GUARDED BY THE NIGHTMARE

MONSTER SECURITY AGENCY

CASSIE ALEXANDER

COPYRIGHT © 2024

BY CASSIE ALEXANDER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Guarded by the Nightmare

Cassie Alexander

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations incorporated in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. To request permission, send an e-mail to cassandraassistant@gmail.com

If you would like to learn more about Cassie, visit her website or join her mailing list to receive more news about her books and additional scenes!

Editor's Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are from the author's imagination. Places and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, etc., is incidental.

Cassie Alexander / Caskara Press

2108 N ST, STE C

Sacramento , CA 95816

WWW.CASSIEALEXANDER.COM

COVER PRODUCED BY BOOKBRANDER.

BOOK DESIGN/FORMATTING/INTERIOR ART BY JACKIE KRANZ & PR PUBLISHING GROUP.

USED WITH PERMISSION.

For anyone who ever wanted to sleep

with Alucard or Pinhead—

I’ve got you.

Special thanks to Dani, as always,

Katie, Jackie, Sara, and Paul.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Author’s Postscript

Sneak Peek…

About the Author

Also by Cassie Alexander

No one survives hiring me.

Not even her.

I’m a Nightmare, a creature that feeds on fear, and I’m capable of boundless cruelty—which is why my services come at a steep price: the life of the person who hired me. As such, the only people who hire me on are those brought to me by fate, like Mina, a woman so desperate for revenge that she’s willing to spend her own life to get it.

I don’t usually care why I’m hired. Human affairs don’t matter to me. Food is food, and a job is a job.

Mina’s enemies will get what they deserve—and I’ll get what’s mine.

Her beating heart.

Hey y’all—Cassie here!

Listen up, I’ve got two important things to tell you before you jump in <3

First off, your enjoyment of this book might be helped by reading Harbor of Hearts in my naughty omnibus Extra Wicked Things, which tells the story of how Royce and Omara from Guarded by the Kraken met and what happened. You can get it by subscribing to my newsletter here: http://www.cassiealexander.com/nightmare

Now, on to the more important one….

This is a dark book.

I know, I know, I’ve warned you about that before at the front of other books—and I was right, wasn’t I?—but this one deals with really heavy themes, including SA (off-screen, but the influence of it is all over the plot), ruthless revenge, and death. Mina’s been through the wringer and she didn’t come out all the way normal on the other side, and Sylas doesn’t particularly value humanity. Never has, never will.

But . . . they’ll find love with each other. In one of those messed-up, you-can’t-take-your-eyes-off-of-it ways.

It’s just that they’re not ride-or-die—they’re die-and-die.

I promise you you’ll get your HEA. Just please grant Mina some grace for everything that she’s been through, and know upfront that Sylas doesn’t care what the fuck you think about him anyways.

Xoxo,

Cassie

1

SYLAS

“IT’S TIME.”

I erupted out of the ground in Royce’s office and planted my hourglass on his desk with bone-rattling force, so that both of us could watch the last of the red sand inside pour down.

His jaw clenched. He hated me, and with good reason. I’d killed his great-grandfather when I’d been bound to his line, and no matter how often he tried to rid himself of me, just like his father and his grandfather before him, he hadn’t managed it yet, and he never would.

I was a creature of shadow and fate, and every time the hourglass turned, it was time for me to get my due—and right now, there was someone coming to the Monster Security Agency who was meant for me.

Someone from whom I could feed.

Royce pushed himself away from his desk reluctantly. He’d said no before, and he’d tried to refuse me, but that wasn’t how this worked. The curse that made me roam the earth consuming fear and terror could not be denied, just delayed, for one hourglass’s worth of sand.

“Fuck you, Sylas.”

I laughed at his discomfiture. “Cursing won’t change anything. Does it even make you feel better, at this point?”

“Not really, no,” he confessed, taking a long inhale, and looking out the window beside him, as if he could see whoever was arriving, seventeen floors below.

“Who do you think it will be?” I asked conversationally. The opportunity to taunt him was too good to pass up. “Young or old? Male or female?” The smoke I was comprised of swirled around in eager anticipation.

A sheen of sweat broke out on his head, reflecting light as he shook it. “Whoever it is, I don’t want to meet them.”

The burden of knowing that horrible things were going to happen was too great for him to bear, but it didn’t bother me in the least. In almost every case people—usually men—would walk in and ask to hire a monster for an “assignment.” Sometimes they were cagey, sometimes not, and I would give Royce one thing: he never entertained them, nor tried to extort money from their insanity. The second they said anything about hurting other people, he—or a cadre of his employees—would escort them out the door.

And in those cases, released from my tether to his hourglass, I would follow them, silently, knowing that a great crime was going to be committed. I had followed cult leaders, mad bombers, and school shooters alike—and each time, I knew that somewhere inside the MSA building a frantic Royce Bannerman was making phone calls to lines that would suddenly not work, or getting through and shouting warnings that went unheeded.

His line was cursed, I supposed, much the same as I was—but I had accepted my fate long ago, far before I met his kin.

I was well aware of my place in the world, and I didn’t fight it.

“I have no idea what my great-grandfather was thinking, when he tied you to that.” Royce pointed at the hourglass that we were both watching—the object I’d spent most of the past three generations trapped inside.

“Hmm. He was probably too busy planning his funeral to think much,” I said, letting a malevolent smile cross my shadowed face.

Royce made a pained, growling noise, from deep inside his chest. “You’re no better than a tick.”

I gave a dark and mocking laugh. “Really, Royce,” I chided him. “Have you ever considered that I perform a needed function?”

The magical dark red sand inside the hourglass was thinner now and pouring out like blood.

“Which would be?” he asked, his tone arch.

“Maybe someone needs to feed on those emotions. Maybe if they were left alone, they would multiply endlessly, splashing out onto others.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? So you can sleep at night?”

“Oh, tsk, Royce. I don’t sleep. I only make others sleep—sleep, and dream of me.” It was a portion of the quote inscribed on a swooping portion of my hourglass’s golden frame. And on the inside of that inscription, in a place only I could see, was the phrase: Time gives fate a reason. Fate gives time a point.

I’d had to stare at it for the better part of a century.

But all my attention now was for the final few grains rattling down, inside the glass. “Here they come.”

The last one dropped—and Royce’s intercom went live. “Mr. Bannerman? There’s a potential client here to see you. I tried to tell them you weren’t in, but—”

I eyed Royce, watching him swallow and hate me with his full heart.

It was glorious, the way he radiated light—the light of fate, that his human eyes couldn’t see—and the way it pierced me, falling into my black, feeding me, all of his opportunities and possibilities for the next portion of time forgotten as I swallowed them whole.

It wasn’t as good as killing somebody and stealing all of their fate from them—but I knew that would come.

Once I was released, I could not be denied.

Royce gritted his teeth together and reached out to hit the intercom button. “Reception room three,” he announced.

“Race you there,” I taunted, snatching up my hourglass to sink into the floor at once.

2

SYLAS

I WAS SURPRISED to find a young woman sitting in the reception room several floors below, her hands primly nested on the table, her fingers wound as tightly as the braid her hair was in.

I watched her from the shadows—an easy task, because I was one—reading the solemn expression on her face and mentally tracing the line of her jaw.

She was pretty, but pale, like something left out in the sun too long, or something that had never even seen the sun before, her lack of coloring made all the more stark by the rather severe high-collared black sweater she had on.

But none of that mattered, because I recognized what she was at once.

An actual client.

Oh, it had been so long—and it was going to break Royce’s heart.

I couldn’t wait.

And sure enough, he burst in breathing hard, having had to take the longer way down, with an accusatory finger out at the woman already. “You need to leave here. Now.”

She stared at him with hollow eyes, betraying no emotion as she stood, and I wasn’t sure if that was idiocy or strength. “Why?”

“Because. We can’t help you. Whatever your problem is—”

“I can pay,” she said, looking through her purse as she moved to stand. She offered her hand out to him in return, holding a folded check.

He didn’t take it, but I did get to watch him comprehend the situation immediately. “We don’t want your money. It’s not safe for you here. You need to go—we don’t have anyone here that can help you.”

“On the contrary.” I disagreed with him, forming myself out of the shadows beneath the table, standing at its far end. I set the hourglass sideways and rolled it down, and all three of us listened to its metal spin across the wood, until it stopped in front of my new friend. “I believe she’s here for me.”

Her brown eyes flickered from the hourglass to my face and figure. It amused me to wear a suit on these occasions—like Royce had on—and so I was “wearing” one now, forming my smoked and shadowed essence to have a suit’s edges, despite the licks of me that were always pulling away. I was tall, because I controlled my height and I enjoyed looming, and the only light others could see on me, if fate had decreed they were meant to, was a slight glint inside my eyes.

She licked her lips, swallowed, and then found her resolve. “I think I am.”

“No. No. Absolutely not.” Royce stormed over and made to pick the girl up, as if escorting her out of the building would cut the newly formed thread of fate between she and I.

“What is your name?” she asked me, ignoring him.

“Sylas Veil, although I have many others,” I said, with a deep bow. “And if you will just suffer my hourglass to touch you, you will become my queen.”

“Until he kills you!” Royce said, like that ought to change her mind.

And it would’ve, if she were a normal woman, of course.

But fate had driven her here, on this night, practically into my arms.

Because sometimes—very rarely—people did get to hire me.

And on those occasions I would get to not only follow them for a time, but do their bidding, and I would be permitted to not just feed on fear and hate and terror, but allowed to cause it.

Personally.

Violently.

Up until their sand ran out and I finally slaughtered them.

Her heart, and all of the precious light of her future inside of it, was mine.

Her gaze weighed me for a second more, then she dropped her check and picked up the hourglass.

3

MINA

IT WAS time to make the boys of Rho Rho Phi pay.

Even if it cost me my life.

I owed it to Ella.

I held the cold gold-and-glass timepiece with both hands. There was an inscription across a band on the top: Sleep and dream of me, till dreams become reality.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually slept and I didn’t have any dreams anymore, so—I flipped it over, and the red sand inside the top of the glass now started slowly pouring down.

At the same moment I did that, I felt a flare of heat and pain on the inside of my left forearm. I yelped, dropping the hourglass—but Sylas was there, in a swirl of living smoke, catching it before it fell, setting it down carefully.

He looked at the bald man who’d tried to dissuade me. “Do we agree that she’s hired me?”

“Nothing of the fucking sort,” the man said, sweeping the hourglass up off the table, to hurl it at the nearest wall, where it hit with a clang and then bounced.

It was clear they had history . . . and I was fairly certain what had just happened to me. I stared at my arm, still hidden by my sleeve.

“How long does she have?” the bald man demanded.

“How should I know?” Sylas said, pointing to where he’d cast the hourglass aside, before giving him a wicked grin. Then he turned his face towards me. His eyes were like shining black marbles, and they were the only part of him that seemed solid, although the rest of his flowing smoke formed an aquiline nose and full lips that were pulled into a sneer. “My queen, will you do me the favor of showing me your arm?”

His tone was snide, which surprised me, although I didn’t know why—none of the research that’d led me here had given anything about his disposition away.

But his mood didn’t matter. If this was really happening, I didn’t need him to be nice to me—I just needed him to be effective.

I rolled the sleeve of my scratchy sweater up, to find that somehow I’d been branded with an hourglass, just like the images I’d seen on old coroners reports in my research—the sign of the Hourglass Killer.

But what those photos hadn’t shown was the inside of the brand, where the hourglass’s sand was.

It was tattooed red . . . and the ink was moving.

Draining from one chamber into the next, ever so slowly.

I gasped in surprise as Sylas inspected me clinically. “A week, at best.”

He sounded disappointed, while the bald man looked ready to rip off the nearest table leg and beat him with it. I had a confused moment of wondering how that would even work, seeing as Sylas was made of smoke, and the table leg would be solid, but—

I had the mark. I rolled my sweater back down quickly to hide it.

This was happening.

I was finally going to get my revenge.

For me, and for Ella.

“And so you’re mine?” I asked him. I was embarrassed by the slight quaver in my voice, but I wanted to hear him say it.

Sylas tilted his head slightly, and gave me an evil grin that showed a row of short, sharp, black and glinting teeth. “Until you die, or I do. Now tell me, my queen, what is your name?” he asked, and he sounded . . . hungry.

I made sure not to step back. “Mina. Mina Moore.”

He swept an arm across his chest and gave me a deep bow, speaking again once he’d resurfaced. “How lovely to meet you, Mina. I can’t wait to eat your beating heart.”

I’d seen those photos too—how the Hourglass Killer’s victims had their chests torn open, and they were each missing their most vital organ when they were found.

But, as I’d recently learned, power wasn’t free, and there was no such thing as luck.

I took a deep inhale and gave him a steady look. “Good.”

4

SYLAS

MINA, my new patron, didn’t seem surprised or dismayed in the least by the fact that I was going to kill her.

I could see the golden thread of fate binding us together, from her heart to where mine would be if I had one, but I didn’t get a drop of energy off of her otherwise.

She really did know why she was here.

And it was clearly of her own volition; she hadn’t been whipped into a frothing madness first, like most of my clientele.

The shadows I was comprised of rippled and shifted, becoming briefly more solidified, as if one by one different pieces of me decided they wanted to touch her. I was starving, and she was so perfect and pure—compared to me, everyone else was—and so sad. Yes, I could read it on her now, now that she was mine.

The dark circles under her eyes, the way her lips twisted down, her bitten nails and the way her shoulders—briefly proud while claiming me—had gone back to their familiar slump, as if in an effort to hide.

Why?

It didn’t matter. Because I knew I would learn everything that had brought her to this place over the course of my next week at her side. I would taste her tears, haunt her dreams, and once I was through with her, having done her bidding until the sand on her mark ran down, I would know her better than she knew herself and her life would be mine as I ate it out of her, absorbing all of her light until I extinguished it entirely.

“It’s not just that!” Royce was shouting at her—bringing me back from my reverie. “You think you’re the first person to figure things out?”

I had no idea what he’d already said, but I flowed in front of her without thinking, to protect her from his impotent wrath. “She was drawn here. She cannot help it. She is what she is—as am I.”

“She doesn’t know the rules!” he started, shouting at me next.

She stepped away from me, making a triangle in between the three of us again. “I saw the coroner’s reports. I know your great-grandfather—”

“Yeah, you and every other asshole with an internet connection.” Royce’s eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Save me from fucking bored housewives and their true crime podcasts,” he muttered.

She appeared affronted, and her anger gave her color, plus made her jut out her chin. “I figured out the Frazetta massacre was related to the hourglass, and before that, when the Boeing went down—”

Royce sliced the air in front of her angrily. “What you don’t know is that he feeds. Every day. Not just the ones that make the news. And if you don’t give him someone else—he’ll feed from you.”

That did scare her, a little, and her fear called to me like blood to a shark. It made me want to envelope her and press more of it out of her.

“Be kinder, Royce,” I said, flowing myself around the edges of the room, occupying more of the space until I was crowding the both of them.

“Why?” he spat.

“Because you’re frightening her. And I am very, very, hungry.”

He ignored me to question her further. “So you’re sure you just happen to have a baseball’s team worth of people you want to feed to a monster before the police figure things out, after they find your rotting corpse?”

The look she gave him then was complicated—but all her fears of me were forgotten, replaced by whatever urges had drawn her here. I regathered myself quickly, to reach over and put a finger to her lips, quieting whatever response she might have given him.

“Better to leave him guessing than to have him waste his time, attempting to thwart us.” I glanced over to Royce. “Are you through?”

His hands clenched into fists. “Not until I’m rid of you.”

I flowed over to the hourglass he’d thrown, picking it up and setting it onto his table for him. The magical sand inside of it was flowing in the exact same rhythm as the sands on Mina’s arm, so he would know when I was close to killing her—and when I’d managed it, as I would be forced to return.

“No one would like that more than me,” I said. It was the truth, I hated my confinement, and I cursed the day I met the progenitor of Royce’s line. “But until then, I’ve been hired.” I brought myself closer to Mina’s level. “Come, my queen. Let’s go someplace more private to discuss our terms.”

5

MINA

SYLAS OFFERED ME A GALLANT ELBOW. It appeared solid enough, but as much as I wanted to make a show of leaving the room, especially after the bald man had been so condescending, I wasn’t ready to touch my newly acquired monster just yet. It was strange enough when he’d touched me, pressing his finger against my lips for silence. The contact had made my heart burst out in a brief staccato, like maybe it’d known that it was his already.

That all of me was; it was the bargain I’d made.

But I just walked beside him instead, out of the room, and into the hall.

“If you come back here, I’ll try to save you!” Royce—because I knew who he was now, the great-grandson of the Hourglass Killer’s first recorded victim—shouted after me. “Before the sand runs out!”

“Don’t look back. It’ll only encourage him,” Sylas murmured.

I had no intention of it, not when I could only barely believe that this was happening. I’d had hopes of finding out more information when I came here—but I in no way, shape or form had been planning on leaving with the Hourglass Killer in tow, as the gun rattling around in my purse testified.

I’d spent the whole summer in the stacks at the university library, trying to put two and two together, and while Sylas Veil’s help was not part of my original equation, I would be an idiot not to take him up on it—because otherwise my grand plan had been hoping that the aiming skills I’d acquired in the archery class I’d taken at summer camp when I was eight would transfer over to the Glock 19 I’d just gotten off the waiting period for.

I knew I was going to get the death penalty for my revenge either way—so why not go with the sure thing?

But just because I already knew about him didn’t mean I knew what he was. I wasn’t an expert on monster studies by any means, and there were a lot of different kinds out there.

“So . . . what are you?” I asked, as we waited together for the elevator to arrive.

“Your worst nightmare,” he said sarcastically. I wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not, after the elevator arrived and he wouldn’t join me in it. “Don’t worry, I’m not abandoning you.”

He began to sink into the ground in front of me, as the doors closed—and when they opened again, several floors down, he’d beaten me there.

“Do you have any other tricks?” I asked him, crossing my arms. My new mark itched, and I really wanted to look more closely at the sand pouring down inside.

“Several,” he said, leading the way across the lobby, so quickly I almost needed to jog to catch up. He didn’t walk, per se; it was more like he drifted at speed.

“And you can’t tell me any of your other names?” Maybe they’d have a clue for me as to what he actually was, other than a death-dealing serial-killing smoke-monster that’d apparently been alive for a century.

“Give it time,” he said, moving in front of me to hold open one of the Monster Security Agency’s glass doors. I walked out into the cool night air, and spotted the almost full moon hanging in the sky.

“But I only have a week,” I pointed out to him as he joined me.

It felt like he was ignoring me—but his head was lifted up to the sky too. He took a slow spin, his dark face illuminated by moonlight and streetlights in turns—which was strange, because their light also flowed through him a little like he wasn’t even real all the way—but I could’ve sworn I saw the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed while he did it.

“You used to be human, didn’t you?” I said aloud, and he stilled, his head swiveling down to respond.

“Not in a very long time,” he said, before turning my question back on me. “But what do you think you’ll be when I am through with you?”

I blinked, unsure how to answer. Surely something awful, if he was asking. “A . . . ghost?”

That made him laugh. “No, my queen. You will merely be dead. So you may think of me as your Nightmare, for as long as we are bound together—and as for any other names I possess, you will learn them when I make you scream them.” He then looked casually around. “Did you have a mode of transportation?”

It took me a moment to switch gears in my head. “Uh, yeah. Over there,” I said, and meekly led the way.

I FELT FAINTLY ridiculous beeping my little Fiat open for him a few blocks over, where I’d managed to score free parking. “This is it.”

I walked around to my door, whereas he just walked through the passenger side and settled himself. He didn’t wear a seatbelt, but he also didn’t set off the “put your seatbelt on” alarm, and if I thought too long about how he was sitting down while being made of smoke, it’d just give me a headache, so I skipped it.

He waited for me to pull out onto the road and then drive several blocks before speaking.

“There’s only one reason one hires a Nightmare,” he intoned, saving me from trying to figure out which of my Spotify playlists was the best one to kick off a murder spree. “Who are we killing?”

