Among the Debris (Son of Rain #2)

by Michelle Irwin

  “Clay,” she whispered in a tiny voice that sent fractures racing each other through my heart.

  I tried to open my eyes, but I was unable. Darkness took me deep into its depths and the air grew colder still.

  “Clay!” Her voice was panicked now, full of fear and need. I fought against the darkness holding me, but it was useless. Something pinned me in place, tangling material around my arms and legs so that I couldn’t move to help her.

  “Clay!” A desperate scream pulled me to consciousness. The voice was Evie’s, and it rang in my mind as I tried to sit up in bed, panting and with a racing heart.

  The thick blanket was knotted around my legs, the corners all tucked underneath my body. A chill clung to the night like a lover, freezing my blood. I kicked off the blankets and did a circle of my small apartment to check that the windows were closed. I moved to adjust the thermostat, which had somehow worked its way down to a ridiculously low temperature.

  Unable to do the conversion from Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head with visions of Evie dancing inside, I just turned it up to high and hoped for the best. If nothing else, it would remove the cold that seemed to radiate from every surface that little bit faster.

  I tugged on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt, thinking about the dream I had woken from. It was more a memory than an outright dream. I could recall the specific sequence of events from our few months in Detroit. I was used to my dreams of Evie shifting into nightmares, but this one was different. Instead of being the source of the fear like she’d often been, she seemed to be the target again, just like she had been after my retraining and again with the wendigo.

  Why was this one different?

  It was the memory aspect of it that was so odd about the whole thing. It wasn’t just a dream. It had—for a time—been real. It was almost as if I could have reached out and touched Evie. It was a vivid recollection of my memory. I’d felt her weight. I’d heard her voice.

  Why?

  I had been at the Dove for a little over a week, hunting with Toni. She seemed interested in keeping me close. At first I thought it was just so that she could watch me and ensure I didn’t spill her secrets or betray her team, but I soon discovered it was more than just that. She actually seemed to enjoy my company, just as I enjoyed hers. Over the week, I’d come to understand that even before her agreement with the fae, she’d been just as disenfranchised as I had become when Evie had proven to me that not all others were monsters.

  After Toni’s rescue by the fae, she found a new way to do things. Each assignment was assessed for the risk it posed to humans and if the risk was low—if it was simply a creature who had stumbled into the Rain’s web despite posing no significant threat to humanity—Toni passed the information onto the fae, who made the threat disappear into some sort of paranormal witness protection program and left the rest of the Rain none the wiser.

  At the time, my mind had turned to Evie and her words about the protection her fae lover had said he could offer. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d returned to his arms after fleeing from me. It was something I hadn’t considered except in spiteful thoughts when I first learned the truth about the spell she had cast over me, but that played on my mind more regularly since I’d found out about Toni’s partnership.

  When I imagined her hidden away with a nameless, faceless man who held her securely in his arms and whispered sweet nothings in her delicate ear, I felt ill. Jealousy burned though me, stronger even than when she’d first told me about him. Back then, I’d hated myself for driving her into another’s arms through a stupid choice, but now it wasn’t my choices that had sent her fleeing back to him. It was hers.

  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I grew that she was happy and safe while I was stuck in a tiny apartment—which had no more amenities than most motel rooms—trying to make do until I could steal the stupid artifacts that might offer me some sort of freedom from her. I smacked my hand against the wall with a growl in a failed attempt to force her from my head.

  Is that why I’ve been dreaming of her so much lately?

  I headed to the bathroom, a small space no larger than five by six feet that held little more than a small sink, toilet, and closet-sized shower. I crossed the black and white checkered floor to the tiny sink.

  Standing in front of the chipped one-piece washbasin and small, round mirror, I splashed some water on my face to wake me up.

  Meeting my tired eyes in the mirror, it became clear that it was useless to try to examine the cause of the dreams or worry over whether Evie had fled back into the arms of her once-lover.

  I could probably psychoanalyze myself for hours and not be any closer to working out exactly what my dreams meant or why they’d started a few nights ago. All I knew was that for the last three days I’d woken from vivid visions at some ungodly hour of the morning, feeling more tired than I’d been before heading to bed. With each night that passed, the dreams felt increasingly real, and the toll they took on my body became more pronounced.

  On this particular morning, as I took in my reflection—the deep black circles under my eyes and the beard that continued to lengthen—I began to doubt the dreams had natural causes. Because Evie had been the subject of my nighttime visions—dreams that were far more vivid than anything I’d ever experienced before—it made me wonder whether her ability to ensnare me was somehow causing my exhaustion.

  Was there a time limit on how long I could be away from her before my desire began to manifest itself in strange ways? Maybe whatever spell she’d cast over me to awaken pothos and eros was wearing off or fighting back.

  I reminded myself once more that despite the information regarding the process of her seduction, the evidence presented by the research—and my own experience—provided overwhelming proof that a phoenix was a force for good.

