by S. M. Reine
They piled out of the van. Deirdre hung back behind the others.
The Tacoma hadn’t gotten off on the same exit as them, and there was no sign of it now that they stood in the parking lot of an empty grocery store. There wasn’t a sign of any other life at all. It was too late at night.
“The rest of the team is moving on,” Stark said. “I need you people to gather supplies for when we reach our destination.” He handed a list to Niamh.
“No problem, boss,” she said.
“Guard them,” Stark told Jacek. “Don’t let them out of your sight. Bowen and Colette, you’re with me. We’re having a meeting.”
He turned his back to climb into his van. Deirdre only relaxed once he was inside and out of sight again.
The van that Stark was riding in was indistinguishable from the others in most respects. It was gray, boxy, and rust-pocked. But there was a small square of lighter gray paint over the rear left tire. Deirdre memorized its shape so she’d be able to pick out Stark’s ride in the future.
“What are you waiting for?” Jacek snapped. “Move, beauty queen.”
The grocery store was at the end of the vast parking lot, which was dotted by busted shopping carts and wind-blown trash. The front doors were chained with silver and iron—a sure sign of a rough neighborhood.
That didn’t mean Deirdre couldn’t break in.
“I’ve seen these kinds of locks a million times,” she told Gage as they headed around the building. “They’re mostly for show. They should save their money.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
She didn’t have to answer. She just showed him the loading bay, which was secured with another silver chain.
“Looks solid, right?” Niamh asked. She grabbed the chain, wrenched it free, and tossed it aside. Considering that the swanmay barely had supernatural strength, the fact that it snapped under her grip spoke volumes about the cheap metal they’d used to guard the rear door.
“The one in front is real. The ones in back are decoys,” Deirdre said.
“Mundanes are morons,” Jacek said. “Do they really think we wouldn’t figure this out?”
Deirdre shrugged. “Most people don’t.”
The door rolled open.
The grocery store felt huge and empty at night. Back before Genesis, grocery stores like that one had been built to be open twenty-four-seven. But few businesses were open after dark these days, especially in bad neighborhoods. The threat presented by demons was too great.
All that darkness itched at Deirdre. The deep shadows reminded her of the home she’d left behind in Montreal.
She hoped that Jolene was okay.
“We’ll do this faster if we split up,” Gage said.
“Great idea,” Niamh said.
But Jacek shook his head. “Not a chance. I’m supposed to watch you guys. We’re sticking together.”
Deirdre suppressed her disappointment. A store like this would have phones somewhere, but if she slipped away, Jacek would sound the alarm in a heartbeat. And their next fight would be a heck of a lot sooner than Deirdre was ready for.
Gage grabbed a pallet jack and pushed it through the store while Niamh and Deirdre loaded supplies onto it. They started with a foundation of stuff that wasn’t easily breakable, like cases of water and toilet paper, and stacked everything on top of that.
The quantities that Stark had written on the list were big, but not as big as Deirdre would have expected. He obviously didn’t expect to take care of his pack outside the asylum for long.
They passed an employee area by the frozen goods section. The freezers had lights that hadn’t been turned off with the rest of the store’s power, and the pale blue glow reflected off of the office’s sign.
Deirdre caught Gage’s eye, jerking her head toward the door.
He nodded his understanding. If they got a chance to contact Rylie, that would be where it needed to happen.
“Move faster,” Jacek snapped.
“We’d be faster if you helped,” Deirdre said. “What kind of shifter are you supposed to be, anyway? A sloth?” Niamh cackled.
He stepped in front of her, forcing Deirdre to stop short or bump into him. “I’m a viper.”
She rolled her eyes. “Is that supposed to scare me?”
“It should,” Jacek said.
Deirdre brushed past him. “Well, you might moonlight as a viper, but you’re a human now. That means you have arms. Help us load.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
Deirdre turned to Niamh, hoping to share her exasperation. But Niamh was distracted. She wandered toward the produce section, stopping to stand beside a display of potatoes.
