken on worse than this. I wasn’t the kind to fall apart.
The car swerved and then stopped. Henri got out. We were at the gates. There was a soft murmur of voices, and then my door was being pulled open, and bare arms were reaching for me. Killion’s earthy scent filled my head, and then I was hauled up against his bare chest.
“I’ll be back,” Henri said. “Killion will take care of you until I return.” He looked to the hellhound. “She needs to feed. She’ll heal faster if she gets blood.”
Killion lifted his chin in acknowledgment of Henri’s words. His jaw was chiseled, hard, and stubbled. I wanted to touch it, but my body was limp and uncooperative. Blood loss. Was I still leaking? My mind was beginning to do the drifty thing, but one thought sliced through—the golem and the hellhound were friends?
But then Killion was walking off with me, and Henri was starting the engine. We didn’t head to the front of the house. Instead, Killion carried me around the side of the building, his feet crunching on gravel. Bare feet? Was he totally naked again? How had I not noticed?
My eyes drifted closed, and breath plumed from my lips in the cold.
So cold even though the hellhound’s body was hot against my cheek. I wanted to crawl into that heat and let it force the chill away.
A door opened, and then the chill was replaced with warmth. Killion set me down on something soft. A bed?
“Where are we?” I struggled to open my eyes to see a small room with a fireplace, a tiny kitchen space, a small sofa, a footstool, and a square table with one chair.
The place smelled earthy and safe. It smelled of Killion. And he wasn’t naked from the waist down tonight, either that or he’d quickly covered up in black joggers. He grabbed a blanket and pulled it over me and then crouched by the side of the mattress and held out his wrist.
I stared at it.
“Drink.”
It was one word, but it was said with such command that it had my fangs sliding out from my gums.
I shook my head. “Need human blood. Supernaturals don’t quite cut it for me.”
He brought his wrist to my nose. “Drink.”
His scent was in my head now, overpowering, strong, and … delicious. Oh, God. I gripped his wrist, his skin hot and velvet-smooth beneath my eager fingers, and even though a part of my brain was yelling at me to hold up, to check myself and ask again if he was sure, the other part was like, fuck it. Just feed. And that was the part that won. I sank my fangs into his flesh, and his blood bloomed in my mouth, sweet and fresh and potent. It zinged down my throat and hit my brain like a high. My skin itched as it knit, and the burning ebbed. The healing was happening super-fast, and in a minute, I was drinking simply for the taste of him. I locked gazes with him while I sucked. His jaw was tense as he watched me.
His dark hair, which was long enough to curl, reflected the flames in the hearth, and his eyes glowed eerily to match. Fuck, he was beautiful in his silence. His breath was coming shallow, though. Shit. I broke the seal of my mouth and laved the wounds with my tongue so the protein in my saliva would heal him. We stared at each other for a long beat, and then he blinked and broke eye contact. He made to move away, and my hand shot out to grab his arm.
“Thank you. Honestly.”
He nodded and then padded to a drawer in the corner. He returned with a T-shirt and handed it to me. It was huge and came down to my thighs, but it covered my bloody, ripped shirt.
“You have shirts? Who knew?” I cracked a smile.
His mouth twitched.
I stood on steady feet. His blood was truly … wow. “I should get back to the mansion.” I made to leave, but a thought halted me at the door. “Do you ever patrol with the others?”
He shook his head. “I patrol the grounds.”
“Okay. Just wondered … You don’t ever want more?”
He slow-blinked and canted his head. “No.”
A man of few words. “Well, I suppose I’ll see you around?”
He didn’t reply. Instead, he turned away and began throwing wood on the fire. I guess we were done here.
Time to sneak into the mansion.
Chapter Seventeen
Henri would be back soon, and then we could plan. I had a location and a time when the man in the hat would act. We needed to intervene, and we couldn’t involve the others without telling them the truth about me. There was no option but to lie to them.
It made my insides hurt thinking about it, because over the past week, we’d become close, and damn it, I was starting to think of them as friends.