  It was hard to accept given the weariness that seemed to sink under my skin, through my bones, and deep into my very soul. It sapped my concentration and broke my will. Sleep deprivation was an effective method of torture for a reason. I had never heard of it happening without an actual lack of sleep though.

  What has she done to me? I scrubbed my face again, unwilling to either convict or acquit Evie of her guilt without further information. I need to get those relics.

  “YOU LOOK like shit.” Toni had barely glanced at me before issuing her glowing assessment.

  “I’m fine,” I said, leaning against the bar with my arms crossed. Barely a minute passed before I yawned widely, belying my assertion.

  Toni’s gaze trained on me as I did, and she paused in her task for a moment. After taking a long glance at me, she passed the latest set of assignments onto Graham—the muscle man who’d stopped me the first day I’d entered the Dove—before pulling me to one side.

  “Are you ’right?”

  “I’m fine,” I repeated before my mouth opened in another wide yawn.

  “You look dead on your feet.”

  “I’m just a little tired.” It wasn’t true, but it felt easier to lie than admit a weakness. In truth, I’d experienced the same eye-burning, wooziness before—after staying awake for a little over thirty-six hours during a hunt with Lou not long before our eighteenth birthday.

  Toni gave me a look that suggested she could see through my bullshit. Perhaps she could. I was probably too tired to make the right facial expressions. “Have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can’t have someone in the field who isn’t on their game. Why don’t you take a little time off?”

  “And do what exactly?” I asked.

  “Sleep.”

  My mouth pressed into a hard line before I sighed as I decided to admit a little more of the truth. “That’s the thing. I’m sleeping fine. I just seem to wake up more tired than I was when I went to sleep.”

  She frowned. “How long has this been going on for?”

  “Three nights or so.”

  “And it’s been gett
ing worse each night?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “Yeah.”

  She slapped at my forearm to still my nervous scrubbing. Dropping my arm, I blinked at her in response. It was like I was a child who’d been rapped over the knuckles.

  “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

  “Say what exactly?”

  Reaching for my elbow, she sighed and tugged me back toward the meeting. “Come on, I’ll have to let Graham know that he’ll have to coordinate all of the assignments today.”

  “Why?”

  She stopped pulling at my arm and huffed before turning to me with an exaggerated eye roll. “Seriously?”

  “What?” I asked, wondering what I’d done to earn her ire.

  Maybe she’s just being a bitch for the fun of it like—

  I cut off the thought, unwilling to think of my sister and add to my already messed-up mental state. The more I worked with Toni, the more she reminded me of both my brother and sister. It was as if someone had mushed the two of them together to find the perfect balance to keep me sane while on missions.

  “I’m not convinced that this here”—she waved her hand in the direction of the black bags beneath my eyes—“isn’t something that I need to be concerned about.”

  Her tone set me on edge, and the reason for her agitation sunk into my sleep-addled mind. “You think I’ve got an other on my ass?”

  “What else could it be? What you’ve described isn’t natural, not unless you’re iron deficient or something. I’ve seen the way you wolf down your food though, so I don’t think it’s that.”

  The more I thought about the idea, the more it made sense. I remembered the way I struggled against what I had assumed was my bedding before waking fully. “I haven’t seen anything though. What could it be?”

  The list of possibilities was already running through my mind as I asked the question. Top of the list was the fae, but she was in league with them, and I couldn’t voice that opinion without risking offending her and breaking the ceasefire we’d found over our disagreement there.

  “Svartálfar, alb, boo hag, or phobetor.”

  With the exception of the fae, her list was almost identical to my own. I wanted to cull the list, so tried to think analytically. “I think you can rule out it being a phobetor, the dreams I’ve been having aren’t exactly nightmares.” At least, not to start with. In fact, the start is rather pleasant. I fought a smile about how pleasant the dreams had begun.

  Something in my words or tone caused her to raise an eyebrow and chuckle under her breath. While I tried to think through the other possibilities, she excused herself in order to get her second in command, Graham, to do his part. When she returned, she hustled me into an office at the end of the loft room above the bar.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Reviewing the footage.”

  “Footage?” I asked dumbly, even as a feeling of dread stole over my limbs.

  “It was something Granddad insisted on. One of his goons came and set it all up before you arrived in the Dove.” She sat in an office chair next to a computer and pointed out a second chair for me to drag over to sit in.

  Instead of doing as she’d indicated, I stood behind her while it took my sleep-deprived brain far too long to catch up. I tried to hurry it along to a conclusion by forming words. “You’ve been filming me?”

  She booted up a computer. “It’s okay. I haven’t looked at it.”

  “Let me get this straight.” I couldn’t believe her nonchalant attitude about the complete invasion of privacy. My privacy. “You’ve been filming my every move since I got here without me knowing? And yet you think that it’s all okay just because you haven’t watched it yet? Am I really hearing that right?”

  “Do you want to stand there and be indignant, or do you want to see what’s on here?”