“You okay?” Deirdre asked.
Niamh frowned. “I thought I saw something moving.”
Heart leaping, Deirdre looked out at the produce section. She didn’t see anyone. In fact, she didn’t see much at all. The grocery store had been dark the entire time they’d been in there, but it felt so much darker now. She couldn’t see anything beyond the bananas ten feet away.
A chill settled over Deirdre. She rubbed her upper arms. “Do you guys feel that?”
Niamh frowned. “Feel what?” She swiped a hand at her shoulder absently, as though trying to brush a hair off her shirt. She brushed again, and again, and then looked down at herself. The color drained out of her face. “Oh gods.”
Deirdre tried to see what was freaking her friend out, but she looked the same that she always had. She was wearing a Melaka Fray shirt, leather skirt, and big, chunky boots. Nothing new there.
Niamh was starting to hyperventilate, picking at her clothes and flapping her hands.
“Oh my gods!” she cried. “They’re all over me!”
Deirdre suddenly remembered the time she’d hidden in the attic of the group home with Niamh. They’d accidentally broken open a spider’s egg sac in an explosion of tiny, eight-legged bugs. Niamh had gotten the worst of it. She’d been finding dead spiders in her hair for weeks. And now she was arachnophobic.
It looked an awful lot like Niamh was trying to wipe spiders off of her shirt.
But there wasn’t a bug in sight.
“Oh no,” Deirdre said.
Mildew crept over the wall, spreading from the corner to consume the basket of melons. The fruit shriveled and blackened.
Slimy green water gushed out of the crate.
Jacek shouted from the other side of the produce section. Gunshots rang out, muffled and distant.
“Get the hell away from me!”
Deirdre shut her eyes for a moment, trying to find a center of calm within herself. But even with her eyes closed, her senses were assaulted. Cold water sluiced over her feet. The stink of rot clung to her sinuses.
It wasn’t real. None of this was real. Not the rotting fruit or Niamh’s spiders.
Gutterman had located Deirdre.
She opened her eyes to find the entire store melting around her. The freezers were busted and dark, filling with murky black water like an aquarium where all the fish had dissolved.
It was raining indoors, dripping from the ceiling tiles and quickly flooding the floor.
“Get out of here,” Deirdre said, shoving Niamh. “Get outside. He won’t follow you. He wants me!”
Niamh screamed, slapping at her chest and throat. She wasn’t in a place that she could hear Deirdre’s instructions.
“Wait here.” Deirdre shoved Niamh against one of the crates, giving her something to hold on to. It looked like the contact of her body made the wood crumble. That was an illusion, just like the water that rose around Niamh’s knees.
Deirdre struggled through the waters to return to Gage and Jacek, arms wrapped around herself for warmth. Everything she saw might not have been real, but the effect the cold had on her was. Her ears were numbing from the chill.
The aisles were a labyrinth of bloated flesh. Cereal boxes opened red-tinged eyes to glare at her, swell, and then pop. Vines slithered out of rotted
cracks in the walls.
Distant gunshots echoed through the store.
Men were shouting.
She rounded the end cap in the freezer section just in time to see Jacek falling under the surface of the water. He’d emptied his gun into the ceiling, but still he squeezed the trigger, firing on empty.
And then he was gone.
Gage had backed himself into the corner. It looked like the vines were wrapped around his legs and hips. He didn’t register her presence at all.
Deirdre caught Gage’s face in both of her hands. “Look at me. Look at me, Gage!”
His whole body shook as he stared past her, unseeing. He was lost in the darkest corners of his own mind—a place so dark he’d already tried to kill himself once.
“I’m sorry,” he said to nobody. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Damn it,” she said, and she kissed him hard.
It took him a second to respond, and in that second, it was like pressing her lips to a very warm brick wall. She feared that even that wouldn’t be able to get through to him.
But then he stirred. His hands came up to her waist, wrapping around her, and he returned the kiss.