I shook my head. “Tonight? I’m not sure yet.”

I got a sense of vague disapproval from his side of the vehicle. “And why not?”

Because I hadn’t been expecting this. “Our plan doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow.” I watched his dark smoke fingers tap his dark smoke knee in irritation. “But don’t worry. I’ve got something in mind for you tonight. Just so I know, though, do you, uh, always have to kill people?”

It wouldn’t make sense if he did—or if he’d just kill me, without doing my bidding first, like an evil genie.

“Preferably,” he answered, while looking out the window. “High emotions work just as well. Hate, fear, terror. I can work with what I’m given, but I do have certain things that I prefer. Fear before death tastes sweeter.”

“So you’re like a ghostly gourmand, eh?”

He didn’t dignify my bad joke with a response.

“Was your mother a fog machine?” I pressed, and that earned me his attention again. “Sorry, sorry, I should’ve known a ‘your momma’ joke was a step too far,” I said, shirking back against the driver side door. “I’ve just never been murder-buddies with anyone before. I don’t quite know what to do.”

“Murder buddies,” Sylas repeated, and snorted. “I’m currently trying very hard to ignore your presence, my queen. It’s the same reason as why I didn’t ride in the elevator with you. I am very, very hungry, and right now all I want to do is surround you in my blackness, make you feel like you’re lost and forgotten and have never been loved, and frighten you until you weep so that I can lick the tears from your eyes,” he said, before looking back out his window again. “But I currently think it’s best that you keep driving the car.”

I panicked, then realized that wasn’t going to make me any less desirable to him. “Yeah.”

“I would like to eat soon, though,” he went on, like he was the little kid in a back seat on a road trip, rather than someone that had just very nearly threatened me.

Then again . . . did I have any tears left?

I glanced up at myself in the rearview mirror, trying to remember the last time I’d cried. I’d spent months crying after that party in May it felt like, for myself, for Ella, and because no one believed me, but then eventually the tears had all dried up, replaced by whatever it was that lived inside me now.

I imagined if you cut me open I’d look like a piece of balsa wood, all dry and hollowed out.

“Could I just take you to, I don’t know, a funeral parlor?”

“I prefer pain that is sharp and new, and preferably unwilling. That said, I suppose beggars cannot be choosers. I’m not allowed to feed from others without your permission, however.”

“You sure do seem to have a lot of rules.”

“Indeed,” he agreed, continuing to stare out the window. “Once upon a time I was boundless, feeding whenever I desired.”

“And now?” I couldn’t help but ask.

He made a dissatisfied noise. “I am bound.”

“To . . . the hourglass.”

“Or whomever holds its mark. Yes.” He craned his neck to look behind us. “Many things have changed since I was last free.”

Was the Nightmare making small talk? “When was that?” I asked, although I was fairly certain I already knew.

“The air traffic controller.”

The Boeing had gone down when I was starting high school. It’d been all over the news for weeks—so much so that it’d swamped the news of the Hourglass Killer’s latest victim three days later off of the newspapers entirely.

What was one miserable death, compared to three hundred?

“What was that even about?” I asked.

“His wife cheated on him with a pilot. He needed my help to take down the plane.”

Sylas said it as though he were ordering fast food at a drive-through. No emotion, no sorrow, no . . . nothing.

It was one thing to be confronted with the knowledge of death in the abstract—and another for him to be sitting beside you personified, as you drove him to your fleabag hotel.

“And you . . . just . . . did that?” I asked, my voice rising slightly in horror. “You crashed an entire plane full of people for him?”

“Morals are for creatures that have consciences.” He held up his hand between us, and made the smoke it was comprised of dissipate and then reform again. “What about my current appearance makes you think I am possessed of one?”

“But you were human,” I said, frowning and confused. “Once.”

He shrugged. “You said it yourself. My mother could’ve been a fog machine,” he said, and his intonation was as dry as toast, except for the way he lifted the edge of his lips and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Was he teasing me?

Or mocking me?

“Besides—the very thing you fault me for is the very reason you’ve hired me. Even if you won’t tell me why yet,” he said. “Even if, perhaps, you cannot admit it to yourself.”

I shook my head. I had no problem with that at all. Because I could remember Ella sitting exactly where he was the summer below last, with our windows down, and both of us howling along with the radio, her feet on the dashboard while I drove too fast, both of us laughing in between songs.

“No, I know exactly why I hired you.”

“In that case then, where are we headed?”

My hands wrung the steering wheel. “To the bad side of town.”

“Oh, good,” Sylas said, sounding legitimately excited as he looked back out the passenger window again. “I’m sure I’ll fit right in there.”

6

SYLAS

MINA PARKED her ridiculously small vehicle in a decrepit hotel’s parking lot, but when she exited, she didn’t go to a room—she walked down the street to a convenience store that was missing half the lights in its sign, and whose sole employee had a fly swatter out.

I followed her without question, flowing unseen beside her, seeping into the shadows she cast, watching her buy two tiny brown bottles of liquor, quiet until she returned to the pavement outside.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said, erupting out of the ground beside her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

A killer, she was not.

Then I watched her resolve flash across her face, making her look wild and determined, and a spark of black flame lit inside my dark heart.

“Can you hide, or something?” she asked, looking up at me.

“You don’t wish for me to be seen?”

“Not if you want to feed, no.”

“Well, then,” I said in mock obedience, thinning myself again out to disappear into all of the nearest shadows once more, and we returned to the hotel together, her walking with resolve, and me lapping at her heels.

A scantily clad woman ran out of one of the hotel rooms, with a black eye and a pair of shoes clasped against her chest. I was very surprised to find us going toward the room she’d left, and even more so when Mina uncapped one of the bottles of liquor, gargled it, and spit the contents out, tossing the now-empty bottle into her purse. She stopped in front of the door and mussed her hair with both hands, then looked around—presumably for me—before announcing “No interrupting” quietly, then knocked rudely on the door. No one answered, so she knocked louder, until a disgruntled man appeared.

He was slovenly, wearing a half-open robe that showed how skinny he was. He smelled like sweat and sex and tar, and he looked Mina up and down in a way that made me want to pop out both his eyes.

“What the fuck do you want?” he growled at her.

She weaved her head back and forth, miming being drunk so well I thought she might be, especially with the alcohol on her breath. “For you to keep the fuck down! I couldn’t sleep at all last night! Some of us have to work in the morning!”

I watched his lips curl and braced for action—he was twice Mina’s size, and I had a feeling that the girl who’d ran away had been working for him, or more likely under him, and that he hadn’t been kind.

That didn’t deter Mina. “You kept me up all night last night, having your fights and doing your lowlife things—I could hear you from two doors away!” She flung an arm out at what was presumably her door so hard it made her stumble, a movement that did not go unnoticed by either the man or me. “So—just try to keep it down!” she went on, losing steam in the way intoxicated people did as their senses left them.

She turned without regard for his presence or her safety, and walked down to the door she’d indicated, trailing a hand against the wall for balance, and seemed to take forever fishing around inside her purse for keys.

After that, she let the both of us in, and slammed the door shut, but didn’t lock it.

I watched her keenly from the shadows inside her room, as her countenance changed. Her shoulders evened out, her head rose, but she stayed with her back to the door. “Nightmare?” she whispered.

I coagulated in front of her at once. “Sylas,” I corrected her.

She nodded, but didn’t move otherwise. It was clear she was waiting for something—and half-a-minute later, it happened.

I watched the unlocked door handle behind her twist, making a slightly metallic sound.

“Whoever that is,” she whispered to me without turning, “they’re yours.”

“My queen,” I said indulgently, swirling around her in a rush. “I’ll be right back.”

7

MINA

I CLAPPED a hand over my mouth.

I’d just condemned a man to death, I was sure of it.

I kind of felt like an asshole, but I also kind of felt okay with it, because no one was just wholesomely testing my doorknob.

I’d known I was in danger the prior night I’d spent alone here. Even with the gun in my purse I’d still shoved the chair under the door handle, and used one of those door-holdy-gizmos they sold single women on the internet. That hadn’t stopped me from being afraid after hearing some pretty violent sounding squabbles down the hall. I’d watched enough foot traffic through the open corner of my curtain during the day to be certain which room it’d been, and to see its occupant—I knew I’d sicced Sylas after the right man.

But it was still frightening to hear a repetitive thudding on the wall outside my room. It seemed Sylas didn’t have a problem taking on a solid form when he needed to. I reached for the extra shot of liquor I’d purchased inside my purse and chugged it, this time swallowing it, feeling it burn as it dropped down my throat and fell like lead into my churning belly.

Then the sounds outside stopped and somehow that was worse.

I scrabbled my sleeve up—I’d been wearing a long-sleeved shirt tonight by lucky accident—but my arm ached where I’d been marked. The pain was good, though, seeing as feeling things was a novelty. I traced a fingertip against the edges of the hourglass, the injured skin there raised and puffy, and what I could now clearly make out inside was indescribable.

The sand really was pouring out. Each granule at a time, like a little red mite traveling just underneath the surface of my skin, from one half of the hourglass to the next. In my head I’d imagined it would be a beautiful thing, but in reality it wasn’t, it was so grotesque it made me want to puke—and I remembered the stories I’d found when I’d gone back far enough, about some other poor de-hearted person, who’d carved a chunk out of their inner arm, in an effort to escape Sylas’s wrath, no doubt.

And just like it’d been too late for that faceless person, it was far too late for me now.

Although it did feel ironic to have something on me marking the time, when everything else felt like it’d come to a screeching halt in May. Sure, I’d tried to kick the can down the road with the truth some, but what had it gotten me?

Mockery. Derision. Ella’s parents telling me, at first subtly and then with a cease-and-desist letter, to shut the fuck up.

But I knew what had happened to us, and I knew what I’d seen in the cabin’s cellar, and, eventually, I knew no one else was going to ever believe me.

I watched another red grain of sand—of my life—flutter down to join the small group of them gathering in the bottom half of the hourglass, then rolled my sleeve back down and went into the hall.

Sylas wasn’t there—but there was a rather ominous blood stain that started from right outside my door, leading back to the man’s.

I followed this, making sure to not step in it, until I stood outside his room. I had the sense to cover my hand with the bottom of my shirt as I reached for the doorknob.

And I’m not sure what it was that I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I found on the other side.

Sylas’s smoky form was crouched over the man’s body, and the man’s robe was open—along with his stomach and chest. I spotted white tips of ribs sticking out of visible meat like the nails of a hand, and Sylas held coils of pale pink intestines up . . . doing . . . something?

Showing them to the man, I realized, in abject horror.

The same man who was still alive, but had lost the ability to scream.

My gut started refuting me at once—there was no way, he’d lost too much blood for that—the already-fragrant room smelled like tampons left in the trash in summer too long—but then I saw something fluttering inside his chest, like butterfly wings, and realized I was watching his lungs.

Breathing.

“Oh, fuck,” I whispered—and then leaned over and threw up.

The alcohol burned the second time too, only this time it was worse, because some of it went up my nose.

8

SYLAS

I’D ALMOST KILLED the man in the hall.

I stepped through the door, after Mina had given me permission. The man’s fear of me was instantaneous, as was my desire to feed from him.

And he couldn’t see it, but in that moment, we were bound by hundreds of incandescent threads, as I took over his fate completely and started eating his future—and his horror at losing it—at once.

I wanted all of his light for my own, and I would crawl into his skin to scoop it out of him if I had to, sinking my shadows into his mouth and eyes and ears and anus.

His panic was immediate, and I shook him like a dog, hitting him against the wall so that I could finish overwhelming him.

A small voice of reason said that I should make it last longer, to sip on him more slowly, to enjoy this first small burst of my freedom, but then the rest of me longed to ravage him, to place one finger in his mouth and another just behind his balls, and slice him lengthwise with my claws until they met, making everything inside of him spill out like he was an overstuffed couch cushion.

Breaking his chest open and showing him his entrails was a distant third option, a combination of the prior two, an effort to keep him alive slightly longer, because his rich desire to live was so much more pungent and enjoyable as he was on the cusp of death itself—and then Mina arrived.

I’d heard her coming down the hall, of course, and I could’ve stopped or hidden what I was doing more quickly, but I honestly didn’t want to. Just because I wasn’t going to kill her right away didn’t mean that I didn’t want to feed on her, too. I’d been starved for a decade, I wasn’t going to pass by a meal or a dessert.

But when she started throwing up, I decided to rethink my plan—it wouldn’t do me any good if the terror I could cause rendered her insane.

I surrounded the foul man—foul indeed, because now that he was on death’s door, some of his thoughts were open to me, and he had done many awful things—with my smoke, and then disappeared him, along with everything else that might show that either of us had been here. All of his blood, the little sliced bits I’d sliced off of his organs, and the entirety of Mina’s puke.

She blinked several times, trying to understand what she’d just seen, probably wondering if it had been real—and when I would be doing that to her.

“Where did he go?” she asked me, rather than breaking down or running away screaming.

That was good. I could work with that.

I gave her a simple shrug. “Into one of the places I can send people.” There were entire dimensions that were empty except for bodies I’d deposited inside them.

She looked past me. And then through me, the parts of me where my smoke was not so thick. “But—but,” she stuttered.

“But?” I mocked her, and then wished I hadn’t, because it was like I’d flipped a switch inside her.

Her jaw shut with a click, and she turned on her heel, stalking back down the hallway to her room, more pissed at me than frightened.

What a strange girl, I thought, trailing after her.

When I reached her room again, I closed the door behind myself. I chose not to lock it, hoping that other men would make bad decisions tonight. Mina was inside the bathroom—throwing up again? No, brushing her teeth assiduously.

Like someone who wasn’t going to die in a handful of days.

I’d seen a lot of humans process a lot of changes, once fate bound them to me. Almost all of them came to regret it by the end, and there was usually a fair amount of begging or pleading to spare their life, seeing as it was singular and special to them, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.

I found the begging boring, as I had no heart for it to work on, but I did find myself intrigued about the thought of a frightened Mina on her knees.

Right now, though, that was a distraction. I settled myself into an upholstered chair that might have been as old as I was, and played with the threads that dangled from its arm as I waited for her to emerge.

When she did, she stared at me with eyes that burned. “You murdered him.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll murder me, too.”

There was no point in lying—one only lied when one experienced shame, and that was an emotion I had not possessed for millennia. “Yes.”

She bit her lips and nodded. “In that case, can I make a request?”

I tilted my head. This entire moment was becoming droll. “You can do anything you’d like, my queen, and as for me, we’ll see.”

I watched her inhale and set her shoulders. “When the time comes, do it quickly. Please.”

“So polite.”

“That’s not a promise.”

“You didn’t ask for one.”

She put her hands to her face and her body started shuddering. I thought that I had lost her to sorrow or madness—but then she made a braying sound and blinked up at the ceiling, like she was talking to God. “All the murder monsters in the world, and I get the pedantic one.” Her lips were curved up and she was shaking her head while laughing, like she couldn’t believe her bad luck.

Was she . . . mocking . . . me? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been insulted. “There’s a difference between pedantry and precision.”

“Oh, did I hurt your feelings?” She moved to stand in front of me, entirely—irritatingly—fearless. “Please, Mister Smoke, don’t eviscerate me,” she said in a sing-song voice, with her hands clasped under her chin like a silent movie actress. “Is that better?”

I let myself diffuse out, occupying more of the space around us. “I do not have feelings for you to harm.”

“You’re the poster child for toxic masculinity, I’m getting that.” She squinted up at me. “But let’s get one thing straight—you can’t hurt me, either.”

“Because of our pact?” I said, letting my laughter echo from all around. “My queen, I will be killing you.”

She stepped forward aggressively. “Yeah, I know. But not for a while yet, if you’re not a liar. And until then? I’m not afraid of you.”

“The scent of your puke says differently.”

“That was just surprise.” Her chin rose in defiance, her gaze held mine, and while I may not have wanted to kill her just yet, it was time to put her in her place.

I enveloped her in darkness, letting my smoke touch any part of her it could reach, pressing against her with a multitude of horrors—pinpricks of a thousand cold, insectile claws, the sound of wet and heavy breathing in her ears, and I enshrouded her vision with absolute nothingness, unchangeable, and unrelenting.

She gave a yelp, but then quieted almost instantly, her heart rate spiking like a firework, then plummeting just as fast, as she went someplace quiet and hidden inside herself, and I retreated quickly.

As upset as I was not to frighten her more—to get the chance to sip on her like a nightcap—her control boded well.

She just might have the wherewithal to use my skills properly, with some guidance and imagination.

And when I’d finished coalescing back into my form, I found her frowning. “Did you enjoy that, you sick fuck?”

“Not as much as I had hoped.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who doesn’t have feelings anymore,” she said with a snort. “Why do you think I hired you?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” I asked, as I sat back down in the chair opposite her bed.

She frowned and kept frowning. She did have feelings, after all; they just weren’t related to me.

“In all truthfulness, it would be best if you told me what my feeding schedule will be from here on out, so I’ll know if I need to supplement it or not. I assume there’s a man involved?”

That, she deigned to answer. “Men. Five of them.”

“Six kills then, in under a week,” I said with a nod. “I can manage.”

“Counting that one?” she asked, glancing over my shoulder toward the now empty room down the hall.

“No, counting you. Who I will kill in front of the Monster Security Agency building where Royce can see.”

That pulled her short for a moment, but then she shook her head, turning back to her bedding. It took me a moment to realize she’d spread a sleeping bag out atop the mattress. “Are we going camping, later?” I had had some enjoyable moments in my past, walking into campsites full of teens on full moon nights, if so.

“No,” she said, taking a careful seat on the bed and kicking off her shoes. “I just didn’t want bedbugs.”

I still had some few human gestures and mannerisms that it amused me to possess, and this elicited one of those, making my eyebrows—such as they were—rise upon my forehead. “Oh.”

Mina put a hand out to stop my most obvious response. “I know I’m going to die soon. But I don’t want to die itchy.”

I bit my lips—another distant, for me, gesture—to hide a laugh. “Fair.”

She crossed her arms. “You don’t get to judge me, just because you haven’t had to itch in a century.”

“Try several millennia.”

It was her turn to be surprised. Her jaw dropped. “And you’ve just been . . . you? That whole time?”

“If by me, you mean an insatiable vortex for pain and suffering, then yes.”

Her full lips fell into a frown. “Which means you’re on the bedbugs’ side, aren’t you.”

That, I could answer her truthfully. “Oh, no, dearest Mina. All of your future pain is mine. From here on out, anything that wants to hurt you will have to come through me, and I promise they won’t survive it. Even bedbugs.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she wriggled into her sleeping bag regardless, leaving all of her clothing on.

“Please don’t be joking about the protecting-me-from-bedbugs thing,” she said, then reached over to turn off the light.

9

MINA

I HAD JUST WATCHED Sylas kill someone, and I really thought I should be more frightened.

Was this shock?

I didn’t know.

I’d had to deal with a lot of shit in my short life, and there was always the possibility that I was already dead inside.

In fact, that seemed highly likely.

Because if I didn’t know that Sylas was still watching me, I would’ve been staring up at the ceiling until dawn, replaying scenes from my past, letting my memories burn me from the inside out like coals until they charred all of me to a crisp.

The worst part was remembering the good times. With me and Ella and Trent. Back when my life—well, it hadn’t made sense, except in retrospect, when I realized Trent was setting the both of us up—but back when I thought that I was lucky.

Lucky enough to be the somewhat weird goth girl, who bleached her hair and then dyed it two different colors, who painted her nails red and black, and that Trent Donovan, Treasurer of Rho Rho Phi and son of the well-known businessman Jack Donovan Senior, wanted.

He was smart, athletic, pre-law, and somehow we had the same taste in music, a thing which I could not believe, but I swear to god Sleep Token was on his playlists before he even met me—and he was into me.

My high school boyfriend had almost been scared off by my high sex drive, but Trent took it like a challenge, and there practically wasn’t any place on campus that we hadn’t fucked.