The mansion foyer was shrouded in silence with only the freestanding lamp lit. Mai’s calf-length coat was hung up, and peeking out from beneath it was my red leather jacket. I made to unhook it, to take it upstairs and put it back in my wardrobe with all my other jackets, but ended up knocking Mai’s coat to the floor. Something clattered across the tiles. Shit. I hung her coat back up and picked up the clutch that had fallen open on the ground. The bag had come open, and I made to click it closed, but wait, what was that? A face in the bag. A photograph. Ice trickled through my veins as I tugged the photo strip out of the bag. It was one of those booth strips where Mai and a guy were making faces at the camera. The guy was wearing glasses, but even with the specs on, there was no disguising that face. It was the reaper dude. What the fuck was Mai doing with the reaper dude?
Pulse kicking up, I flipped the strip to read the scrawled words on the back. Lark and me at the fete.
Lark?
No. That couldn’t be right. Lark was a weaver, not a reaper. Oh, God, this was wrong. All wrong. Why would Lark lie about his death? Why would he pretend to be a reaper?
The door opened behind me, and Henri and Tris entered.
“Kat!” Tris leaped from Henri’s shoulder onto mine. “I found something. I think I know what the man in the hat wants.”
I held the strip out to Henri.
“What’s happened?” His gaze dropped to the photo in my hand. His jaw tensed. “What the fuck?”
“That’s Lark.”
“So?” Tris looked from the photo to Henri’s face.
“That’s also the reaper we’ve been speaking to,” Henri explained.
The bright overhead light switched on, and Mai stood at the top of the stairs. “Um, guys, what are you doing with my stuff?”
* * *
Kris yawned and plonked himself into his seat by the window. Mai watched me warily, and Jay was stoic and silent. Everyone was in nightwear, ready for sleep during the day. Mai’s hair was mussed as if she’d already been asleep, and Kris kept yawning and flashing his pearly whites. Jay was the only one who looked fully awake.
I’d had Henri summon everyone, but now that all eyes were on me, the decision to spill my secret was a bitter aftertaste on my tongue. My stomach continued to do nervous flips even though both Tris and Henri had agreed it was the best move under the circumstances we were in. All the others knew right now is that I had information on a time-sensitive case.
I took a deep breath. “Before I tell you what I’ve found, I need to tell you a secret. But once I share this secret with you, I’ll be putting my life in your hands because if it gets out, then I’m as good as dead.”
Deep silence permeated the room.
Jay locked onto me with his honey eyes. “Can your secret harm others?”
Shit, yes. I hadn’t thought of that. I pressed my fingers to my temple and massaged. “Look, you could be reprimanded if the council found out you knew, but if you play dumb, you’ll be fine. But no one else can be hurt by it.”
“Why tell us now?” Mai asked.
“Trust me, it’s not my first course of action, but the first course of action could end up getting people killed, including me. And yes, this course could get me killed, if you decide to squeal on me, but at least innocents won’t die and—”
“Basically,” Henri interrupted. “We need your help.”
Mai’s expression softened. “Whatever it is, we’ve got your back.”
“We won’t be losing another member of our team,” Jay said softly. “Your secret is safe with us.”
I looked to Kris.
He shrugged. “What they said.”
Henri was tense beside me, and Tris’s tail tightened around my arm in agitation. This was taboo. This was a huge risk, but we’d discussed it. There was no other way to unravel what was going on here. I needed them to be involved because there were twelve, possibly thirteen, lives at stake here.
I took a deep breath and began to fill them in on the first attack in the alley, the real version of events. I explained about the riders and how the reaper had come to my aid.
“We have a reaper in Scorchwood?” Jay looked surprised. “There are only a handful left.”
The lore books said that after death vanished, many reapers retired because if death couldn’t be bothered, then why should they. It was the reason there were so many spirits knocking around clueless. But only a handful of reapers left? I hadn’t been aware there were so few.
“Wait.” Kris held up his hand. “You can see these riders? You can speak to them?”
I locked gazes with him and nodded slowly while he processed this and came to the inevitable conclusion. “Oh, fuck,” he said softly. “Mother’s or father’s side?”
I ducked my head. “Father’s side. No idea who he is and my mother has never said. She’s been in a coma since giving birth to me.”
“Your gramps has been protecting you?” Jay asked.