  I pressed my lips together to stop myself from saying something I might regret—something that might force me to abandon my quest for the artifacts. Regardless of my attempt to calm my anger, a grumbled rebuff issued from me as she opened the folder that contained the life I’d lived since moving into my little apartment.

  A few moments later, she had the camera feed open and turned to me with an apology in her eyes. “I didn’t want to agree to it, but it would have raised too many questions if I’d said no. Plus, it’s a closed circuit that only feeds to this computer. Granddad thinks I check it daily, but as I’ve said before what he doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him.”

  Still reeling from the lack of privacy, but also curious as to whether it was actually possible that I had a paranormal stalker who was somehow causing my sleep to be tainted and unhelpful, I dragged over the chair and indicated that she should proceed as I sat.

  “The camera is motion activated,” she said, somewhat unnecessarily, as she turned back toward the screen just as an image of me walking into the apartment flicked onto the screen. It was of my first night in the apartment, before I’d really been introduced to Toni and her teams.

  I tried to remember what I’d done that night. Because I wasn’t used to the space or familiar with my surroundings, I hadn’t yet paraded around the room naked, but there were probably times since where I had been fairly close. Horror filled me as I wondered whether there was a camera in the bathroom. The first two nights that I’d had the hyper-real dreams about Evie, I’d needed to find a release for my tension, which involved a not-so-cold shower and a lathered-up private massage to my favorite body part.

  “You seem to know a bit about the setup for someone who hasn’t looked,” I murmured while watching her negotiate around the files with relative ease.

  “I swear, I’ve never watched this before,” she said, with her hands raised in surrender. To my horror, my on-screen image began to undress, the first to go was the shirt and then the pants. “Although, maybe I should have,” she added with a flirty tone.

  “I thought you were supposed to be trying to find something, not enjoying the show.”

  “All right, all right, no need to get testy. Unless we’re going to see some of those of course.” She chuckled at her own joke before turning serious at my expression. “It started three nights ago you say?”

  It took her a few moments to retrieve the right night and then scroll through to the part where I had finally succumbed to sleep. She’d wanted to watch at normal speed from the time I began getting ready for bed, but I’d forced her to skip on.

  “Okay, if we’re right, something should happen in the next few hours of sleeping.” She sped the playback up to six times the normal speed, and we sat watching as my likeness tossed and turned as he tried to fall sleep.

  After watching for ten minutes, I was almost asleep myself. My eyes drooped, and I could barely pay attention to the screen. I physically jolted when Toni elbowed me in the ribs.

  “Look alive, cowboy.” She pointed to the screen and dropped the pace of the playback to normal speed.

  My on-screen double was fast asleep.

  “You look younger when you’re asleep,” Toni murmured with a tender edge in her voice.

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?” I hated the feeling of exhaustion that was stealing any edge I usually had over the beasts we hunted. Toni’s unhelpful remarks weren’t doing much to help my mental clarity either.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment and then tapped the screen as she pressed pause. “There.”

  Her finger rested on an obscured shape near the window in the corner of the room. The shape hid one corner of an old oak bureau, which had been there when I had taken the apartment and that I’d left empty. Whatever moved through the space could almost have been mistaken as a human except for the way its skin flickered and pulsed.

  “Good call on the other,” I said before guessing at what it could be. “Boo hag?” I looked closer at the almost-human shape and indicated to Toni to play the recording again.

  “Maybe.”

  In the washed-out gray of the night-vision
mode, it was hard to see exactly what caused the shadow, but there was definitely something there—something humanoid. We watched as it crossed closer to the bed. My heart pounded as if I was watching a slasher flick.

  The shadow crept closer until it had reached the edge of my bed, and then it proceeded to climb up my body, gently coaxing me onto my back as it moved. Because it was so much closer to the camera, the details of the creature became more apparent. Stripped of its skin, it was all muscle, vein, and sinew twisting around bone. As the hag shifted, her whole body appeared to pulsate with the blood pumping through her veins.

  “Oh God,” I murmured as she crept over my prostrate form.

  “Are you okay?”

  Despite the concern in Toni’s voice, I couldn’t tear my eyes off the screen to look at her. Dread and disgust had settled into my stomach as the creature rested its hands against my chest, one resting over my heart.

  While I watched the horrific sight, I placed my left hand over the same spot—the place I had dreamed of Evie’s hands touching me for the last few nights. The reminder of my dreams added guilt and relief to the swell of emotions building in me. The tiredness and nightmares weren’t Evie’s doing.

  I should’ve known because I’d been apart from her for longer before without the same symptoms, but that had been before I had learned the true wonder of her touch.

  On the playback, the creature on my bed lifted its head to draw my breath—my energy and life force—from me. There wasn’t anything visible on the screen as such, but my knowledge of the beast was enough to tell me what it was doing as it rested over the blankets and pressed against my body. It was killing me slowly and that was a hideous thing to witness. The sight was enough to make me need a hot shower. Or six.

  I finally found my voice. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

  Toni killed the video feed. “Ridden by the hag, man that’s rough. We don’t get many of them over here.”