Ella and I joked that I was doing all of her sex for her, too, since she was ace and aro and totally uninterested in having relationships except for friendship and sheer fun. We were both getting biology degrees—me in microbiology, so I could go on to become the doctor of my dead parents’ dreams, and her in ecology, so she could go study elephants in Africa someday—and while things between me and Trent didn’t make sense on paper, on a day to day basis they were good, for six months. His frat friends tolerated me, and he made it so I hardly ever had to deal with them . . . up until that night in May when he’d wanted me to come to an end-of-the-year party at the Rho Rho Phi cabin.

I knew it was going to be rowdy nonsense, but I figured when he told me to bring Ella he was acknowledging how bullshit it was, and wanted me to have a friend to hang out with while he got wasted with his buddies because it was periodically expected of him.

I thought I knew him differently.

But it turns out I didn’t know anything at all, and there was no way I could’ve known, unless—unless—unless—

I’d spent the intervening months living in my memories like Theseus in the Labyrinth, only without the help of thread. Experiencing one dread moment after another, walking through the hallways of my mind, lost and feeling blind, looking for hints that would’ve made everything make sense, all the while knowing that nothing I figured out would ever really matter.

I’d be punishing myself for missing something, or punishing myself for finding something if I ever did, every breath I took until the end of my life.

And it was that realization that’d driven me into the library, and into giving Brad Kirk regular blowjobs for access to his grad student keycard that got me into the vaults.

Because once I’d seen the elaborate set up in the RRP’s cellar, I knew Ella couldn’t have been the only girl things had happened to. And after I combed through crumbling newspapers with gloves on, and then went into the microfiche they’d used to scan the older ones, I’d figured out what was happening.

Every couple of years, a girl around campus would go missing. There’d be a few headlines in the papers, and it would be very sad and there would be candlelight vigils, but nothing ever changed. In fact, my campus probably had below the normal death-attrition rate for college aged girls—I looked at some of the larger statistics just to see where we were at. But I was now certain each of those disappearances could be traced back to Rho Rho Phi somehow. And sure enough, each of the girls was dating a Rho Rho Phi, or last seen at a Rho Rho Phi party, or a friend of a friend of a Rho—I could see the lines drawing everything together, but I knew from trying to report what’d happened to Ella and me that asking the police for help was futile. And I knew, from trying to tell everyone else what’d happened, that no one would ever believe me.

So I’d spent practically the whole summer in the depths of the library looking for clues, losing whatever tan I’d possessed and getting crippling neck pain. And that was when I started learning about the Hourglass Killer—a serial killer that haunted the streets of our city, one who, unlike the RRP guys, at least had an ominous name.

After that everything had flowed in that direction. I’d taken up listening to true crime podcasts, in the hopes that someone somewhere else would eventually give a shit about what’d happened to us, and that was when I learned about the coroner’s reports, all of which I could find online if I was willing to give the dark web a whirl.

And I slowly put enough stuff together about him to figure out his attachment to the bigger murders—because I wasn’t hung up on the people he killed personally at the end, with the brands, like he would me—no, I was able to go back further and realize that something really pants-shittingly bad happened every time he came around, a few days before he killed the branded party.

But everything started with Mr. Bannerman’s great grandfather, the Hourglass Killer’s first kill, and that was why I’d gone to the Monster Security Agency tonight—to talk to his great-grandson and try to understand. Maybe there was some connection between the Hourglass Killer and whatever the fuck the RRPs did—because one murderer might recognize another one?

I didn’t know—I was desperate—and now I had a Nightmare.

Watching me sleep.

Assuming I ever fell asleep again.

I shook my head and opened my eyes—and found Sylas standing right-the-fuck beside my bed, like a jump-scare from a horror movie.

“Good-fucking-lord!” I shouted, violently scooting back in my sleeping bag.

“There was a bedbug,” he said dryly, and that was even worse.

I started thrashing from side to side. “Where? Where?” I asked, panicking until he began to laugh. It echoed around the small hotel room, while I looked at him like he’d betrayed me. “It’s not funny.”

His laughter stopped, although I could still read the amusement in the creases on his smokey face. “I’m sorry. I only came over to note that you are not very good at sleeping.”

“Yeah. That shit’s been hard lately,” I said, wiping my face with a hand.

“Would you like help?”

I blinked and stared up at him. When was the last time I’d stayed asleep for more than an hour or two? I was tired. My body was tired. My brain was tired.

It was one of the many reasons I was willing to give myself over to him—because I had a sneaky feeling that being dead would be better than always being exhausted.

I pouted, not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. “This isn’t some sort of cheating thing where you make me sleep for six days, go do whatever you want to, and then come back and kill me, right?”

He squatted on his heels beside the bed, bringing his face closer to mine. “What kind of fairy tales are they teaching children nowadays?”

“They don’t. Or if they do, they involve true crime.”

“Ah.” He pondered that for a moment, then held his hand in front of him, drawing from one palm with the fingers of the other. “Well, in that case, dearest Mina, I, Sylas Veil, Mister Smoke and creature of night and darkness, have a wish for you.”

His tone was sonorous. Soothing. And if I’d had my eyes closed, I would’ve found it kind of hot.

Perhaps even trustworthy.

“What’s that?” I asked him in a small voice.

“Sleep and dream for me,” he said, before blowing a trail of the smoke he’d pulled from his palm my way. I gasped in surprise, inhaling some in, and—

10

SYLAS

MINA FELL ASLEEP AT ONCE. I watched the wary rigidity she carried herself with wash away, as muscles unknotted and tight tendons released.

And her mind was just as tired as the rest of her. I felt it drift down like a stone in a well, lubricating itself with rest. I could tell it was the first time she’d truly relaxed—in months, possibly—but that wasn’t the reason I’d offered the gift to her.

No, I’d wanted her to sleep so that I could read her dreams.

During the day human minds had walls up, but at night all of their resistance fractured like a mirror crazed with cracks, letting their true selves show within.

All I had to do to see it was wait.

I crept over her, straddling her, much the same as I had the man I’d murdered down the hall, although she could not feel me. The tension around her lips, eyes, and nostrils relented at last, and I could feel her dropping into herself. She seemed so peaceful, and I’d forgotten how intimate it was to watch someone else with their guard completely down.

Especially someone who was already marked for me.

Because from so close above her the thread of fate between the two of us was almost blinding—it made me want to crack open her chest to eat it from its source.

She inhaled and exhaled deeply, and her eyes started roving beneath her eyelids, while she made small noises and twitched.

“Oh, yes,” I whispered. Watching someone else’s dreams uninvited felt like defiling innocence. I brought my forehead near hers and let my own mind go blank, so that I could capture as much of what was happening in hers as possible.

She was in a forest.

She had small, spindly legs—a fawn? No, a lamb. White as snow, just like the old nursery rhyme.

And the forest was dark, just like in innumerable fairytales. The trees were hunched over, with branches that clawed, it was night out—of course—only now there was no moon, though somehow she could see in the way of dreams, that haze of knowledge that one had once inside them, that you were present, and that things were indefinably, indescribably bad, a feeling that would wash away the second your eyes were open, but for as long as they were closed felt as real as your own heart’s beating.

Then the forest began to rustle around her.

A howl cut through the night, one, then another, and Mina’s lamb quaked. She tried to run, and I got the feeling that she always did, that she’d trod this path at night so often that it ought to carry her footprints—only it was too late. She tumbled into a clearing, and it was filled with wolves.

They were big; she was small.

She begged them for mercy, and they answered her with teeth.

She shouted for help, she screamed, and then she cried as they savaged her, ripping her apart with sharp fangs—and if the pain she was sharing with me now was just a hint of the agony she carried inside her—I rose up and stared down at her, as the beginnings of her tears started seeping down her cheeks, leaving glowing streaks that only I could see.

And while I no longer lusted, if I did, it would’ve been for them, for tears were fate in its purest form—they were distilled from futures that had already been denied.

But I knew if I started feeding from her now . . . I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.

“Save all of this for me,” I commanded her, and when that didn’t work, I reached down and stroked her hair back with one hand, then stopped, stunned and somewhat curious to be touching someone without murderous intent. “Mina,” I said, more loudly, and she woke up with a shake.

She sat upright in bed, but I’d already flowed away from her, to sit back in the chair. “Sylas?” she asked the dark.

“Mister Smoke,” I corrected her, with the name she’d given me.

I heard her swallow and felt her relax. “I was having a bad dream,” she murmured.

“You were,” I agreed, as though I hadn’t seen a thing. “What was it about?”

She made a sound. “I don’t know.” And that was a lie for certain. “Having a nightmare in front of a Nightmare. How ironic,” she said, slowly lowering herself back into her bedding.

11

MINA

The Past

May 25th, 8 p.m.

“ARE you sure you want out here?” It was raining cats and dogs and my Uber driver had a point. The RRP cabin was in the middle of fucking nowhere, there was no way I was going to be able to catch another ride back, so Ella had better not ditch me.

But I saw lights inside the cabin, which wasn’t too rustic. It had two stories, and Trent’s truck was parked outside, along with the familiar rides from the rest of his frat. “Yeah—I’ll be fine—thanks,” I said. I rated them and gave them a tip, then pulled my coat around myself, bracing to run in using my phone’s flashlight for light. I got out, trotted down the barely moonlit trail, my cute heels squelching in the mud from the last rain of spring. “Oh, Trent, you owe me,” I muttered, dancing back and forth from dry spot to dry spot, until I reached the front door, half-soaked, and heels most likely ruined.

“Lamb! You’re early!” Trent said, opening the door after my furious knocking.

I made a face and handed him my wet coat. I’d been a hell-of-a-lot better looking five minutes ago—right now I felt like a bedraggled poodle. “It’s amazing I’m even here at all,” I complained, and noticed him watching the door slam shut behind me.

“Sorry, lamb,” he said, hanging my coat up. “Where’s your friend, the Nobody?”

I know, I know, it sounded rude, but it wasn’t, it was a stupid Odysseus joke, because both my best friend and my boyfriend were Latin nerds. It’d begun one night on the couch in my apartment when we’d all been watching a movie and Trent had made some joke about an actor’s “one-eyed wonder” in reference to their dick, and innocent Ella had assumed he was talking about a cyclops.

“She can’t come up till she’s done with work—she doesn’t get off for another thirty.” I looked past him, where other frat bros I recognized, Logan, Brandon, Garrett, and Nolan—essentially his underlings—were getting things ready for the party, which was supposed to begin at nine.

“But she is coming?”

“She’d better be. Assuming she doesn’t get rained off the road, that is.” I scrunched my hair in an effort to get it to dry cute at least. “She’s my ride home tonight. There’s no way I’m waiting for your hungover ass to drive me back in tomorrow,” I teased, poking him in the chest with a finger.

Trent laughed. “It’s not my fault. I have to put in some face time with my boys occasionally.”

I glanced around. Logan was near enough to hear, but he was the youngest of the group, and I didn’t think Trent minded him knowing how we kept busy besides. So I gave Trent a girlish pout, flashing him with dark eyes that hopefully weren’t raccoon-ringed with my non-waterproof mascara, before saying, “I like face time too, you know.”

That made the corner of Trent’s lips lift up. “Your face or mine?”

And it was times like these that let me know he really liked me. Maybe even loved me? I wasn’t one hundred percent certain, but I did feel like we’d both been close to saying it before.

Because I was pretty sure someone who didn’t almost-love me would let me have so much power over him in front of his underlings. “Your face,” I decreed, and Trent’s grin only got bigger as he reached for me.

“There’s already an empty bedroom set aside for us, upstairs,” he said. I mimed putting a shocked hand to my chest, even as the other started suggestively tugging up the hem of the already-short dress I had on, and he laughed. “Being an upperclassman has its privileges.”

“And what about the rest of the party setup? Won’t your brothers know you’ve gone missing?”

“They will, but I’ve already helped out some, and pre-gamed even,” he said, sliding his hand down to my ass. “Come on.” He directed me further, tucking his mouth beside my ear. “I want my breath to smell like pussy and beer—my two favorite things.”

It was gross, but it was also true, and if I didn’t almost-love him, I definitely loved him wanting me like that. It was as addictive as a drug. I squealed as he palmed me, and then ran up the stairs.

12

MINA

The Present

I WOKE up well rested after having slept in for the first time in months. Sure, I’d had that bad dream, but after that, it was a night of blissful nothingness.

Was that what it would be like, when I had died?

If so, you could sign me the fuck up.

“Finally,” Sylas intoned the moment my eyes fluttered open.

“Let me guess,” I said, sitting up. The light penetrating the hotel’s dingy curtains only served to glint off the motes of dust circling around him, giving him a strange halo. “You’re hungry.”

“Always,” he said, standing. “So—your plan?”

I blinked, then reached for my purse, which I’d set beside me the night prior, all the better to sleep closer to my gun. I had a small notepad inside, where I’d carefully recorded all of the guys’ movements and patterns, watching all five of them have the lives they’d denied me and Ella. “Logan Whitmore.”

My Nightmare crossed his arms. “Who is he?”

“Better to ask what.” I could tick off all of Logan’s life attributes on one hand. “Devastatingly handsome, rich, and stupid as a baked potato. He’s a legacy RRP, and the only reason he hasn’t flunked out yet is because he has access to their testing bank, plus he pays a tutor on the regular.” I put air quotes around the word tutor—the RRP had other kids in the same classes essentially on payroll to help.

“And he’s the first of your five why?” Sylas asked. His tone was neutral, indifferent even, but the tilt of his head gave his interest away.

I made a face. “Because I won’t mind us killing him—and also because I know exactly where he’ll be tonight.”

Sylas looked around. “I take it we’re trading up in the world.”

“As long as I’m not bringing any bedbugs back to my apartment,” I said, crawling out of my sleeping bag at last.

I DIDN’T BRUSH my teeth at the hotel. It wasn’t worth bothering with, when civilization was so close at hand. I was surprised when we left though to find out that the door down the hall was open but there wasn’t any police tape around—then I remembered Sylas had totally disappeared the corpse. No one had noticed that guy was missing, or called the cops.

“I don’t want you doing that with Logan,” I said, once we were both inside my car. Sylas was harder to see now with more ambient light, but I could sense his curiosity as I drove us away. “I need for there to be a body. The rest of them need to know it happened.”

Sylas gave a malevolent chuckle. “Good. I like that. More fear for me to feed off of.”

I nodded strongly. “Yes.”

The only reason I’d come to this hotel was because it was the only place in town where I could pay cash for a room. If I’d had to go through with my plans alone, with just the gun, I needed to be untraceable, and when someone started putting two and two together, the first place their concerned fingers would point would be at the “lying” ex-girlfriend.

But I had a feeling that now, with Sylas, the murders would be so atrocious that no one would think they could be committed by little old me—until it was too late.

“He’ll be at his tutor’s from six to eight tonight. He’s got a final coming up, and he needs a C to pass. We just have to wait for him to walk to his car to drive home when he’s done.”

And that was a good thing, too. His tutor lived off campus, far away from the rest of the frat. If Logan’s corpse was found near RRP house, they’d view it as an attack, whereas if he was murdered a few miles away, it could be a wrong-time, wrong-place scenario.

A mugging gone wrong.

“Do you have any weaknesses?” I asked Sylas.

He seemed affronted—I could tell by the way he dispersed, letting more of the sunlight show through him. “Excuse me?”

“That I should know about,” I quickly explained. “Like some way he can capture or hurt you?”

There was a still between us in the car, like when you were in the eye of a storm, and then raucous laughter poured out of him. “Me? Be hurt?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m just asking.”

“Curious for yourself, I bet,” he said, his smoke forming a tongue for long enough for him to lick it across his now showing sharp black teeth.

“No, I don’t renege on deals.”

“That’s what everyone who hires me thinks, at first,” he said, with a shrug. “And then, for some reason, as their sands run out, they all seem to change their mind.”

I frowned. I hadn’t laid eyes on my hourglass today, but the mark didn’t hurt as much as it had the night prior. I was going to have to keep wearing long sleeves to hide it, I wouldn’t want anyone putting two and two together until it was too late, but it was a crisp October, and I had plenty of reasons to be wearing sweaters.

I’d given away three-quarters of my wardrobe after Ella had gone away. Any girl my size who hit the Goodwill that week was going to think she won the lottery. I just couldn’t stand the thought of wearing anything I’d worn with Trent ever again, and seeing as we’d dated for six months, that was most of my clothing.

Too bad no one would wonder what Logan was wearing when they found his corpse.

THE NIGHTMARE and I reached my apartment at ten, but I turned to him before he could get out of the car. “Can other people see you?”

“As in, should I hide?” he asked, with a shrug. “Probably.”

I squinted at him before taking off my seatbelt. “And you didn’t think about that, yourself?”

He heaved a sigh. “You’re going to be dead in seven days, my queen. So no, I don’t really care about people seeing me—and, neither should you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” he said, phasing out of my car.

He followed me up to my apartment on the stairs in front of the security cameras and I guessed he did have a point. Now that I was signed up to die, it wouldn’t really matter if I left any evidence behind.

It was just hard to get out of that mode. And I couldn’t stomach the thought of someone stopping me before I’d gotten my revenge. I was at a point where I didn’t give a shit about what’d happened to me—or what would happen, clearly. But Ella? Ella needed me to stick around until the fourth quarter.

I unlocked my door and let us both inside, and Sylas diffused himself at once, nearly disappearing, until I heard his voice from my bedroom.

“Is this you?” he asked. I followed the sound, till I caught him rifling through the photos I’d tucked into the edges of my mirror frame. I hardly recognized myself in them anymore—I mostly kept them for the images of Ella.

Every picture I’d had of Trent and myself I’d burned in the trash.

“It used to be.”

“And the other woman’s room?” he asked.

“My friend. She’s why you’re here.” I never went into Ella’s room anymore. I had enough money to cover both halves of our lease—my parents had died in a tragic car accident my first year here, when a semi-truck swept into their lane. I’d gotten a massive payout, which I wasn’t going to be around to spend.

But Ella’s parents were still alive. They’d moved out most of her personal items, but what little they’d left behind—her bed, and a couple of scraps of clothing—I’d decided to leave where they were at, like a shrine.

I’d stolen some of her makeup before they’d come in too, so I still had a pot of Perfect Blue Pigment out on my vanity, and her toothbrush—which’d gone unused since May 25th—was still in the holder beside mine on my sink.

“She was pretty,” Sylas intoned, from beside me, startling me. I’d forgotten he was there.

“Yeah, she was.” I bit my lips. I tried not to think about the way she’d looked when I’d last seen her, because it hurt too bad.

“But you,” he went on, sounding somewhat clinical. “What happened?” He plucked out a photo of me that someone had printed off on their mini-Polaroid when I’d been at a club. I’d been bleach blonde then, with smokey eyes and happily smiling red lips, looking sultry in a sheer top with a black bra on underneath.

It was pretty different than the Amish granddaughter look I was going for now.

“Life?” I said sarcastically, to deflect him. I should’ve known it wouldn’t work.

“A lot of people go their entire lives without murdering a soul.” He drew himself in so that his form had crisper boundaries, even as he went on trampling over all of mine. “So what kind of life?” he pressed.

“As long as you eat, why do you care?” I asked, shooing him away. I wanted to change clothes. Look at the mark on my arm. Maybe take a shower. Maybe take an Ativan.

“Because you only have a limited time left on this earth, Mina. And for as much as you are able, I want you to live it with me.”

I whirled on him and frowned. He was between me and my bedroom door. My bed was behind me, and a particular kind of terror wound its tail around my spine. “What do you mean?”

“Do you want to murder people wearing this,” he said, gesturing at my outfit. “Or wearing that?” He reached out to tap my clubbing photo.

“Are you giving me super-villain dressing tips?”

“It’s one thing when you have a hope of escape. You might as well blend into the background, with thoughts of somehow getting a new identity,” he said, before shaking his head gravely. “But since you don’t, what’s the harm in living it up while you can, so to speak?”