I nodded. “I think … I think he’s in trouble for his efforts. I haven’t heard from him in a week.” I waved a dismissive hand. “But I’ll deal with that later. Right now, there are twelve humans, possibly thirteen, at risk, and Gramps would want me focused on saving them.” I filled them in on the man in the hat, on what the reaper and the ghosts had told me and the awful place I’d been dragged to.
“Oh, sweetie.” Tris nuzzled my cheek. “You must have been so scared.”
“You could have died,” Henri reminded me. “You should have taken me into the alley with you. That’s what I’m fucking here for.”
He was being an ass but only because he cared, so I took the berating. “I know. I messed up, but I had no idea … That place is something else.”
“The Shade?” Mai said. “It sounds like the Shade?” Her mouth trembled, reminding me why we were having this conversation.
Lark had been sucked into the Shade. Torn up. But Lark was also the reaper …
Tris tensed on my shoulder, and I stroked her back. “Tell us what you found.”
All attention went to Tris.
She adjusted herself on my shoulder to face the others. “The man in the hat, the shadow man, the bogey man are all names given to the same entity. He affects realities differently.”
The concept of multiverses wasn’t alien to the supernatural world. We’d discovered alternate dimensions, and the multiverse was simply an extension of that. Humans, however, were still theorizing on the subject.
“From what I could dig up,” Tris continued, “this shadow man can’t directly affect this mortal realm. He interacts with us from the spaces in between—the pockets of shadow between waking and sleep. But from everything I could gather, he wants more than anything to step into this world.”
“And the humans?”
She shook her head. “The only problem was I couldn’t find any rituals that would allow him to do that involving twelve or thirteen humans.”
“What did you find?” Jay asked.
“A cleansing ritual, a binding ritual, and an unbinding one which was strangely obtuse, and a ritual for fertility.”
“Then we keep looking,” Jay said.
Except, we were out of time. “I think whatever’s supposed to happen will be happening tomorrow night. The night of the full moon. The ghost at the club told me about it before the riders ripped her. She said something about a warehouse and a barren cornfield and a … farm?”
Mai snapped her fingers. “Connelly’s farm. They used to grow corn, but the place has been abandoned for over a decade.”
Jay’s brow furrowed. “There�
��s a warehouse on the land where the crops were stored.”
“Then we go in,” Kris said. “We go during the day, and we get the humans out. No humans, no ritual, right?”
But there was more. There was the icing on the cake. “There’s something else.” My gaze flicked to Mai. “It’s the main reason I needed to tell you guys everything.”
“You mean you don’t need the manpower?” Kris asked, but there was concern in his eyes.
My smile was bland. “No, manpower is definitely a must, but the thing is … The reaper we’ve been talking to looks exactly like Lark.”
Mai sat bolt straight in her seat. “What do you mean exactly?”
“I mean they’re either twins, or they’re the same person.”
“I’ve seen him too,” Henri said. “He looks exactly like the photograph in your purse.”
Mai’s stare flicked between us.
I couldn’t even imagine how hard this must be for her. “I don’t know how else to explain it. I don’t understand what’s going on.” I threw up my hands. “But whatever it is, it’s bigger than I can handle. Could Lark be a reaper? I mean, he was a weaver.”
“He died,” Mai said softly.
“I saw him torn,” Jay said in a low, soft voice that was almost reflective. “I saw him swallowed by the air. But maybe …”
Mai was on her feet. “Maybe he’s alive?” She frowned and shook her head vehemently. “No, he can’t be. He wouldn’t just leave us like that, thinking he was dead.”
Kris plucked at his bottom lip. “What if he can’t? What if he’s forgotten us? What if he’s under duress by this shadow man person?”
Mai exhaled heavily and sat back down. “Oh, God.”
They were all possibilities. “I don’t know. But I need you guys to help me figure it out and stop the shadow man from doing whatever the fuck he has planned. I’m sorry I lied to you. I thought I could handle this myself, but I was wrong, and trust me, it’s not often I say that. Henri and I can’t do this alone. It’s too big a job.”
A Ghost of a Chance: The Nightwatch book 1 Page 14