His mouth parted, his tongue responding to hers.
The contact was brief. They didn’t have time for anything more than that. But when he pulled back, Gage’s eyes were much clearer.
He looked around them. He still wouldn’t see what Deirdre saw, but he seemed to realize what was happening.
“Crap,” he said.
“No kidding,” Deirdre agreed. “Now let’s go, okay?”
She dragged him away from the freezers, searching for Niamh. It was hard to tell where she was going. Her feet were sloshing through icy, ankle-deep water and everything had become so moldy that she couldn’t distinguish walls from shelves. In fact, she couldn’t see anything at all beyond arm’s reach. For all she knew, she was running in circles.
They passed the employee area, its door covered in creepers and mold.
“Wait,” Gage said, digging his heels in. “A phone. We should call Rylie.”
“We can’t stop.” She tried to pull him along, but he released her.
“Go on,” Gage said. “Get Niamh out of here.”
“You’re crazy,” Deirdre said.
But she wasn’t going to stick around long enough to argue with him.
Gage vanished into the darkness, and she lingered for a moment, watching the place where he had vanished. The expression on his face when she’d found him was stuck in her mind. He’d looked so completely hopeless—as though he’d sunk to the absolute bottom of despair and would never be able to emerge again.
She turned to keep searching for Niamh.
Gutterman stood behind her.
Deirdre stopped so quickly that she slipped, dropping shoulder-deep into the icy water. She groaned and tried to stand. Her feet couldn’t find traction.
The nightmare was huge. His head brushed the ceiling, and the rolls of his bruised, pimpled fat draped over the floor. A veiny tumor jiggled on the right side of his head. He grinned and exposed crooked, broken teeth at her.
“Hello, Deirdre dear,” Gutterman said. “You look cold. Didn’t bring a jacket?”
“Go screw yourself,” she said.
She leaped to the right, directly into what looked like a wall of rotten creepers.
It wasn’t really there. She pushed right through it.
Gutterman sloshed toward her. His rolling girth made the waters cascade toward her in waves.
“But Deirdre, I want to chat with you.” His voice echoed through the store. It rattled around in her skull, losing itself in her brain. “I already had such nice encounters with your friends.”
“If you mean Jacek, he’s not my friend,” Deirdre panted. It was getting hard to breathe. The water had risen to her jaw, and even though she knew it wasn’t real, she couldn’t help but lift her head to try to keep her mouth above the surface.
“You are keeping strange company these days. Very strange. My Deirdre, joining a rebellion? The girl so honorable that she balked at repossessing cars from former customers? I can’t imagine.”
There was a hint of threat in that tone, but it was a hint and nothing more. Gutterman didn’t know that Deirdre had spoken with Rylie. He had no idea she wasn’t loyal to Stark. There was no information that he could use against her.
She ignored him and pushed through the darkness.
Waves lapped at her chin. Water dribbled into her mouth.
It tasted like dead fish.
Deirdre spluttered, gasping for air. Her feet slipped out from under her.
The water closed around her head.
She thrashed against the waves, trying not to panic and failing. Gutterman’s fear consumed her. It suffused every atom of her body until she no longer remembered what it meant to be warm and dry and breathing oxygen.
Deirdre sank into the darkness and kept sinking.
There was no floor. No bottom.
She was going to drown.
Deirdre couldn’t cry or scream. She had no air left in her lungs for that. Her blood boiled with futile anger even as she lost strength in her muscles.
“Deirdre!”
That was Niamh’s voice.
Fingers wrapped around Deirdre’s wrists and jerked her out of Gutterman’s frozen ocean.
Deirdre slammed into the pavement of the parking lot behind the grocery store, Niamh’s warm body pressed to her back.
Water gushed out of the loading bay door and slopped over both of them—but only for an instant. Everything vanished the instant it connected with the ground. The asphalt was completely dry, and so was Deirdre.
Niamh rolled off of her, and Deirdre got to her knees, looking down at herself.