I huffed. “I’m not that girl anymore.” That girl—stupid and innocent and carefree—was gone. She’d never come back, even if Sylas weren’t in my bedroom.

“Yes—but you’re not this, either,” he said, giving my black sweater a disparaging look. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“How the fuck would you know what suits me?”

“Because I’m the only creature alive who has witnessed other people in your exact same shoes,” he said, with a patience that was annoying. “You’re between life and death, Mina. You’re different from the rest of humanity right now, whether you like it or not. Shed your skin and become something glorious with me.”

13

SYLAS

MINA CONSIDERED MY STATEMENT, then frowned, her deep brown eyes misting with memories, and I knew I had pushed her too hard.

“The only thing I currently want to take off is the clothing that I slept in, so can you please give me some privacy?” she snapped, and I appeared to withdraw at once.

“Of course, my queen,” I said, dissipating myself until there was no way she could know I remained.

Most of my hiring clientele were obsessive or insane. If I said pretentious things, their first inclination would’ve been to agree with me, because they were pretentious people, who needed to make the world work the way they thought it should—which was, of course, always in their favor.

So I was curious why fate had brought me this girl, who kept trying not to be frail, even though she was.

Poor little lamb, I thought, watching her undress, remembering her dream from the prior night.

She took off her sweater and inspected my hourglass mark first, watching the sand inside it run down, rubbing at its edges—not trying to get it off, but attempting to understand it. Then she kicked off her jeans, and walked into her bathroom to turn her shower on, in her bra and underwear, their black fabric stark against her pale skin. After that, she began to brush her teeth, while giving herself furtive glances in the mirror.

I still possessed a concept of beauty, but I had seen millions of people in my very long “life,” and thus most of humanity was a vague blur to me. What did their lives even matter, when they were so short, and no one would remember any of them in a century?

But she was pretty in the way that things that are appetizing become more tasteful when presented well, like the contrast between the food taken hot and food taken cold. Both were the same at base, and yet one was often better than the other.

When she was done brushing her teeth she cupped water to her mouth to drink, and then afterwards took another palmful, I thought to drink again, but instead she whirled and spattered it against the wall.

“I know you’re there!” she hissed. I let the water drops fly through me, and I realized why she’d turned the shower on so hot—so that any shape I kept would show in its emanating steam.

It hadn’t worked. I didn’t need to maintain my form like that, but that she’d thought of it and tried . . . that was alluring, beyond mere physicality, and made me amend my prior thoughts on her. My cunning lamb, I purred, to myself.

This version of her made me want to show her all my teeth.

But once she was done huffing and puffing, her own image obscured in the fogged bathroom mirror, she deflated, thinking I’d never been there at all, and she took off her underwear and bra. Her breasts were small teardrops, there was a thatch of unkempt hair between her legs, and there was an unexpected mark upon her inner left hip, that I could barely make out before she jumped behind the shower curtain, so I followed her there.

I stood under the shower’s spray, letting all of the water flow through me as she started performing her ablutions, washing herself off, shampooing her hair, the mark on her hip moving as she did, the water trails making its edges ambiguous.

What wasn’t hard to read though was her mood, which darkened the entire time she was in the small, enclosed space. I watched her run a soaped washcloth over her body once, twice, and then after that it was clear that whatever it was she wanted to wash off of her was something she would never find as she segued into a frenzy, as though she were trying to clean something deeper than her skin—perhaps her soul—until she was crying again, and once more I was forced to watch her tears go to absolute and utter waste.

I felt myself solidify without thinking, angry at her for showing me so much but somehow still not enough to understand her. Luckily, she didn’t notice, lost as she was in her own pain. It permeated the humid air around her and my choices were to make myself known, or fully retreat, and so I whipped myself out of her fog, standing on the other side of the curtain as she finished, like the monster so many humans feared in the movies.

I will know you shortly, lamb.

Whether you like it or not.

14

MINA

The Past

May 25th, 8:35 p.m.

“FUCKING HELL,” I groaned, throwing a pillow over my face, trying to muffle the fact that I was coming for a third time.

Trent reached up from his spot between my legs to swat it away with wet fingers. “Let them hear.”

I rose up enough to glare down at him with a fake pout. “You told me I’m not allowed to howl.”

It was a stupid thing him and all his frat bros did during certain parts of their ceremonies. I’d tried to join in once, only for him to pull me aside so that we could have a “serious conversation” during which he’d told me I shouldn’t, and I’d politely tried not to laugh at being howl-splained, in large part because he was so good with his tongue.

Quality oral was a rare skill on campus.

Ask me how I knew.

“That’s different,” he said, laughing into me, and the moment was a little ruined, plus I was exhausted. Ella was definitely on her way here—I’d heard my phone get a text that surely said as much fifteen minutes ago—and I needed to clean myself up before nine.

“Mmm, okay,” I said, closing my thighs around his ears a little, and shifting my hips, so he’d get the hint.

“Is it?” he said, wrapping an arm around and over my hips.

“Trent,” I complained. I knew I was the very definition of bed head, there was a wet spot the size of a truck tire beneath me, and even if his underlings wouldn’t give him shit, they’d definitely be looking at me, doing that thing you could never quite call them on or explain to anyone—any guy—who hadn’t already experienced it before.

“You’re the one who said I should be down here,” Trent teased, pushing his fingers back inside.

“Ella’s on her way,” I whined, as he lowered his mouth again.

“So? She’s definitely heard worse,” he said, before beginning to work me over.

She had. Ella was the world’s most understanding roommate. I had no idea why she put up with me, or with the way Trent and I fucked like bunnies on Viagra and Adderall just one thin bedroom wall away.

“No, come on,” I whined.

“You come on,” he teased. “If you’re not going to spend the night, you need to give me one more now. I know you can do it, lamb,” he said, and yeah, I could, and in hindsight, letting him make me come again when I wanted to be done with things, maybe wasn’t a red flag, but it was possibly a white flag that you’d washed with some other red ones to turn all pink like that and—and—and—I groaned.

“Goddammit,” I complained, biting my lips and writhing. “Okay—enough—that’s enough—”

He rose up on one arm and wiped his mouth with the other. “Good girl.”

“Fuck you,” I breathed, grinning at him and regathering myself. My phone chirped again, and this time I picked it up. Ella was outside. I kicked myself free of him, found my underwear on the ground, and pulled them up unceremoniously. Trent watched me panic with a shit-eating grin.

“You worried about something?” he asked, with a head tilt.

“I just don’t want her out there with all the rest of the wolves,” I said, gesturing to all of his friends outside, plus anyone else who’d already showed up to party—I could hear people starting to shout over other people, and from somewhere downstairs a strong bass thump had begun. “Why haven’t I been here before?” I asked, pushing my dress down and hitching my boobs properly back into my bra.

“Because the last party we had here almost burned the place down. We had to hold off until people could be more respectful.”

I laughed. “Okay, so I definitely do not want to crash here tonight. Plus, my face wash and my toothbrush—”

He pretended to be confused. “Why do you need a toothbrush when I have condoms?”

I let my eyebrows crawl up. “Are you implying I should just brush my teeth with your dick?”

Trent made a face and laughed. “I mean . . . we can try that? I’m not sure how well it’ll work, but I’m game, as long as you don’t scrape me too hard—”

“Cum is not mouthwash.”

“Technically, anything is mouthwash, as long as you spit it out,” he said sagely, standing to encircle me with his arms. He was a good foot taller than I was, and sometimes that was nice, like when it was cold out, or for snuggling on the couch. Other times it was less so, like when I’d challenged him to drunken wrestling one night, discovering that my dearly-nearly-beloved could really easily put me into something akin to a choke hold that I’d be hard pressed to escape from.

“All right,” he said, nuzzling his face against mine. “Just remember, this is our room for as long as you want to stay.” Then he pulled a key out of his pocket, surprising me—it was on a thin ball chain, like the kind military dog tags came with, and he looped it around my neck, tucking the key itself inside my cleavage. “Any time you feel like you need to rest, you can just come up here, or bring Ella with you.”

And then there were times when he was sweet like that, and it felt like he really did understand me. Because neither Ella nor I were built for parties—we could have fun one on one, and we could manage in a group, but Being Presentable In Public really took a lot out of the both of us.

I turned and caught his head between my hands, smooching him quickly on the lips. “I’m so lucky to have you.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

I made a show of smelling his breath. “You’d better go drink some beer to even that out, baby.”

“On it, lamb,” he said, gnashing his teeth gently in my direction, like the RRP wolf he was, before we both left the room together, and he, with another key, locked the door.

15

MINA

The Present

“SO, uh, what do you want to do for the rest of the day?” I asked, after I’d dried my hair off with a towel and come out to my living room. I didn’t see Sylas anywhere—I imagined him floating off to go play Peeping Tom on other apartment residents.

But he appeared instantly in front of me, faster than a blink, making me yelp and jump back on instinct.

He chuckled and grinned. “Live,” he said, then corrected himself. “By which I mean eat.”

I had visions of myself going to an ice cream parlor and knocking fresh cones out of little kids hands . . . and it wasn’t entirely a bad idea. I grabbed my wallet and my keys. “Let’s go see what we can find,” I said, heading for the door, with Sylas floating out beside me.

He paused at the car, but I walked past it. “Where are we going?”

“It’s my turn to be mysterious,” I told him, and he managed to wait patiently until we were half a block away, and the sound of the upcoming playground became clear.

“Really?” he asked, sounding arch, as I sat down on a bench, patting the space beside me for him.

To my surprise he did take it, settling down, resting the ankle of one ghostly foot on the knee of the other, while he steepled his hands. There were fifteen or so different pre-school aged children playing, running around, climbing on the small structures, or industriously digging in the sandbox with plastic shovels that they’d brought.

“Their sorrows are very tiny,” he complained.

“But their feelings are pretty vast,” I countered, giving him a look. “I mean, no one’s more unhappy than a toddler denied.”

“This seems like you’re not taking me very seriously.” He coalesced more tightly in his displeasure, like my affront was compressing him, turning him into the center of an angry star.

“Oh believe me, I am, I just don’t have too many other options. Although there’s a dog park down the street—sometimes owners there get into fights when they bite each other.”

One of the mothers nearest me who was rocking a baby too young to play in its stroller gave us a nervous look, and after taking us in, me in particular, which I found odd—maybe because I had wet hair outside in October?—got up and pushed her stroller away, clucking to her other child to follow.

That was when I realized what’d happened. I whirled on Sylas. “No one else can see you, can they?” I asked, indignantly. “So right now I just look crazy.”

He held up innocent hands. “Your words, not mine.”

I crossed my arms and sank back into the bench, determined to keep my lips still and use shitty ventriloquism to continue our conversation. “What about later tonight? When I need you?”

“I can be seen—and heard—when I desire it. Believe me.”

I did. And I guess that made sense. Otherwise people would’ve definitely noticed the black-smoke-man following around the Hourglass Killer’s other victims.

Right now he was surveying the playground coolly. “Did you ever want one?” he asked.

And now he was making an attempt to feed off of me, I was sure, seeing as we both knew there were no children in my future.

“I don’t know,” I said, through stiff lips. “Did you ever have one?” I countered, squinting at him, wondering if he’d answer me truthfully.

This, he seemed to consider. I watched his smokey chest rise and fall, and then he said, “If I did, I don’t remember.”

“What?” I asked aloud, at full volume, earning me the ire of another playground mom. “How could you forget your own child?” I went back to whispering.

“It wasn’t intentional,” he said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think.” I continued to give him the stink-eye as he went on. “I mean, he—or she—could’ve been an asshole.”

I bit back a horrible laugh, not sure if he was being funny on purpose, with his dry sense of humor, or just funny-sad.

“But really, Mina, there’s no point in me keeping track of anyone, being what I am,” he said, diffusing outward. I watched little wisps of him reach out to stroke through the hair of the nearest children like a breeze, and knew that, despite his earlier protests, he was feeding off of them, ever so slightly, grabbing the reasons that they fought and squealed and drawing those brief moments back into his . . . soul?

Or whatever it was that kept him like this, here.

“Compared to me, everyone is temporary. Everyone dies. What does it matter if it happened yesterday, or today, or tomorrow?”

“And yet you yourself said you wanted to live earlier.”

“Being out of the hourglass is living, for me, such as it is.”

“Have you always been inside of it?” I asked, after biting the inside of my lip. It was possible he had, and that no one had put two and two together, because the rest of his crimes were before photography. I had my doubts though. “The way you talk, it sounds like you predate glass.”

That made him snort, apparently loud enough for other playground mothers to hear, although they reserved their squint-eyed glares for me. Then I watched his smoke wend its way towards them instead, harvesting the Stranger Danger they felt towards me to his own ends.

“I am not that old,” he said.

I stood up and whispered. “Okay, okay, enough.”

“No such thing.”

“Let’s go,” I said more loudly, like I was one of the mothers myself, chiding a child, and that made him laugh—a laugh just between the two of us—but he did finally follow.

16

SYLAS

I WATCHED Mina fret for the rest of the day, enjoying the ambient panic radiating off of her as she contemplated murdering one of her classmates. She made herself food she didn’t eat, she vacuumed assorted patches of carpeting, and then at the end spent at least half an hour in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror, applying, removing, and then reapplying makeup with shaking hands.

I pretended not to notice any of this though, waiting instead until she emerged to present herself to me. “Well?” she demanded. “Do I look like a killer?”

She was wearing a baggy white collegiate sweatshirt with a pink stain on it, black form-fitting leggings, and running shoes—and the only makeup on her face was around her eyes, where she’d rimed them with a bright, true blue.

Overall, what she looked like was unhappy.

“I thought you didn’t want my opinions on your attire?” I intended it to tease, but it had the opposite effect, as I watched her deflate further. “It’s okay you know,” I said. “I’m the one who’ll be doing all the work.”

“It’s not that,” she said in a tone that implied there was a lot more behind it, but her mouth was a locked door.

“Well?” I asked. “Shall we?”

She gave me a curt nod, and then we headed for her car.

WE DROVE AROUND two edges of a college campus before leaving things behind entirely and going to a place that was row after row of houses that had clearly been constructed during the same time period.

I knew we were almost there when she began to slow down, and I waited patiently while she wedged her smaller vehicle in between two larger ones to hide it.

“That’s the house, there. The green one,” she said, pointing, and I watched her hand shake. She’d been quiet the entire way here, which had surprised me—lost in her own thoughts, probably worried about killing someone for the first time.

She was so different from all of my other clients, who were usually hellbent and monofocused on revenge.

“And that’s him,” she said, nodding sorrowfully, biting her own lips as a strong-jawed, dark-haired man got out of a truck that could’ve run over a moose. We watched him walk up the house’s front stair. “We’ll get him when he comes out, when it's darker.”

“You find him handsome?” I asked her, somewhat affronted.

That made her blink and look at me. She smudged a finger at the corner of her eye, streaking some of the blue eyeshadow she’d placed there, and I could see it taking a moment for her to remember why I’d asked. “No. I mean—objectively he is,” she said, returning her gaze to the house, where the occupant had let him inside. “But I prefer men who can perform addition.”

I waited an entire minute, listening to her anxious heart beat erratically, before stating, “I was there when they created the zero,” and had her stunned attention again. “As a mathematical concept.”

Her lips opened, her brow furrowed, and I watched the exact moment when she realized I was joking cross her face. She gave a manic laugh, then shook her head violently. “You’re not supposed to be making me laugh right now!”

“How should you know what one does before murders, if this is your first one?”

“I—just—” she sputtered, before regaining steam. “I was at an attempted murder once.”

“Hmm,” I said dismissively. “You’ll have to tell me about that later.” I watched the breeze blow through the underwatered ferns outside of Logan’s tutor’s house. “I love hearing about amateurs fucking up.”

She shrank back into the seat and huffed. “Yeah. Sure.”

17

MINA

I HAD THOUGHT I’d experienced some long stretches of time before—with the RRP guys, with Ella in the hospital after the crash, waiting at the police station to be deposed, and each week since July when I went to see Brad Kirk and got on my knees—but nothing really compared to sitting outside waiting for Logan, with the Nightmare beside me.

AKA Mister Smoke, or Sylas.

Who seemed to have a sense of humor.

I guess he had to, to survive being cooped up, for decades at a time.

“So what do you do in the hourglass?” I asked him, without taking my eyes off of the tutor’s front door. “Other than come up with dad jokes, I mean.”

He was quiet for so long that I almost looked over at him again—but I was so nervous about missing Logan’s exit I couldn’t risk it. If I didn’t know where Logan was right now, when I was this close to him, there was always the chance that he could lunge out at me, like a Jack-in-the-Box, and make me scream—or worse.

Again.

“Mostly?” he finally asked. “I’m angry. But I’ll tell you a secret, as long as you promise not to tell another soul.”

“Seeing as I’m dying in the next seven days, I feel pretty confident I can swear,” I said, with a snort. The sun had definitely fallen—streetlights were popping on, porch lights too, and because Sylas was himself dark, it felt like I was talking to an echo.

“And I believe you,” he granted me. “Especially seeing as I’ll be beside you for the rest of those days, and I can help you murder people with a cracked skull or broken arm just as well as I can without.”

“Lack of anger management, check,” I said, spinning my hand in the air beside my steering wheel, for him to get on with it.

He gave a low chuckle, then sobered. “It’s not just a prison for me, it’s a kind of punishment. You see—while Royce doesn’t like me very much, he does like to be prepared for my arrival. So he leaves the hourglass on his desk. Usually behind his monitor, where he can’t clearly see it, except for a glance every few days—but I can see out of it the entire time.” His voice paused then. “I can see the sun through the windows of his office, drifting through the clouds, but I cannot feel it heat me. I can watch the lights flicker on and off in the building next door, but I cannot feed from any of the people inside. I’ve seen thousands of airplanes fly overhead on their blinking tracks, but I can never take one—unless I make it crash.”

I chewed on the inside of my lower lip, momentarily distracted from the cause at hand—and then my phone buzzed.

“What was that?” Sylas asked.

I knew exactly who it was—the only person left alive who would bother to text me. “No one.”

I could feel the weight of his regard. “And you’re sure you don’t need to know what you were sent?”

“Did they even have cell phones when you were out last?” I asked, without giving him, or my phone, my full attention.

“I just told you I get to watch the world—and had nothing else to do, in fact.”

My phone buzzed again. Fucking Brad. Trust him to text me at the worst possible time, on the worst possible night. As if going toe-to-toe with Logan wasn’t bad enough. “I’m sorry, did you want me to cry for you or something?” I snapped at Sylas, whirling on him in the car to take out my frustration. “Because you also just admitted to mass homicide, again.”

His chin jerked, and I twisted back—to see Logan Whitmore leaving his tutoring session an hour and forty five minutes early.

Fucking hell. We were in prime UberEATS hours, and this location didn’t feel nearly as secluded currently as it had when I’d been casing it for the past few weeks.

“I think we should talk,” Sylas said.

“Now?” I said, my voice rising in panic.

This was all I’d wanted—it was what I’d paid my life for—but I was frozen, with my heart in my throat.

“Yes, now,” Sylas said, giving his fingers enough form that he could snap them—and outside the window I watched Logan freeze, mid-step. One of his legs was held up at an improbable angle and if the laws of gravity were to be obeyed he should have been falling forward, but he wasn’t—and I realized there was a car coming out of the driveway further down the street that had come to a halt, and that the leaves in the trees had stopped waving in the light breeze too.

“No fucking way,” I whispered.

“Pull up your sleeve and see.”

I did as I was told at once, and for the first time since I’d gotten the hourglass mark, the sand inside of it was still.

“I cannot stop time, but I can slow it down so much that I can give and take eternities. So now that you have time to talk—tell me what you want out of this night, my queen.”

I rocked back in my seat, finally believing him, catching a glimpse of the blue eyeshadow I’d put on in my reflection, and was instantly bombarded with memories.

“I—I—”

18

MINA

The Past

May 25th, 9:00 p.m.

“ELLA!” I shouted her name from the top of the stairs, waving frantically, hoping she’d see me.

She stuck out like a sore thumb, wearing a baggy white sweatshirt, amongst all the other girls who looked more like me, in dresses that could be more charitably called lingerie.

But somehow she saw me and waved back. I gestured her upstairs, and then watched her thread her way through the crowd. “This place is one hour away from an orgy or a horror movie, but I couldn’t tell you which” she said with a snort, before taking me in. “So it’s been like that, has it?”

“Is it that obvious?” I asked, raking my fingers through my hair.

“Depends!” she said with a grin. “Do you want me to lie to you, or tell you the truth?”

“Just lie for now, thanks,” I said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her into the room that Trent had assigned for us.

Ella looked around, with increasing concern. “Our chances of being in a horror movie just jumped up twenty percent.”

There was a lot of dark wood furniture jumbled up in the room, I’d give her that—probably everything the guys hadn’t wanted to get ruined from downstairs. “I wouldn’t play Ouija in here if you paid me,” I agreed with her. “But,” I said, locking the door from the inside. “This room is ours.” I showed her the key on its chain around my neck. “Trent said so.”

“Which would explain why it smells like sex,” Ella said, giving me a wicked look from underneath her bright blue eyeshadow.

“You’re supposed to be lying to me right now, remember?” I lightly complained, pulling out my phone to look at myself in my camera.

“You look fine. I was just giving you shit.” She reached for my wrist and pulled it down, taking half of my anxiety with her.

Ella was my emotional support person.

I had no idea how I’d ever function without her.

I took a deep breath. “I know. It’s just, that—” I began, but then didn’t need to finish my sentence because she’d heard it all before.

All of the other RRP guys’ girlfriends were gazelles, when I felt like a zebra on a good day, and a donkey on a bad one.

They were all moneyed and graceful, got blowouts, and always had nice nails. They weren’t bad people, and some of them were really smart—even occasionally friendly!—it was just hard to be around them without playing the comparison game.

The thing was, I’d understand why Trent was with me, if I looked like they did and had a last name that dripped generational wealth. But because I didn’t—while it was fun to pretend to be a princess some of the time—it was a lot easier to feel like a princess when I wasn’t around literal goddesses.

And, not for the first time, I wondered if I just had a magic vagina.

Honestly, it was the easiest way to explain things.

“Are you wondering if you have a magic vagina again?” Ella asked.

I inhaled to lie, half a second too late—she was already laughing.

“I should’ve never told you that!”

“No, you shouldn’t have!” she agreed, snickering. “I’ve gotta work tomorrow. So you get three drinks, Missy.”

“It’s not work if they don’t pay you,” I teased. Ella was always volunteering at the local zoo, giving tours to elementary school kids. “We both know you’d pay them, just to get to hang out with the animals.”

There was a loud knock at the door. Ella and I both jumped, and then whoever was outside tried the handle, but found it locked.

“Maybe they’re just looking for a bathroom?” I guessed quietly—while Ella raised her hand and hacked her empty fist up and down in front of her chest, in the international signal for “it’s a murderer with a knife—run.”

I made a face at her, unlocked the door, and opened it up to find Logan standing outside. “Yo, Mina, Ella.” He was as tall as Trent was, and broader than a barn door. He always looked like he was ready to go off half-cocked—I suspected he’d been on ’roids since he was fifteen.

“Hey, Logan,” I said, giving him a companionable nod.

He answered it with a frown. “Trent said it was my job to serve you both tonight.”

Ella’s nose wrinkled like a bunny. “Uh, no thank you!”

“I can get my own drinks, Logan, but thanks.”

And Logan—he didn’t look relieved at being let off the hook, like he should’ve, you know?

Instead he looked concerned, and as I moved to close the door again, he stuck his foot in the way. “Please?” he asked, looking vastly pained to do so.

I assumed he was currying favor with Trent, so he couldn’t back down, but now, in hindsight—I knew.

How couldn’t I have seen it at the time?

“Define serve?” I asked him, accidentally dooming us both, opening up the door.

He made a show of looking us both up and down. “Mostly in the bartender sense. Because one of you belongs to Trent, and the other I’m not into.”

Ella gave me a disparaging glance, before huffing a sigh. “I’m sorry he’s not into you, Mina,” she said, flinging up both of her hands, miming innocence.

I rolled my eyes and stuck my tongue out briefly at her, before returning to the younger guy. “I’m not Trent’s truck, Logan. I don’t belong to anybody.”

“Yeah, well, he calls you his lamb, so—”

And that was the other thing about the RRP wolves. Their girlfriends were called lambs, I think short for lambda, a shout out to some other sorority that’d been more popular on campus once upon a time—and while I was okay with Trent calling me that occasionally, I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of the matching sweatshirts some of the other RRP girls had with cute little cartoon baby sheep on them.

Then again, none of those other girls would’ve ever asked me if I wanted one.

“You do have an ass like a dump truck,” Ella told me, sounding suddenly reasonable. I whirled on her, and she started laughing at once. “It’s a compliment! You could put Wide Load on that thing!”

I groaned, and then started laughing too. “Not helping!”

Logan looked as confused as a dog whose owner had faked throwing a ball. “So can I get you both something to drink or what?”

“I will take whatever the hell is in that punchbowl you were working on earlier,” I said, before pretending to glare at Ella. “And she will have water.”

“Or Diet Coke!” Ella piped up.

Logan just shook his head and then disappeared back down the stairs, I assumed heading in the direction of the kitchen.

“What even was that?” Ella asked, once he was out of range.

“I don’t know.” It was hard to parse out what was dumb shit unique to Trent’s frat lifestyle, and guys giving other guys hard times just because they could. “Lowkey hazing?”

“I’m gonna make him get me twenty waters in that case,” she said with a grin. “Shall we mingle?” she asked, with a slight British accent, like we were in a Regency-era show.

“Oh yes,” I proclaimed, similarly, with fake enthusiasm, only my accent sounded more like Julia Child’s. “Let’s.”

THE CABIN already had all the makings of a rowdy party. The storm hadn’t let up, so there was no place for people to disperse outside. RRP seemed to have brought up plenty of kegs, guessing from everyone’s red Solo cups, and the mix of guys to girls was good—plus, it was almost the end of the school year. Plenty of kids were here just to have one last pre-graduation huzzah.

That energy—a desperation almost—combined with the liquor, and the still unseen DJ’s frantic beat—its chaos called to me. I had nothing in common with most of the people in here, but I didn’t feel like I needed to.

I just had to let go.

“Here!” Logan announced, finding us again in the throng, somehow managing to hold three drinks in his hands, our two, punch and water, and his own, which looked like beer. We each took ours, and he shouted, “Bottom’s up!” at us, over the fray.

Ella and I watched him in semi-stunned horror, as he did just that, chugging his entire cup.

“Your liver, my dude,” Ella said, while I took an involuntary step back, and into someone else.

The only place there was any space left in the entire cabin was the makeshift dance floor the guys had created in the living room, by moving every other piece of furniture that was left against a wall—and there were girls on the fireplace’s stone hearth, using the extra six inches of height and their heels to give their fellow dancers a show.

I wanted that for me.

Not to get eyeballed or groped—unlikely, seeing as Trent was here, somewhere—but just to let loose and be free. And I didn’t need alcohol for that.

“Can you hold this for me?” I asked Ella, handing my cup over. She nodded, taking a sip of her water.

“Three songs. Then I’ll take a break with you, all right? And if you ditch me, I know where I’ll find you,” I said, pointing upstairs to the room.

She nodded strongly, with a grin. “Go have a good time!” she shouted, and I waved as I moved back into the crowd. I felt it swallow me whole, and I started to dance.

I had some self-esteem problems. I was one of those parentally neglected kids, who wound up uncertain if it was better to be seen or ignored. I’d wanted to be popular in high school, but I’d also been aware that it was like a livewire that I wouldn’t be able to hold onto—which was why I distrusted this thing with Trent now—but maybe my distrust was me knowing something was wrong all along?

Like my being with him was an abstract monster in an indie horror flick—something slow moving, but also something inexorable, that I was utterly unable to stop.

In a crowd, though—the right kind of crowd—I felt safe.

On the dance floor, if we were all moving, I could be part of something bigger, without wondering if it was embarrassing. I could feel like what it seemed it was like to go to church, from the outside, or maybe a Taylor Swift show—just as long as the vibe was right.

I didn’t have to be myself anymore, I could just be the thing the music made of me, as I let it run through my body.

“Hey, you,” I heard growled behind me. I was grabbed by one strong arm, and I squealed, knowing Trent was there.

“My boyfriend might see!” I warned the boyfriend in question and heard him laugh, as I spun to face him.

“Having fun?” he asked, as I looped my arms around his neck, and we ground up on each other to the beat, him with one arm still around me and a claiming hand upon my ass.

“Actually? Yes,” I answered truthfully, while craning around his shoulder to glance at Ella. She was chatting with Logan—a thing I could not believe. Then she caught me looking and gave me a cheerful “What the fuck?” expression of disbelief, as Trent moved us both, blocking my view of her completely.

“How are you?” I leaned up on my tiptoes to ask him. “Are the RRP gods happy?” I was well aware there were seniors in charge of things—for all I knew Trent was having to bartend for one of their girls.

“So far so good,” he said with a smile. “When I left the beer pong tables in the back, everyone was being well behaved. And it’s still raining—makes it harder to catch things on fire.”

I laughed. “I cannot believe you even have to factor that into your equation.”

“Me either,” he said, shaking his head ruefully, before moving to catch my mouth with his own. He didn’t taste like beer or pussy, but he didn’t need to; his attention was intoxicating. “Want to drink?” he said, offering me the cup he held, when I came up for air.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” I asked, taking it from him. “You know a drunk Mina just wants to wrestle.”

“One of the guys found a Twister game at a garage sale—I’m counting on you to win it.”

I laughed, took a big sip of the pink concoction, and then winced. “Saint fuck, how much alcohol is in that?”

“Enough for you to take Nolan on,” Trent swore with a tease, naming the biggest friend in his crew. “I’m going to bet a ton of money on you winning later.”

“Wrestling isn’t Twister.”

“It is when it happens inside of an inflatable pool full of Jell-O.”

My eyes widened. “You wouldn’t . . . would you?” Trent laughed, and I made a show of looking around in mock panic. “Where’s Ella? I’m going home!”

He squeezed me harder to keep me there, and I squealed with laughter.

“You know I don’t want the other guys to see you,” he purred against my ear.

“Just hear me, huh?” I said, purring back, remembering earlier in the night.

I didn’t know it then, but that was our last perfect moment together. Before the story of my life started tearing into two, like prior to that it’d been written on a stretched out scroll, now sliced down the middle, one half-moving on, living the life I could’ve had if I’d never known—and the other half the timeline I was stuck on, frayed and curling off into the darkness, wondering just how the fuck I was going to manage living with myself for the rest of my time.

At that moment though, a thrill ran through me, feeling possessed by him—fuck it, maybe I was a truck after all—and then I pushed him away. “You know, if you and Nolan wanted to wrestle in Jell-O, I can promise you there’d be an audience for that.”

Trent laughed, palmed my ass again, and then let me go. “Finish that, and I’ll find you later,” he said, leaving my new drink with me.

I TOOK it to the edge of the living room, and when I didn’t see Ella there, I went with my first guess and headed back upstairs.

“Ella?” I asked, knocking on the door. She didn’t answer me—but I tried the handle, it was locked, from the inside. I held my cup with my teeth and unlooped the key so that I could use it—the party was so loud, maybe she hadn’t heard me? And maybe she was reasonably pissed, because I was pretty sure I’d been grinding on Trent for longer than three songs.

When I got the door open, she was inside, but on the floor, sprawled out like a drawing around a crime victim, one arm up, one knee up, like she’d been swimming to the bed.

“Oh fuck, Ella!” I shouted, dropping the cup I’d brought up with me, its pink contents spilling on the ancient hardwood floor. “Get up!” I said, shaking her, then went into full pre-med mode, peeling her eyelids up to make sure her pupils weren’t blown, and feeling for her pulse.

She’d gotten in here alone. She’d locked the door. Her clothes were all on.

What the fuck?

And then I felt a wave of wooziness.

Like someone was starting to pull a dream over me. I fought it, clinging to my brain cells, even as I felt them beginning to shut off, one by one.

Then I spotted her cup on the nightstand by the bed—and felt my heels sticking to the drink I’d been given, now all over the floor.

I fell to my knees, in horror, and because the ability to control myself was quickly departing my body.

I might’ve had a “dump truck” now—but I hadn’t always had one. In fact, in high school, I’d spent six months being bulimic, thinking that if I just got skinny enough, life would be easier on me. So with my last remaining remnants of consciousness, I stuck a finger down my throat and barfed up my pink drink, where it spattered on Ella’s white sweatshirt as I started to sink to the ground. I watched her breathe beside me until I was there and not there both at once, my ability to think and act swirling away like water down a drain.

The last thing I remembered was Logan coming in, and squatting down to look at both of us, making a disgusted face at the scent of my stomach acid. “God, your girl’s a lightweight,” he said, and I heard Trent answer.

“Don’t call her my girl.”

19

SYLAS

I HELD TIME, waiting for Mina to come up with her words.

“I—I want him to pay,” she breathed, eventually, looking up at me with dark, soulful eyes. There were tears shimmering inside them, tears that should’ve belonged to me, and I wanted him to pay, too. The wheels inside my mind were already turning.

“Go to him,” I urged her, releasing my control on time itself. “Speak your piece.”

She looked frightened still, but made an “Uh-huh” sound, and gave a quick nod. Then she panted thrice, and got out of the car, slamming its door hard enough behind her to attract the boy’s attention as I released time back to its prior course.

“Logan!” she shouted, and he paused, squinting at her, until he realized who she was, and his bearing changed.

“Oh, Christ—Mina—what the fuck?”

The second his attention was on her, she changed—and I realized my little lamb wasn’t afraid of killing him, as I had assumed for the entire past day.

She was afraid of the man himself.

I suddenly understood so much more about her.

I solidified myself next to her, but only for her to see. “Go on,” I urged, and after a moment she took two steps forward.

“Do you remember this?” she said, plucking at the stained sweatshirt she had on.

“No. Why should I?” He cast his head up to the heavens before dropping his backpack to the ground. “Stop trying to fuck up my life—I almost lost a scholarship because of you.”

“Fuck up your life?” Mina said, her tone arcing up in disbelief, and finding strength in her anger. “And a scholarship? I lost my best friend!”

“I’m calling my lawyer, and then I’m calling the police,” the man said, pulling out his phone. “Stop stalking me, you dumb whore,” he said as an afterthought, without even looking up to see the effect his words had on her, and that was enough for me.

I snapped my fingers and the man exploded, spattering into bits in all directions, clothing and all.

Mina—now covered in gore—looked aghast at me, as she wiped the remains of her former classmate off her face with a sleeve, smearing her blue eyeshadow along with it.

“Don’t throw up,” I counseled her.

“I’m not going to—because if I open my mouth too wide I might taste him!” she hissed at me. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“He was insolent. And we came here to murder him, did we not?” I pressed, then sighed. “Fine.” I snapped again, assembling the man back together. He was inside the shadow of a tree, in the dark, and Mina looked at me, and herself—her white sweatshirt now free of bloodstains, just the solitary splash of pink remaining—before running up to him, to pummel him with both her hands.

“I hate you! I hate you and you deserve this! Fuck you and fuck your scholarship and fuck your lawyers!” she shouted, loudly enough for lights in houses across the street to turn on. She didn’t notice this though, lost to her frenzy of attacking the man I’d recreated for her—and then she paused for long enough to realize that he wasn’t responding, as I came up to her side.

“What . . . the fuck,” she said, with a low voice, like the bottom of her stomach had just fallen out.

“I don’t have any practice putting people back together,” I said. I’d done a rather shoddy job of it, because I’d reassembled him clothing and all, so he looked like a strange doll, half meat and bones, but with threads of fabric going into him and jutting back out. I noted a dark mark on his chest, over his heart, but I couldn’t tell what it’d been before I’d shattered him. “And in any case, I cannot reanimate the dead.”

Difficult emotions flowed across her face, too quickly for me to attempt to fathom. “I wanted him to know it was me!”

“Well, you didn’t say that,” I told her. “But you were the last thing he saw, my queen. And they will find a body.” I relaxed my hold on the man’s form, and he fell into his recently created constituent bits.

“That looks like it went through a wood chipper!” Mina said, pointing at his remains with an outstretched arm. “This was not a chance for you to do a Fargo impersonation!”

I had no idea what that even meant, but I could sense she was on the verge of tearing up again. Perhaps this time from frustration—but it absolutely would not do.

I swept up a portion of the man’s blood onto my fingers, then returned to her with it, pressing them against her lips.

“What are you doing?” she whispered behind my fingertips.

“Giving you communion, Mina,” I said, making myself darker than the shadows behind me. “You’re dying in six days. Take this from me.”

I wanted what she wanted—these pathetic men dead—but I wanted her to take their deaths from them in glory.

I didn’t want her crying again until she was crying for me.

I watched her gaze harden, as she found resolve to fully follow through on this path that she had already chosen, and her lips parted, letting my fingers in to taste the blood upon them.

“Don’t throw up, my queen,” I said again, and she nodded, sucking on my fingertips as her commitment grew, and I was so tempted to let myself grow claws inside her mouth. “That’s it. Swallow. Get a taste for it. There’s so much more to come.”

20

MINA

WAS I A CANNIBAL NOW?

Or just a vampire?

I drove Sylas and myself home in shock—I forgot to put my headlights on until someone else on the road flashed theirs at me. I’d gotten what I wanted, but not quite the way I’d wanted it—I think I’d hoped there would be more groveling on Logan’s part, and gloating on mine? But I hadn’t told Sylas that, and I honestly wasn’t really a gloat-er.

What I wanted, I realized, seeing Logan there again, and being as close to him as I’d ever been since that one night in May, was my old life back.

Which was never going to happen.

It made going through all of these motions rather futile feeling—except for the knowledge that somehow I’d be depriving them of all of their lives too.

My phone buzzed in my back pocket—another text from Brad, no doubt—and I wanted to throw it out the window.

“Why should he have recognized what you were wearing?” Sylas asked.

Of course Logan hadn’t recognized Ella’s sweatshirt on me.

Because to do that, he would’ve had to care.

Suddenly I felt a lot less bad that Sylas had chopped him into hamburger.

“Did you get to actually feed on him?” I deflected, rather than answer.

“Not fully, no,” the Nightmare beside me said with a shrug. “But there will be more where that came from, once word gets out. I very much like the news programming in your era.” He sounded so confident as to be almost smug. “Assuming you let me feed from people’s ambient fears, that is. We could go to one of your parks again tomorrow, or even a grocery store would do.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, shaking my head.

Logan’s death still didn’t feel real—even though I could taste his blood in my mouth. I’d be worried about getting some disease from him if I weren’t so certain I was dying soon myself.

“We could also drive back there tomorrow,” Sylas continued. “Revisit the scene of the crime. People will be picking pieces of him out of the grass for days.”

I made a face. I didn’t want to think about whoever’s job that was going to be. I did wonder how much of him, his juices and what not, were seeping into the soil right now though. Maybe things would grow better in that one patch of lawn in the future, because of him.

It might be the first positive thing he’d done in his whole life.

“And for what it’s worth, you did well,” Sylas said—and I was so surprised I veered into another lane. His hand whipped out, grabbed the steering wheel, and pulled us back before I had a chance to process anything. “No dying before your time.”

There was no one else currently out on the road, so I pulled over.

“What do you mean?”

“I get to be the one to kill you. You’re not allowed to have accidents, or for that matter, commit suicide.”

“Is . . . that a thing that happens? When people hire you?”

“Attempts, occasionally.” His tone was casual, matter-of-fact, and I shook my head to clear it.

“Before that—you know I’m not looking for murder grades from you, right?”

His form condensed and I could’ve sworn I watched him sigh. “I’m here to help you, Mina. That’s all. We both have the same goals, up until you die.”