The only moisture on her body was sweat.
“Nightmare demon?” Niamh asked without getting up.
“Oh yeah,” Deirdre said.
“Friend of yours?”
“Not anymore.” She grabbed Niamh, hauling her to her feet.
Darkness billowed out of the open loading bay door. Gutterman’s presence was expanding.
Deirdre had always assumed he was one of the weaker demons on Earth—what kind of nightmare wastes his time being a loan shark?—but the infernal forces bubbling within the grocery store looked like they belonged to a pretty damn powerful demon.
Apparently he held a grudge about getting zapped back at Deirdre’s house.
They raced around the side of the grocery store, avoiding the encroaching edges of Gutterman’s presence. There was still light in the parking lot. He hadn’t gotten that far yet.
Stark leaped out of the back of the van when Deirdre and Niamh pounded toward him.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Deirdre grabbed his sleeve, using it to hold her up as she caught her breath. “There’s a nightmare demon in there. I lost Gage—and Jacek.”
“And the supplies?”
“Forget the supplies! The guys are still in there! You know, the lives that aren’t replaceable.”
Stark brushed her hand off. “I’ll take care of this.”
His absolute confidence was reassuring for once. He didn’t balk at the shadows around the rear of the grocery store at all. He strode inside as though he had no fears of his own to face—like the man had never had a nightmare in his entire life.
The darkness consumed him, and he was gone.
—XVII—
Deirdre and Niamh spent the next hour in Stark’s van, watching the shadows billow around the grocery store. At that distance, Deirdre could barely feel Gutterman’s influence. She didn’t have any more hallucinations. But she was still cold, so horribly cold, even when Niamh piled a couple blankets on top of her.
“They’ll be okay,” Andrew said, mistaking Deirdre’s shivers for worry.
Andrew was the lion shifter that they’d taken from the benefits office. Deirdre had known that Stark took him to the asylum, but she hadn�
��t seen him in days; she’d been assuming that Stark’s brand of tender loving care had led to his untimely death.
Finding out that Andrew had been in Stark’s van that whole day—and that he most certainly was not dead or injured—had been a shock, to say the least.
“She’s dating Gage,” Niamh explained. “Can’t blame her for being worried.”
Colette was prowling outside the van, waiting for the men to return. She gave a sudden shout, drawing their attention beyond the door of the van.
Stark and Jacek had emerged from the grocery store.
Gage was nowhere in sight.
“What took you so damn long?” Bowen asked, taking Jacek from Stark. The viper shifter could barely stand. He was halfway to unconsciousness.
Stark wiped his hands off on his jeans. “Jacek will need to be hydrated.”
Bowen turned to Deirdre, but she shook her head. “You do it. I’m not babying that asshole.”
Grumbling, he dragged Jacek into the other van. At another time, Deirdre might have enjoyed the sight of Jacek so weakened. She might have even taken the chance to get revenge on him for that confrontation in the bathroom. But she’d been subject to Gutterman’s thrall so often that she actually pitied the bastard.
“Where’s Gage?” Niamh asked.
“I didn’t see him in there,” Stark said. “We’re leaving. We’ll have to get supplies somewhere else.”
Deirdre pulled her jacket tighter around herself, gazing at the grocery store. She remembered how Gage had looked under the influence of the nightmare—that total hopelessness, and the apologies that he’d mumbled to a specter she couldn’t see.
There was no way she would leave him in there.
She only got two steps toward the grocery store before Stark grabbed her.
“We’re leaving,” he said again, biting out the words.
Just the idea of defying him was enough to make her heart cringe up into a miserable little knot. She remembered the pain of defiance far too well. But the idea of leaving Gage behind was even worse.
“Five minutes,” Deirdre said. Stark’s mouth clenched into a hard line. “Please.”
“Wait!” Niamh cried.
There was someone else in the parking lot now, staggering from the side of the grocery store. He was moving slowly. It kind of looked like he was limping.