He had been true to his word.

Exactingly.

“Okay, so—how should this work in the future?” I asked, gesturing to the space between us.

His eyes—or the spaces they would be if he had them—grew darker, and his whole bearing became more intense. “Be precise. Tell me exactly what you want, and I will do my best to give it to you. You have an imagination, don’t you?”

I frowned. “Yes, of course. But I don’t use it like that.”

“Sure you do. You watch your television, you read your books. You don’t lack for thoughts of murder and mayhem in your daily life. What you have lacked thus far is the ability to act, and opportunity.”

I let his words hang between us in my car. I wanted to tell him, “No, I’m not really like this,” but I couldn’t really, after watching Logan burst. “What do most people murder for?” I asked instead, pulling my car back on the road.

Sylas considered this. “Love. Hate. A hate that they think is love. An inability to see themselves in a future they believe is unavoidable—like you, I think.”

“I don’t disagree.” I wrung the steering wheel a little.

“You could tell me about it, you know,” he offered. “Whatever they did to you. I’d prefer it in fact. I’d like their deaths to be as traumatizing as possible.”

I snorted. “Yeah, I think the only person you damaged with Logan’s death was me, unless you whispered, ‘You’re going to do an impression of microwave popcorn’ into his ear before exploding him.”

“True.” Sylas gave a low chuckle. “But most of my clientele talk more. They’ve never had anyone interested in their stories before, and I am forced to be a rapt audience.”

I bit my lips shut—and felt my phone buzz again. Fuck.

“Well, I’m the reverse of that. I’ve told my story so often that I don’t want to hear it anymore. Not even from myself.”

We were quiet the final drive into my apartment complex, and I let us in—well, just me, and Sylas just seeped around the door’s edges to wait for me inside.

“I’m going to shower, brush my teeth, throw that toothbrush away on principle, take some sleeping aids and pass the fuck out,” I announced, leaving him behind in my apartment’s entryway. “See you in the morning. We can go cruise grocery stores for you then, and I can get a new toothbrush.”

Sylas didn’t fight me on any of this, and I did exactly what I said I was going to do—it wasn’t until all the Benadryl and melatonin I’d taken had almost hit that I had a realization about our earlier conversation.

I was pretty sure Sylas had been admitting that he was lonely.

21

MINA

The Past

May 26th, 1:45 a.m.

I WOKE IN A DARK ROOM, on the floor, and not entirely in control of all of my faculties—and the first thing I did was check for Ella, throwing an arm out to the last place I’d seen her at my side.

She wasn’t there; all I felt was the stickiness of my own vomit.

I sat up slowly, panting, the taste of my puke still on my tongue—had I barfed enough up to stop from ingesting what they’d spiked me with? I’d only had that one glug on the dance floor—and—where was Ella?

I only barely stopped myself from calling out for her, but I knew I couldn’t let them know I was awake.

My last memory of Trent flashed in my mind like a shiny penny falling into a dark pond.

If I wasn’t his girl, then what was Ella to him?

Fuck!

I dragged myself up the frame of the bed that Trent had eaten me out on.

It was my fault Ella was here.

But where was she?

I knew where the door was, because I could see light leaking around its edges, so I staggered that direction. I tried the handle ever so slowly—but it was locked, this time from the outside.

Where else could I go?

I tried to remember the layout of the furniture on the far side of the room, and walked over there with all the care I could manage—not much—before stubbing a toe on what was, I realized after I patted it down, probably an end table.

But behind it and other furniture, I could make out a window in the wall, letting a little bit of moonlight in.

I grabbed hold of the end table and pulled, wincing as it scraped against the wooden floor. That got me a little closer—and my shins helped me find a chair as I patted the air in front of me.

I moved it, and then another, and another, and crawled up onto a low dresser, to open the window and look outside.

The chilly night air helped wake me up at once. I was still dizzy if I moved too fast, and my stomach wasn’t sure if its remaining contents wanted to come up or not, but my ability to think was clearing.

Which meant that as soon as I looked around, I realized that jumping two stories down to rescue my friend was an incredibly bad idea.

I pushed my head further out the window though, taking big gulps of fresh air, praying that it would make me smarter—when I turned and saw a trellis covered in heavy ivy to my right.

Was it as old as the rest of the cabin seemed to be and made of the same heavy wood?

Or was it a Home Depot special, likely to peel off the wall and kill me when it fell?

There was only one way to find out. I took off my heels, put their straps in my teeth, reached for it and I—

22

MINA

The Present

“MINA,” I heard, just as I was about to grab hold of the trellis. I woke up, and I knew Sylas was in the room with me.

“Were you just watching me sleep?”

“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he confessed. My room was dark now, and I didn’t have any idea where his voice was coming from. “You were having a nightmare again. Do you have them often?”

I frowned. It wasn’t a nightmare . . . yet.

But sometimes, yeah, it was—I’d grab hold of the trellis, ivy and all, and then have to climb up like I was Jack on the Beanstalk, only I’d never, ever get to anywhere.

Other times I’d reach out, climb aboard, and the ivy would just eat me whole.

I could still remember what’d really happened. How I’d gotten splinters as long as my fingernails into the bottoms of my feet and—

“Mina?” Sylas asked again, sounding concerned.

I turned over, pulling my pillow over my face to shout, “Go away!” at him from beneath it.

He didn’t leave. I could feel his presence.

Waiting.

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” I said, with a muffled sound.

“Fine. Have it your way,” he said. “Just know that I’ll lick the next man’s memories out of his skull before I kill him.”

I removed the pillow and sat up. “What?”

“When people are close to death, their lives become liminal things—like dreams almost. And then I can read them, if I want.” Each phrase of his statement came from different parts of the room, like he was everywhere at the same time—or like he was speaking with different parts of himself. “And when you are dying in my arms,” he went on, “I will be able to read you, too. So you might as well tell me.”

I pulled my knees into my chest. I just had a T-shirt and underwear on so I made sure my sheets were hitched high—then again, Sylas had probably been around since before the invention of bras. “Are you saying you can read my dreams?”

“I am a Nightmare, after all.”

“Then shouldn’t you want me to have them?” Nothing about this moment with him was making sense.

“No. I only like it when I am hurting you. But you, my queen, are not allowed to hurt yourself.”

I wiped my hands against my face. “This is like the world’s strangest therapy,” I said, and he laughed—it washed around my bedroom like a tide. “Just let me have a few things to myself, Sylas.”

“Fine then—when the dawn comes, what else shall we talk about?” He rattled the blinds like he was looking outside, even though I couldn’t see him. “It looks like a fine season for you to die in. Shall we speak of the weather? Or, maybe we’ll watch TV?” The small television in the corner of my room turned on, but only to show static—which should’ve been impossible, because I only used it for streaming. “Which show would you like to be your last? Did you have anything you needed to polish off, that was worth spending one of your final handful of hours on Earth on?” The contents of my desk were next—he scattered the papers, notes from my stalking mostly, all around like a stiff breeze. “Should you write your parents a letter, or call them?”

“I get what you’re doing,” I said with a frown. I already knew that every moment I was experiencing now legitimately was, with absolute certainty, one of the last I would have. “But my parents are dead.”

He paused in his poltergeisting. “Aunts, uncles, cousins?”

“Not really. No one worth baring my soul too, at least. It was just me—and her,” I said, jerking my chin towards Ella’s empty room.

“And would she want you doing this?”

“Isn’t it a little too late now, to be asking?” I gave a shallow laugh. “No, I have your number now, Mister Smoke. I’m the only toy you have to play with.” I knew I was right by the silence he surrounded me with. “You’re so omnipotent, but in the end, there’s only you and me, and after I go away, you have to go back to be alone in your sandbox inside the hourglass, just like one of the toddlers at the play park.”

I could feel his attention on me, but otherwise the room was so quiet you could’ve heard a pin drop.

And then my phone buzzed.

My teeth ground at once. “Are you kidding me?” I asked, snatching it up off my nightstand, to finally go through all the texts Brad Kirk had sent me. I scrolled and scrolled—it looked like he’d been counting off prime numbers of eggplants until I responded.

But I didn’t need his fucking key card anymore.

“Are you still hungry?” I asked the room at large, wondering if Sylas would respond.

To my surprise, he condensed at once, so close it made me jump. “Always.”

I flung my sheets off my bed—and they went right through him. “Give me five minutes, and then we’ll ride.”

23

SYLAS

MINA WAS PISSED, and I loved it.

She was pacing around her room, muttering to herself, scrabbling for clothing on her floor—she didn’t even care if I saw the bare white of her legs. I found myself disappointed by her lack of shame; I didn’t like my presence being forgotten, but I was willing to forgive her anything for the sheer energy she radiated now. Frustration, anger, sorrow, and yes, a tinge of fear—but more than anything else she was active, and that’s what I wanted.

To live.

Not watch someone sleep.

And not just wait for someone to die, when there were so many people that needed killing.

I coalesced inside her car before she got there, then when she looked at me she tossed her phone into my lap. I caught it—she’d opened the screen for me—and she had her keys, but she didn’t have her purse.

“Text that asshole back that he’d better meet me in the alley behind our regular place,” she announced, and hit the accelerator, reversing out of her parking spot.

“Why has he sent you so many of these purple fruits?” I asked, texting as commanded, before scrolling back to see all of their messages. Their relationship seemed odd—every few days he would send one of these images to her, and she would respond with a thumbs up.

It went back like that for months.

I decided to not distract her while she was driving, intensely curious where this thing would go, and soon enough we were driving through narrower roads, in between old brick buildings, in a less dense part of town, until she pulled to a sudden stop, throwing her parking brake on.

And from a door in the building in front of her, a man walked out.

He was short, built squarely, and was holding a pillow of some sort underneath one arm.

“Hey, Mina,” he said, giving her a bright grin. She hadn’t turned her headlights off, as she got out of the car.

“Brad,” she said, the lines of her body tense.

“I’m glad you could fit me into your busy schedule,” he said, raking his eyes over her body. “Rocking the au naturel look. I like it.” He seemed overly acquainted with her form, and I wanted to eat one of his eyes at once—and I would make him watch me do so, with his remaining one.

She crossed her arms beneath the breasts that he enjoyed. “I’m going to give you one chance to apologize.”

“For what?”

She didn’t answer him. “I’m counting down from ten. Ten. Nine.”

He made a baffled face. “I assumed this’d be a quickie.”

“Eight. Seven.”

“What the fuck, Mina?” he said and laughed.

Her counting was undeterred. “Six. Five,” she said, and my anticipation mounted, hoping I knew where this was going. “Four.”

“Are you threatening me?” he asked. “If so—with what?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Three.”

“Does this mean you don’t need my library access anymore?” he asked, then showed her the object he’d brought. It appeared to be a chair cushion. “I brought this for your knees.”

“Two!” she almost shouted. “Do you really think you don’t have anything to apologize for?”

“I was helping you out!” he protested, like she was the unreasonable one. “I told you I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t! You wanted access to the vaults, I had it, sheesh.”

“No, Bradley.” I heard her swallow beside me. Mina looked around her, presumably for me, and I felt a flash of pride. “Sylas?”

“Yes, my queen.” I made sure to say the words so that he could hear them—and his fear piqued in an instant.

“He’s yours.”

I condensed into a very visible creature of claws and violence, letting myself see the glowing threads of irrevocable fate picking up between him and I at once. “Oh, we’re going to have so much fun.”

There was a delicious pause wherein he realized what was happening, and then he started howling as I advanced. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I helped you!” he said, throwing the sad little pillow at me. It bounced off my side, and then caught on fire, because I wanted it to. “You’re not through counting!” he sobbed, and I paused mid-lurch, waiting on Mina’s behest.

“Oh, I’m fucking done,” she said. “Because if you’d really wanted to help me out, you could’ve just loaned me your access card, like a person.”

That was all I needed. I swept him up inside my smoke and made him disappear.

24

MINA

AND SUDDENLY I was alone in the alley behind the library sciences building on campus, with a flaming chair cushion.

I checked my phone for the time. I’d been responsible for three deaths in roughly forty-eight hours. I couldn’t remember if that made me a serial killer or a mass murderer, but whichever it was, I was owning it.

Then Sylas reappeared, looming nearby again, his hands full of claws and mouth full of teeth, looking pleased with himself.

“You may not feel it, but I was gone for quite some time—and I came up with a gift for you. Close your eyes.”

I gawked at him, and then did what I was told.

“Now, open them,” he commanded, a millisecond later—and my hand flew over my mouth.

“What—is—that?” I whispered at a high pitch. He’d sliced up Brad’s liver like a strawberry at a fancy restaurant, splaying it out like a magician offering someone cards, over a sigil of intestines in the shape of a—

“It is an eggplant!” he exclaimed, floating slightly above the fragrant mess.

“Yeah, it is,” I squeaked. It was one percent sweet, and ninety-nine percent disgusting.

“At first I thought he merely liked Italian food,” Sylas went on, as I started stomping out the burning cushion with my boot. “But if I had known what was in his mind before the end, my queen, I would’ve made his death take even longer.”

I looked up at him. “What?”

“I told you I would read the thoughts of the next man I killed. And you did not tell me not to, so,” he said, with a casual shrug, like we both currently wouldn’t look like Satanic emoji enthusiasts to an untrained eye.

And then his attention lingered on me, just like I knew it would, if he knew any part of what had happened.

Oh God—he’d read Nolan’s mind next.

“Stop that,” I told him.

“What?” he asked.

“You know what.” I stomped the smoking cushion with renewed purpose. “I wouldn’t have even known about you if I hadn’t given blow jobs to him, so get off your high horse, Mister.”

“Seeing as I can fly, I do not need to ride a horse,” he said solemnly, and I glanced over, unable to tell whether he was being truthful or trying to be funny again, till he continued. “And I gathered that many of your classmates think dark things about you, my queen.”

“You could say that,” I agreed, as the fire finally went out, leaving goopy remnants of plastic stuck to the bottom of my shoe.

“So you might as well give them a reason to.”

I straightened and looked at him. He was far more interested in looking me in the eyes than at my chest. I appreciated that, then realized how sad that was.

What was that joke about the bar for men being so low it’s in hell?

Maybe that’s why it was easier for a demon—or whatever the fuck Sylas was—to surmount it, because it was there all the time.

“Look, I appreciate this,” I said, gesturing to what remained of Brad, “but, you’ve gotta get rid of it. It’s artistic as fuck, but it’ll just pull attention from what I’m trying to do, elsewhere.”

“Understood,” Sylas said, and it all disappeared.

“Did you, uh, get enough to eat?” I put my hands into the pockets of my jeans and rocked back and forth.

“I did, for now,” he said, lowering himself in size, until he wasn’t too much taller than I was and I didn’t have to look up so hard to see him. “Have you?” he asked, cordially.

I realized I hadn’t eaten a single thing today—other than that lick of Logan earlier in the evening. “Not really.”

“Is there someplace we can go to, then, that you might?”

I inhaled, suddenly unable to speak or move from the spot I was on.

It could’ve been the fact that someone who’d just shown me the slices of a man’s liver was asking if I was hungry, and the moment was too Hannibal Lecter to bear—or it was the fact that I couldn’t imagine someone being kind to me, without having an ulterior motive.

Like hurting me, or my best friend, or taking advantage of my situation.

But Sylas was merely hovering there, calmly waiting for me to make up my mind.

Being nice to me?

No.

It was pity—an emotion I was quite familiar with receiving, from how everyone treated me after my parents had died.

And I didn’t want that from him—or from anyone.

It was one of the reasons I wanted to be in control and have power now, so I didn’t have to tolerate anyone feeling sorry for me, ever again.

So I held up a finger before I spoke next. “Just so we’re clear though,” I said, “I would’ve sucked a thousand dicks if it would stand Ella up from her hospital bed.”

Sylas momentarily diffused. “Heal her? What do you mean? I thought she was dead.”

I stared through him into the mess of my life that was my past. “She—she might as well be.” She would never get better. Her parents had told me that at least, before they’d served me papers.

“Then I want to meet her,” he said, coming near.

“Good luck,” I muttered with a frown, scraping my boots on the asphalt to get the burnt cushion off their soles. “The nursing facility where she’s at won’t let me in.”

“My queen, since when have doors mattered to me? Or for that matter, locks?”

I looked up at him, feeling a faint flicker of hope for the first time in months.

I really did want to see Ella before I died.

Even knowing, if she were awake, she’d tell me to get my head out of my ass and stay alive. “I know a 24/7 place we can order takeout.”

“Then I will meet you in your car,” Sylas said—and flew the ten feet over to do just that, grinning at me from my passenger seat because he’d just made the whole situation faintly ridiculous.

And against my will and better judgment, I found myself smiling back.

25

SYLAS

NOW THAT I knew more of Mina’s past, gaining her trust was going to be so easy.

She was like a houseplant no one had paid attention to for years, barely clinging to life, with half a root and one functional leaf—and all I had to do was water her with a precise titration of attention. Care. To handle her like a high-spirited horse, yet as gently as when working on the inner workings of a spring wound clock.

She had been right about me, earlier, and that was annoying—my life would be forced to mirror hers, right up until I ended it, and there had been moments in the past when the people who’d hired me had been tedious enough that I hastened their execution to escape them.

But I could tell there was promise inside her.

All I had to do was lure it out.

I had the patience for the task at hand now though, especially knowing it would make my final conquering of her so much sweeter.

Because I had been able to torture that shallow human—Brad—in one of my dimensions for hours.

He was certain that Mina was a liar and that she had gotten what was coming to her, and I’d kept him so near death for so long he’d been utterly unable to lie.

But I knew I was only hearing his part of the story, second-hand and once removed.

What he experienced first-hand, however . . . the memories of him fisting himself into her mouth, again and again, had made me drive my own fist down his throat, until he was gagging on my arm up to the elbow, and I was searching around inside his chest with my hand until I found and crushed his heart.

It was nothing after that to paint him into a pretty picture for Mina. As my current employer, she deserved nothing less than my total adoration, until I betrayed her, seconds before her own oblivion.

And I would stretch those out for as long as my powers let me, savoring each sad twitch of her brow, the deepening furrow between the peaks of her top lip, and the fountains of tears I drank from her eyes, until she had nothing left and all of her was mine, within me, for eternity.

I did remember everyone who had hired me since Bannerman Senior had trapped me in my hourglass. He’d given me that, at least, a wretchedly horrible way to count my days. So in that way, she would live longer than the Sphinx or Mona Lisa—little did my bleating lamb know that she, inside of me, her memories forever imprinted in my mind, would watch the heat death of the universe.

But right now, she was just eating fries by the handful and slurping down a milkshake in a parking lot.

“Did you want any?” she asked, offering the first to me, and then the second.

“I am good,” I told her, meaning it utterly. “Thanks.”

26

MINA

“GOOD MORNING, MY QUEEN,” said a masculine voice when I woke up. It was daylight outside, I could see stripes of light between the blinds, but I couldn’t tell where Sylas was.

“Hey,” I said back, and wiped the sleep from my eyes. It was too early for conversation—and in hindsight, I was lucky to be alive, because after all the sleep aids I’d taken last night, it was a miracle I hadn’t wrecked my car at any point after we’d left to go find Brad.

When I remembered what we’d done to him, I took a moment to check in with myself, letting everything that’d happened sink in.

We’d murdered two people . . . and I felt surprisingly okay with that fact.

Then I remembered Sylas’s and my last topic of conversation. “Ella?” I asked, moving to sit up.

Sylas coalesced at once, standing at the foot of my bed—but the daylight still filtered through him. “You only have to take me to the place where they keep her. I will handle the rest.”

Suddenly my heart was in my throat. I was excited, elated—and scared. “We can’t murder anyone there, though, Sylas. Promise me.”

“What if they deserve it?” he asked, darkening, beginning to cast a shadow.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said, with a headshake.

“Hmph. Then who does?”

“Nolan Baxter.” I picked up my phone, and started looking for local news. “He’ll be next—he’s the reason I bought a gun.”

“Before all this?” Sylas asked, growing more solid by the minute. I noted that, then went back to skimming one news site and then another.

“Yeah. For my own protection. Back when I was still committed to the whole living thing, but after I knew exactly what these guys were capable of.”

Local news was a bust, so I went onto the local boards for my college on Reddit.

Nothing.

“No one’s talking about it,” I muttered—and suddenly Sylas was very nearly in the bed with me, looking over my shoulder. “Back off,” I said with a frown, but then held my phone out further so he could see the screen. “Not a peep about Logan being missing, or a weird human-meat pile being found in someone’s yard.” I glanced at the time on my phone. It was almost noon. “Someone should’ve noticed by now. Then again—he skips half his classes anyways, and they don’t sweep that street for a few days.” I got out of bed—I’d managed to put on PJs at least, before drooling into my pillow with fry-breath for eight hours. “So let’s go see Ella.”

I turned my back on the last place I’d seen Sylas, paused, and then decided not to care if he did see me some while changing, seeing as he’d probably seen approximately eleven-bajillion boobs over the course of his lifetime.

Whereas with the limited time I left, I’d never see a dick again, unless I was cutting it off of someone.

RRP had a lot to answer for.

“You’re not going to want to change your mind after you see her, are you?” Sylas asked, from behind me at least.

“Nope,” I said, hopping into last night’s jeans and buttoning them up. “Not unless she wakes up and tells me to stop,” I continued, then giving him a look—he was still sitting on my bed. “But I’d be okay with that.”

“I’d still get to kill you, you know.”

“I’d be okay with that, too.” As long as Ella was really alive again—not whatever sad half-life thing that was happening to her now—it’d be worth it.

Because the reason she was in the skilled nursing facility to begin with was all my fault.

27

MINA

The Past

May 26th, 2:15 a.m.

I ALMOST FELL off the trellis four separate times. My hands were blistering, I was covered in sap and old spiderwebs and my feet hurt so bad—but I had to keep climbing down. I needed to figure out what the wolves of Rho Rho Pi had done with her.

When I made it to the ground, I didn’t put my heels back on—I kept one in each hand like a weapon. The cold mud felt good on my feet anyhow, it helped to numb the pain. And it’d stopped raining long enough for a sliver of moon to come out and light my way.

I crept around the cabin, peeking into the windows one by one—all of the rooms inside were dark.

What had happened to the party?

Then I heard a creaking wooden sound, followed by a thunk. I froze, until I heard an unfortunately familiar hawk and spit.

Nolan.

The only one of the guys gauche enough to use chew.

Everyone else took pills, vaped, or snorted their drugs of choice, but not Nolan—he wandered around campus with a spit cup in one hand like he was a pro baseball player from the 90s.

And something told me wherever he’d come from was where I needed to go.

I ducked down and peeked around the corner of the cabin, spotting him, standing beside an open storm cellar in the ground—then I heard the sound of him unzipping and releasing a strong stream of pee.

He was twice my size, easy.

But he was distracted, and if I wanted to get into that cellar—taking him on, right now, before he went back down, was my only choice.

I bit my lip and ran at him, as hard as I could, bumping him with my shoulder.

He grunted with surprise, going down to one knee, and I could smell the beer on his breath—him still being intoxicated was the only reason that’d worked.

“Hey!” he shouted sharply, and I did the only thing I could think to.

I kicked him in the balls, as hard as I could.

He squealed, drunkenly lunging for me with one hand, while moving to cup himself with the other. I fended him off with a spike heel, while kicking him again and again, until he groaned and rocked back, finally falling over, and I ran around him, staying out of the range of his long arms, until I got to the cellar stairs and started racing down.

28

SYLAS

I REMAINED quiet as Mina drove us to the place they kept her friend. I had to trust her skills with the internet this morning, but I also believed her—there were too many people out, carrying on with their day, experiencing only the general fears they possessed about survival.

No one was worried about themselves or a loved one being run through a supernatural meat grinder.

It was frustrating.

“This is it?” I asked. The building we were behind was innocuous, and it’d been there for quite some time. She’d parked us in a corner beneath a massive pine tree, so that the car was streaked by shadows.

“Yeah,” she said, giving the building a determined look. “They’ve got my license plate on file, is why we’re back here.”

“Ah.”

“How should we go about this?” she asked, turning toward me, her expressive brown eyes wide. Her heartbeat had picked up, and she bit the inside of one of her lips with anxiety. “There’s a door at the back. Some of the people who work there smoke—we could try to get in that way.”

“You’ve cased this place before?” I asked with bemusement, but instead of getting mad at me, her gaze drifted toward the ground.

“Yeah,” she said, with a disappointed sigh.

“Don’t worry, my queen. I can get you in the front,” I said, flowing around her until I was standing outside her door and opening it for her. “As long as you promise not to let anything that happens after that scare you.”

She stepped out of her car, looking nervously up at me, with hope in her eyes, while I watched her with all of my sight, and caught another thread of fate springing forth from her heart, to latch itself alongside the first one, pouring into the darkness of my chest.

It was all I could do not to rock back in pleasure.

Yes, I willed her. Believe in me. Trust in me.

Give me all of your light.

“If you can get me in there, I’ll owe you my life,” she said, daring to give me a smirk. “All that remains of it, that is.”

“Sold,” I said, gesturing her forward, and closing her car door behind her.

THIS TIME SHE FOLLOWED ME, and I went to the all glass front entrance of the building. There were a few visitors inside, I gathered from their lack of uniforms, and a stout woman wearing scrubs on the other side of a desk—and I could tell that Mina was hiding behind me, even though she knew other people couldn’t see me unless I wished them to.

“Do you know where your friend is located?” I asked her, looking back, and I saw her nod. “Then be more brave, my queen,” I said and flowed behind her so that she would be forced to lead the way.

“Sylas, they’re going to—” she began, but then headed for the wide glass doors rather than fight me and I . . .

I slowed time for her.

Just like I had the prior night.

She caught onto it instantly, turning to gape at me. “You’re doing this?”

There was a mother coming out of the door with a small child at her side—I’d frozen him mid-sneeze.

“It’s only a moment or two out of people’s days,” I said, walking around the child, holding the door open for her.

She angled around the woman, doing her best not to touch her.

“But won’t they remember it?”

“Oh, no. If you’d had an interaction with any of them, it would be harder—and I can’t erase what’s already gone before—but I can make sure that no one pays attention to you.”

Mina stood in the lobby, looking all around. “If I’d had that power this semester, I might’ve been able to go to class.”

I didn’t understand this, based on what I’d gleaned from the man’s mind the prior night. “I thought your schoolmates avoided you? Isn’t that much the same?”

Mina snorted. “Sometimes non-attention has a weight to it,” she said, and walked past the front desk, and down the hall.

I only kept the space nearest us frozen, gently releasing those we’d passed so that they’d never notice they’d had any time missing in their day, and slowly picking up those we were nearing, easing their transition from one state to the next, so they would be unlikely to realize anything was happening to the others around them.

It’d been a very long time since I’d had to slow time for so many people at once, so I was concentrating hard, but once Mina opened a door I felt a deep sorrow cut her like a knife.

“Hey, Ella,” she said softly, right after walking in.

I closed the door behind us both, and released my control, allowing time to resume normally for everyone in the building.

There was a girl in a bed in front of us. She was Mina’s age, and there was still youth in her size and the smoothness of her skin, but her body was flaccid as she unblinkingly stared at a wall full of pictures.

The whole room smelled like diapers and cleaning products were having a war, and the diapers were winning.

“This is your friend?” I asked, while Mina hesitated.

“My one and only,” she said quietly, stepping forward, slowly taking Ella’s hand in her own. “How are you doing?” she asked, stroking the back of the other girl’s hand, and arm, until she started to cry and leaned forward to give the bedridden girl a hug.

More tears—and not for me.

My hands clenched into fists at my side, as I flowed forward—and felt something familiar and magical slice through the smoke I was comprised of.

I frowned down, and then started dissipating at once, spreading myself thin, to trace it back, in a line from the girl in the bed to the walls—and then found another line of it, and another, like she was resting in the center of a spiked wheel.

“I’m so sorry, Ella,” Mina said, smoothing the other girl’s blonde hair back. “I didn’t know—I swear I didn’t.”

“Mina, don’t move.”

She whipped her head to glare at me over her shoulder. “Why?”

“I mean it,” I said, my voice like gravel, and she gave a contrite gasp, taking me seriously at last. I came up to her side, flowing around the magic. “Something is wrong here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mina said sadly. “It’s not a great place—it’s just what her parents could afford.”

“No. I mean metaphysically—give me your hand, and take hers with your other.”

She gave me a dark look, but did as I requested, taking Ella’s hand first.

“No matter what happens, don’t let go of either of us. Promise me?”

I felt her hand squeeze mine. “Yes.”

“Brace yourself,” I warned, and then let her see the world as I could when I wanted, letting the confines of perceived reality peel away. Objects that looked solid became blurs of atoms and time became a rope that leashed us all, creating bright streaks of fortune or fate from one creature to the next, as all the opportunities that opened or contracted with every choice a human made, innumerable amounts of them per day, briefly branched and then disappeared, as an infinite number of potential universes were repeatedly lost.

It was beautiful in its own strange way, once you were accustomed to looking at it. It was like watching an image made entirely of fluttering butterfly wings—and in the center of everything for me, right now, was Mina.

The threads of fate binding she and I were the most obvious, but now that we were here, I could see the things that made her her from moment to moment—right now her grief, pain, and despair. They made her skin light up, like she was coming apart at the seams.

She looked around, her jaw dropped. “Is this how you see . . . everything?” she asked.

“Only when I want to.”

I watched her inspect herself, and then the shimmering line pulling between us ever since she’d hired me, that could not be denied. “Oh,” she breathed.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Where are we?” she asked, looking around, before inspecting her friend. The spokes of magic I could feel in reality were more obvious here, and they were pulsing like slowly strummed strings. “What’s happening to her?”

“Time gives fate reason. Fate gives time a point,” I said, just like the inscription on my side of the hourglass’s band. “And this, is what the concept of both look like, when you can manage to perceive them.” I gestured to the threads between us with my free hand. “And as for your friend,” I began, then took longer to contemplate what might be happening. “I believe something magical is diverting her future away from her . . . stealing it, in much the same way I will be stealing yours, only you agreed.”

Mina gasped in horror. “Can you stop it?”

“Yes and no. I could break the strands, yes, easily. But as for what would happen to her afterward, I cannot say.” While the magic that surrounded the blonde girl was familiar, it had a human’s touch—and I had never seen magic done by humans echo onto my plane.

It made me displeased—and then I noticed Mina’s horrified expression.

At seeing me, here?

Because here I was the thing that ate the light.

But it wasn’t that. Her hand squeezed mine more tightly. “They did this to other girls, Sylas. Before her. But they killed them.”

“Are you certain?”

“One hundred percent. It was why I was in the library, researching. I knew it couldn’t have just been Ella.”

I considered her friend again. “And that boy, last night—he was capable of bending fate?” If so, he should’ve been a more formidable opponent.

“He . . . must be? Or maybe it’s all of them together—they were all there the night of the ceremony. I saw it,” she said, drifting off, her eyes glazing as her memories got the better of her.

I held her hand tighter so she couldn’t let me go, and now I had the perfect lever to use against her: the truth. “I cannot read any future but yours, my queen, but if you want me to be able to undo this—you need to tell me everything. I need to know what I am up against.”

“Do you think you can?”

“I think I can try—and my trying counts more than most.”

Tears shimmered in her eyes again—so close to being mine!—but then she turned to the other girl. “Do you hear that, Ella?” she whispered. “I’m going to get you back!”

Only to leave her again—if I managed it—full of the knowledge that her reentry into life had had a terrible cost.

Maybe I would get to eat Ella’s sorrow, too, before I was through.

“Is there anything else we need to start?” Mina asked.

“No. I have the tenor of the magic. I will recognize it again when it is wielded. We will rejoin reality together now. Brace yourself, I suspect the transition will be jarring.”

29

MINA

“OH, GOD.”

All of a sudden I went from being a creature of light, staring at a creature of darkness, and then my knowledge of my own existence and mortality hit me like a freight train. I had an ocular migraine at once—flashes of light hopped around in front of my eyes like grasshoppers—and it felt like a team of dwarves was mining inside my mind.

I groaned, and Sylas put a hand out for me—not to steady me, but to sweep away something from beneath my nose.

Snot? Cerebrospinal fluid?

I touched the spot he’d just touched, then looked at my fingers.

Blood.

“Sorry, I thought my period wasn’t due for another few days,” I joked, then pinched my head and tilted it back. When the lights in my eyes stopped and my headache went away, I figured it was safe to stand straight again. I licked a corner of my sleeve to wipe away the smear beneath my nose I was sure was there, while Sylas eyed me.

“Sometimes you are very strange,” he said.

“Yeah, you too,” I muttered, hoping I’d managed to get myself clean.

He looked different over here. Over in Timelandia, his presence had made sense—and just like the light coming from me, from my heart to his—I felt a draw.

But now that we were standing together in front of my friend, he felt cold again.

Though wasn’t that what I wanted?

If I didn’t want his pity, I couldn’t very well want his heat.

I took Ella’s hand in mine. “I’m gonna get you out of this mess, okay?” I leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “I mean it,” I swore, then looked around at the ground around me. “Am I safe? Or should I walk out of here like I’m doing a heist in a museum?” I glanced back at Sylas and found him looking confused. “You know. Jumping over the red lasers?”

“Ahh,” he said, getting my gist at last. “No. I will protect you,” he said, sweeping forward to pick me up.

I bit back a scream. “What are you doing?” I asked, as I struggled in his arms. I didn’t feel actual muscles, but I felt safe and supported, even as I thrashed.

“I can flow around the magic. You cannot,” he said, as he carried me toward the doorway.

“And the people in the hall?”

“I’ll slow time for them,” he said, like it was easily done—and then he did it, until we were outside in the sun.

He set me down and I dusted myself off. “I can’t believe any of that happened,” I said, looking back.

He flickered himself back and forth several times. “The magic surrounding her fades out here; I cannot trace it further.”

But for the first time, I had an actual clue—and hope.

“Mina—remember, I need to know everything,” he said, the second my attention was his.

“Yeah. I’ll tell you now,” I said, nodding deeply. “But not here.”

30

MINA

The Past

May 26th, 2:20 a.m.

I WAS as quiet as I could heading down the cellar stairs. I figured I had about three minutes before Nolan caught his breath, max. After that he was going to come for me, and no force on earth was going to be able to save my life.

But if Ella was still alive and there was something I could do to help her in the next one hundred and fifty seconds, then I was going to fucking do it.

The stair looped around, with earthen walls on either side, until I felt like I was descending into hell—then I scented smoke and sweat and heard what sounded like rough chants, like I was nearing a demonic football stadium. I reached the final level and stepped out into a massive cavern, with frightening-looking creatures carved into the walls, and the echoes of frat guys all around me.

Everything seemed vaguely Egyptian—and in the center there was a massive golden wolf’s head, with an open mouth. It was the size of a small bus, and Ella was on the—altar?—of its tongue, tied down, inside of all its teeth.

She looked out of it, and Trent’s closest crew from Rho Rho Phi were all around her, at the points of a symbol inscribed on the floor, with torches lit behind each of them—and they were all jerking off.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I mouthed to myself in horror—and then I spotted a small sword on the table beside her head.

I would’ve guessed it was ceremonial if I’d come across it in any other context, and they weren’t doing that, but now?

I heard Nolan bellow upstairs, and I ran forward at once.

Garrett saw me first—he let go of his dick to lunge for me, and I threw a heel at his head. It surprised him enough to let me get to the table, sweep up the dagger-thing, and start shouting at Ella. “Get up! GET UP!” She blinked and moaned, struggling with the ropes on instinct. “Get-up-get-up!” I shouted more, while wheeling around to confront Garrett, who was circling.

Braden made to let go of his junk too, but Trent held his free hand out. “Don’t you dare stop,” Trent commanded him, and he held back.

“That’s right, keep touching your dick because Trent Donovan, Jr. told you to,” I spat as Ella came around enough to start loosening the ropes.

“What—the,” she said, her voice slurring, but they hadn’t tied her tightly—they hadn’t planned on her fighting back.

“You don’t know what you’re messing with here, Mina,” Trent said, rising up on the balls of his feet, without stepping forward. He was strong as fuck, I knew that, and me swinging a sword like a drunk person at a shitty ren faire wouldn’t have stopped him from coming for me. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You don’t know what the fuck I want,” I snarled, as Ella got herself free, and rubbed her face with her hands.

“Where the fuck are we?”

“Don’t know, don’t care—get off the table,” I said, while trying not to take my eyes off of any of them. Garrett made to lunge at me again, but a whistle from Trent brought him up short.

“Don’t! You know better!” my now very-fucking-ex-boyfriend commanded, and Garrett listened to him.

Somehow, some way, with my cheesy little weapon—that actually appeared very sharp now that I was looking at it more closely—I was in command of the situation.

Ella stood up beside me, teetering like a newborn horse, and I grabbed her with my free arm to pull her behind me, pointing at all the remaining boys with the sword. “I don’t know what kind of fucking Aslan bullshit you were pulling here, but it didn’t work.”

I pushed us toward the stair, trying to keep an eye on all of them at once, but it was slower going in reverse. Ella was stumbling often—and Nolan was waiting for us at the bottom.

I braced myself—he was sober now—and he’d pull me to goddamn pieces.

“Let them go,” Trent commanded, from behind me.

“What the fuck, Trent!” Nolan shouted over my shoulder.

“You heard me!” Trent’s voice boomed in the cavern, and I saw Nolan shrinking back.

“Yeah. You heard him,” I said, wrapping one arm around Ella, sword practically forgotten, as I hauled her up the stairs.

31

SYLAS

AT THAT POINT, I interrupted her. “And you didn’t think it might’ve been important for me to know literally any of that earlier?” I was staring at Mina in the small space of her car, underneath the pine tree’s dappled shade.

“I told plenty of people! It’s just that no one’s ever believed me before.” She rocked her head back and shook it. “I thought they were doing dumb frat shit—not real magic. Not with their dicks hanging out. Oh, and, please try to imagine me, explaining that to the cops.”

I would grant that that had probably been futile. Plus, the magic I’d sensed inside the girl’s sick room had been powerful—the kind of magic possessed by people who held sway.

“But she walked out of there, with you? Up several flights of stairs?” I pressed, because the girl in the bed had not seemed capable of that. “And could talk?”

“About that . . .” Mina began, a shadow crossing her face. “I got us to her car—her keys were still in her pocket—and I drove us back. But the rain picked up again. Something ran in front of us on the road, and when I swerved to miss it, we spun out, bad.”

I had the sense this time to wait patiently for more.

“I didn’t make her put her seatbelt on,” she said quietly. “I was yanked to hell and back, but Ella flew up and hit her head on the glass. They thought she had a traumatic brain injury, and she had a major goose-egg up there for a month.” She patted the same spot on her own head. “The doctors said she should be getting better by now, at least a little, but she never did and . . .”

“You blamed yourself.”

She shrugged. “How could I not? She wouldn’t have been at that party if I hadn’t invited her. And then afterwards, when no one listened to anything, and they made me out to be the crazy girl—”

“You hired me.”

“Yeah. Eventually.” Her hands found the steering wheel and wrung it. “If you do break the spell or curse, or whatever’s holding her in that bed—will she be better?”

“There is no guarantee.” I could not truly see inside people’s minds unless they were near death. “But at least without the spell, she will have a chance.”

Mina looked over at me and nodded. “It’s better than nothing.” She took a determined breath and then gave me a tight smile. “Sylas, thank you.”

“Whatever for?”

“For believing me when I told you about a circle-jerk.”

I laughed. “If you’d seen as much of humanity as I have, nothing would surprise you anymore.”

“No, really. I mean it.” The look she gave me then was somehow strong and fragile at the same time, it urged me to both destroy and protect. “And for letting me see Ella, of course. Plus killing Logan and Brad.”

“Don’t.” The word came out of my mouth before I could stop it—and it was the exact opposite of what I should’ve said. I should’ve preened beneath her attention, letting her think it was what I longed for, luring her closer while I tightened the noose around her neck. “We’re not friends, Mina.”

One half of her lips cocked up into a sad smile. “That’s right, we’re murder-buddies, it’s different.”

“You may call it what you like, my queen. Let us go to this cabin, and see this cellar,” I said, turning to stare resolutely forward. Then when the car didn’t start a second later, I heard the thud-thud-thudding of her heart as it started to race, impossibly fast. “Mina?”

I turned to look at her and saw her panting in short quick bursts. Her hands were trembling, and I could tell that her wide pupils weren’t actually seeing me.

“Mina—you’re not in liminal space anymore. You’re here in the present. This is reality,” I told her, wondering if what was happening to her now was an after effect from having been shown too much of the universe. I’d never let anyone else see any of it before—how could I have been so foolish?

What if I had broken her accidentally, instead of on purpose, like I longed to?

“Mina,” I said again, more sharply, but that didn’t stop what was happening to her, inside her mind.

So I reached out for her hand again, slipping it off the steering wheel and into mine, where it was sweaty.

“Mina,” I repeated, softer this time, trying to get through. “It’s all right, Mina. You are here. This is real. I’ve got you.”

Tears rose up inside her eyes. This time I reached for one as it fell, I wasn’t strong enough to stop myself, but her face turned sorrowfully into my hand, and her tear dropped, wasted again, as she started to shudder—like she was going to cry, or trying very hard not to.

“You’re safe, Mina,” I said, abandoning all decorum, flowing over into her seat, to wrap myself around her in all dimensions. I couldn’t stand to lose another precious tear of hers, but I was also afraid I was watching her shattering.

And then she started crying in earnest, bucking into me, her breath hot, her chest rising and falling with each raw sob.

“Shhhh, Mina,” I crooned. It was torture to be surrounded by so much of her pain and not feed. But I wasn’t entirely sure if I took anything from her now that there’d be any of her left.

It felt like I was the only thing holding her together.

I firmed myself all around her, until she was engulfed in my essence, pressed from all sides, supported and held.

“Mina, Mina, Mina,” I whispered, with my lips against her ear, waiting for her to answer me, and not entirely sure she ever would.

Then she reached the end of whatever well she’d fallen into and resurfaced with a shuddering gasp.

“Mina,” I whispered again.

Whatever spell had been on her was finally broken—had she been injured by the same magic that afflicted her friend? I released her a little, but held her head in my hands.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, still mostly wound around her like a snake.

She shook her head against me. “No, not really.” She fought to move her arm and I let her—she wiped the back of her hand against her face. “I can’t go back there, Sylas. I’m sorry. I want to be brave, for Ella’s sake. But—I—I can’t.” She stuttered as she spoke the words, trying to get them out the same time as she swallowed her emotions down.

“It is all right, my queen. We may do it later, or not at all. You have been brave enough already.”

She sank back in her seat and wriggled, so I unbound her. “No, not really.”

And then a uniformed stranger appeared from beneath the tree’s shade and tapped on the window at her side with a clipboard. She jumped up half a foot in her seat, then rolled her window down like he was gesturing for her to do.

“Miss, you can’t be here, you know that,” he said, pointing at her with the handheld talking device in his free hand.

“I know,” she said, and quickly started her car.

32

MINA

I DROVE HOME by muscle memory.

It’d been a long time since I’d had a panic attack, but if anything was going to trigger one, it was the thought of going back to the cabin.

It made sense, now that I was able to put two and two together—with Sylas’s help—but just because my brain knew it was the right thing to do didn’t mean that any part of my body was on board with the idea.

Because my body remembered.

I’d gone there again, mostly to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, after I hauled the police out and hadn’t been able to find the cellar door—despite the fact that it was wooden and huge—and made myself the laughingstock of the campus.

And that was when I’d been caught.

All by my lonesome.

And—

“Mina!” Sylas shouted, grabbing the steering wheel from my hands, yanking us back into our lane.

“What? I’m sorry—I’m fine!” I sputtered, dragging my attention back to the present.

“Perhaps I should drive,” he suggested sternly.

“Do you know how?” I asked, looking over.

“No. But it doesn’t look that hard.”

I snorted at him. “I’ll pay attention,” I said, then glanced into the rearview mirror and saw his expression of concern and disbelief written in his shadows. “Swear.”

It wasn’t like I wanted to think about my past really, anyhow.

But now that I had, it was like a shaken-up soda bottle—I’d made the mistake of opening it, dropping a Mento in, and now I couldn’t find the cap.

I got us back to my apartment—we had several hours before we needed to go track Nolan down—and then I remembered that Sylas was going to scrape the memories out of the inside of his skull like the good part of an artichoke leaf.

And I couldn’t very well tell him not to, if we needed to know those things to fix Ella’s problem.

I was already ruining things enough with my inability to function.

“Mina?” he asked again, from beside me. I’d parked—but I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting inside the car.

“I’m here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I MADE a beeline for my bedroom once I was inside, and started sorting through the contents of the top drawer in my nightstand, which was mostly bottles of pills on top of an old layer of packaged condoms. Hopefully, Sylas was staying politely outside my closed door for once while I uncapped a bottle.

You’d be surprised what you can get prescribed to you after your parents traumatically die. Not like I didn’t deserve anti-anxiety medication, because I did, I was a college-aged student in America, for the most part we were all like nervous chihuahuas, trying to figure out what the fuck any of us were going to do with our lives.

But underneath the familiar orange bottles with tight white caps was what I’d used to use to relax, before I had access to good drugs and could legally buy weed . . . my vibrator.

I stood there, with one tiny white happy pill in my hand, while looking down at its friendly pink silicone and little rabbit-eared head.

I groaned, tossed the pill into the nightstand, and stormed back out into my living room.

“Sylas?” I announced, and he appeared.

“Are you well, my queen?”

“Honestly? Probably not. But—you have to do things I say, mostly, right?”

“Yes.” His answer was hesitant and after my time in the car I couldn’t blame him.

“And—you can touch me through fabric, yeah?”

I knew he could, I’d felt him all over me in the car, holding me in a completely unfair fashion—like he fucking cared.

“Also yes,” he intoned, tilting his head. “Why do you ask?”

“So if I were to ever tell you to stop, you would?”

“Completely. Up until the moment I get to kill you, that is. Nothing will be able to stop that from happening.” He gestured between us, where our invisible cord of shared fate was apparently always pulling me closer.

“Okay. Can you get on the couch?” I asked, pointing. He did so, and then looked at me, making himself more solid than normal in his current state of confusion. “Answer me truthfully—do you fuck?”

Everything on him that was usually in a swirling state of motion stilled, like for once he was the one frozen in time—and I realized that considering using my murder-buddy like a sex-toy was probably not very cool of me, and that I should genuinely fucking know better.

“I am so, so sorry. Forget I asked.” I shook my head and went back to hide in my bedroom immediately, hunting in my nightstand for the pill I’d tossed.

Then there was a knock outside my door.

If he was knocking, instead of just appearing beside me, I knew things were bad.

“Mina,” he said, from the door’s other side. “You’re not the first person to try to barter with me for their life.”

I groaned. “I wasn’t doing that, but out of morbid curiosity—was anyone else successful?”

“No.”

“Please forget I asked, then!” I shouted back, rattling around the half-empty pill bottles in my nightstand for my loose Ativan. I had Xanax in there somewhere, but I didn’t trust myself to be in murdering shape by sundown if I took it.

“I will be waiting for you on your couch,” he announced, and then I felt his presence fade.

I stood over the open drawer. What the fuck did that mean?

Did I . . . want to go find out?

I closed the drawer again, and peeked out of my open door.

“What on earth possessed you to ask that?” he asked, the second he saw my face.

I came out sheepishly. “Okay, just, know that I’m not super proud of myself in this moment . . . but I wanted to get laid.”

His mouth opened like he was going to say something, but then he didn’t, he just gravely nodded.

“I mean, I don’t want to if you don’t want to, I’m way not like that—but—I saw myself in there with you, Sylas, in Timelandia. It didn’t make you a good person suddenly, but it did help me to understand things with you.”

“Ah, yes, Mina the frail human, suddenly grasping the intricacies of the universe.” His tone was snide, but I was used to him by now, so I didn’t really worry about it.

“I know you’re only helping me for self-serving reasons. It’s still help, though. And—you’re what I have at hand.”

“And isn’t that what every man wants to hear.”

I wiped my sweaty palms on the thighs of my jeans. “You’d be surprised.” That made him snort. “Plus—you’re my last chance at being normal.”

“Normal,” he repeated slowly.

“I’m not saying it makes a ton of sense outside my head, okay? I just wanted to do something safe. With a friend. And I’m pretty sure you can’t knock me up—we both know I’m not ready to be a time-baby mom.”

“Well, and you’re on your period, besides,” he said drolly, and it took me half-a-second to remember what I’d said earlier in Ella’s room about my nosebleed.

“Also you’re really good at callbacks,” I said. “It’s kind of hot.”

That made him chuckle darkly. “I am not sure what you are good at, except for foolish bravery. But if sex is what you desire, I can certainly play along.”

I bit my lips and took a hesitant step toward him. “You won’t hate it or anything, will you?”

“No, my queen,” he said, his voice slightly more solemn.

I swallowed, closed my eyes, and then opened them again. “All right.” I pulled my top off, and unzipped my jeans, leaving my bra and underwear on, not trying to make things sexy in the least. “Just stay right there. And I might change my mind. I’m sorry if I do; it just is what it is.”

“Whatever you desire,” he said as I walked over to him. I put a knee on either side of his lap on the couch, and my hands against it over his shoulders. My underwear covered the mark the RRP guys left on me the second time through, which was good, because I didn’t want to see it—and I didn’t want to have to explain it to him. “What would you like from me?”

“No penetration—not yet,” I said, and I wished it didn’t sound so clinical, but here we were.

“As you wish,” he agreed, but he also slouched down, jutting his hips up—it took me a moment to parse what he was offering, but he’d pulled enough of himself in so that I could see the outline of his clothing, and, when my eyes trailed down, I found the promise of something hard between his legs.

It made the parts of me the boys were right about long to answer. The rest of me was not a whore—and no shade to sex workers, having sex as a job sounded amazing—but if my pussy had its way, it wasn’t picky, it’d work with a doorknob.

“You are my queen. Turn my lap into your throne.”

I glared at him. “Why do you have to make things weird?” I complained, and he laughed.

“You’re the one who wants to have sex with the creature that will kill you.”

“Not sex, just . . . fucking,” I muttered.

I hadn’t been horny in months—ever since the last time I’d seen Trent in the cellar.

So why now?

And why him?

I thought it was because I knew him now, as much as it was possible for anyone to. Going to Timelandia had been like doing really good drugs—I’d gained a lot of clarity.

“What does normal mean to you?” he asked.

“That’s such a good question,” I said.

All I knew was that I wanted it in a way I couldn’t quantify. I wanted to live in a world that was fair, where things made sense, where I could go back to just being a girl who was a little messed up, but who still had a clean conscience and a present best friend.

“Then might I suggest something?” he asked, and I gave a soft nod. “Sit down.”

I frowned at him, but he’d sworn he’d behave—and he wasn’t human, which meant that maybe I could trust him. So I did as I was told, waiting for something horrible to happen, wondering if I’d ever not be waiting for something horrible ever again.

“May I grab hold of your thighs?” he asked.

“You have to say mother-may-I first,” I snarked, but then nodded.

He took the tops of each of my thighs into his hands and I felt the pinpricks of his claws. “You have lovely skin.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls you’re going to murder.”

That made him chuckle. “May I touch you, Mina?” Seeing as he already was, I had a feeling where he meant. “Not in, though, I promise,” he said—and I felt a ripple between my legs, like a sea-creature breaching the surface of the water, running up my seam. I gasped, and he asked, “Shall I continue?”

It was nice to be asked.

It was nice to be touched.

It was nice, after so many goddamn months of festering silence, to be heard.

“Yes,” I whispered, and so I felt him again, heat and pressure, rubbing against me, sliding back and forth. I felt myself part slightly as he slid across my opening, and something hot and blunt nudge against my clit. He did it again and again, making nerves light up as I started breathing with his rhythm, rocking back and forth in his time.

“Do you like that?” he asked.

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“What other normal things might you like?” His tone was even and calm, even as he was rocking up into me.

I bit my lips. Normalcy was now or never—because after he read Nolan’s mind tonight, I’d never get the chance again. “You.”

“Let us wait a bit,” he said, sliding his hands up my thighs, to my hips.

“Why?” I heard myself—I sounded upset.

“Because I don’t know when I’ll get to do something like this again. If we are not in a rush, I would prefer it to not be over too soon.” He tilted his gaze up to look at me.

It never would’ve occurred to me that we were both searching for the same thing. “What do you see when you look at me?” I asked, wondering which set of eyes he was looking at me with.

“A pretty human, grinding on me.”

“Pretty, eh?”

“More attractive than seventy-five point one percent of all humanity,” he said, and I stilled. “That’s counting men and women by the way,” he went on, as the edges of his lips quirked up.

“Fuck you,” I said with a laugh.

“Or, you can fuck me,” he offered instead, flexing his claws against me as he rocked, moving against me, making me move against him. “I can feel how wet you are now, Mina. If I were on fire, you could put me out.”

“Don’t judge.” I frowned, pouting.

“Trust me, I was not. But would you rather know what I really see?” he asked, and I nodded. “I see a girl who is either brave—or insane—enough to let the creature who is going to kill her plug her cunt. And that goes far beyond external beauty—that fact makes her spectacular.”

I waited for him to make a joke, to disarm me and ruin the moment, but when he didn’t, I dared to breathe again. “I’m not sure how I feel about the words plug or cunt used in that order—but—do that to me?”

His claw-tips guided me up higher. I felt him notch at my entrance, and then he slowly guided me down. I was wet, but he was also the perfect size, pushing me open and filling me as I slowly sank.

“Oh, fuck, that’s good,” I groaned, biting my lips and closing my eyes, as I settled him deep inside.

It’d been so long since I’d had sex—months, which, when you were like me, felt like an eternity. The shit I’d done for Brad did not count.

No—this was precisely what I needed: a good, deep, safe, dicking.

“Yes,” he agreed, in a low, low voice. “Just like that,” he purred as his hands moved me through another stroke.

33

SYLAS

I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED that the Mina I’d seen in the sick room, the Mina in the car, and the Mina riding on me now were the same woman, if I did not know otherwise. She had as many moods as I had grains of sand in my hourglass, and I was interested in all of them individually.

She was fascinating, all the things that she was scared of, all the truths she still was holding back—but the fact that she was letting me enter her—

I could not remember the last time I’d penetrated someone that was willing, or with my member instead of my fist. When certain clients had tried in the past, I’d dissuaded them easily, uninterested in the charms they possessed, but . . . her? Pieces of me I had not used in eons decided that they should form and come to attention at her command.

But there were vast differences between what I could do now, versus what I could do when I’d been mortal. I didn’t want to frighten her, what with all her talk of normal, but I knew I could erupt into a creature made of mouths, kissing her with any part of my body, suckling on her teats at the same time as I lapped her clit—or I could be made of eager hands, groping every piece of her pale white skin—or scratch against her with an infinite number of claws, until she purred like a kitten and was covered in welting red lines.

But she wanted normal, and so I was giving it, and it was enough, as I rose her up and let her fall on me again, her cunt swallowing my cock whole, from the head to the hilt, the juices that fell from her pussy as sweet as tears to me, if not half so precious, and I tasted them, because everything I was was entirely made of me.

It was not a concept she had grasped yet, what with thinking of me as wearing clothing—or assuming I wasn’t in rooms when I was—but that was fine, because for some reason she needed this before we went out tonight.

I’d seen bloodlust before, and lust-lust, and every shade in between, and knew right now she was riding me to conquer. I was pleased just to be her plaything, feeling her envelope me again and again, her jaw dropping, her breath coming in quick, short, pants.

“What else do you need, my queen?” I asked, letting myself diffuse out against her, grasping her, so that everything was friction, feeling her nipples pucker under the cotton of her bra, listening to her heart race like it had in the car, but for entirely different reasons.

“Just—this,” she said, darting a hand between her legs, beneath her underwear.

“Tsk-tsk-tsk, let me,” I said, pulling her hand away, creating ridges of myself in the right spot for her to ride on, while thrusting myself deep.

She wasn’t in a position to ask why or how, not when she was about to come hard for me, and the temptation to pull time to a stop for us both loomed large—just as I could make tortures last for a lifetime, I could ruthlessly extend pleasures, too—but I didn’t want to hurt her, in case transitioning in time was what had shaken her mood earlier.

She made a whining sound, and I realized how quiet I’d been by comparison, especially when she opened up her tightly closed eyes. “Are you close?”

“To you right now? Yes,” I answered honestly, and that made her quickly nod.

“Oh—Sylas, Sylas—Sylas,” she hissed, beating her hips down hard, her face tense, her jaw dropped. “I’m gonna—I’m gonna—” she warned, and then she was, gasping as her cunt took what was needed from me, and she gave me guttural moans as she rode on and off of my still-hard cock, grinding herself atop me fiercely—and I peeked for a moment through the veil, to the other side, to watch her heart exploding, not with the last throes of death, but with whatever it was she was experiencing now in relation to me, making streamers of light ripple out through the space between us to land in my darkness, and for once, instead of me pulling her closer bit by earnest bit as the end of her time neared, it was she who was pulling me back.

“Oh, Sylas,” she said again, panting, leaning forward, and I made myself solid for her to lie against and touch, marveling at what I’d seen as she tried to catch her breath against me. I picked one arm up, then the other, to wind around her, feeling her breasts bob as her chest did, her breath hot against my neck.

And to think I’d been worried about it being hard to capture her eventually, when here she was in my arms, as frail as a baby bird.

Or a little lamb.

I waited until she shifted her hips and disconnected herself from me, before reclaiming the part of my shadow I’d let enter her. “Was that normal enough for you?”

She pouted down for a moment before wrinkling her nose. “It was good.” She said it like it was a complaint.

“So normally for you, it’s not?” I asked, confused.

She pushed some of her hair out of her face. “No. I just—” she said, sounding pensive. “It’s not what I expected. But I’m glad it wasn’t—it was better than it could’ve been,” she went on, confusing herself as well, before shaking her head. “How was it for you?”

“There were parts I enjoyed.”

“Which ones?”

I couldn’t very well tell her seeing her heart explode. “The part at the end. When you seemed particularly pleasured.”

She tilted her head. “But not you?” she asked, then her eyes went wide. “Sylas—did you not come?”

I had a vague memory of what that was—that once upon a time it’d seemed like my only priority.

But now?

I shook my head. I wouldn’t even know how to accomplish that, seeing as all of me could see, and feel, and taste. If I were to come inside her, would I be leaving a piece of myself behind?

“Were you really scared of getting me pregnant?” she asked, full of innocence.

“Do you think your small human womb could handle my seed?”

“Bold of you to assume I don’t have an IUD.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a little metal gizmo up in there,” she said, gesturing to her belly, before she huffed and shook her head. “But that’s not the point, Sylas—I just wanted you to want things, too. Not that all sex has to be orgasm-centric, but—”

“Me, not responding appropriately to you, wasn’t normal?” I guessed.

“Something like that. Although I feel very shallow now, for not noticing,” she said, letting her shoulders slump. I took hold of them and straightened her.

“I am not like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I knew what you wanted from me, of course. But as for me, I do not know—” I thought back to my time inside her. I had enjoyed her pleasure, but in regards to my own . . .  “Anything.”

Her eyes went wide with understanding. “You don’t remember what it was like?”

“What point would there have been in me keeping the memory?” I asked with a shrug.

“Oh, Sylas,” she said once more, only this time with an entirely different intonation.

Pity—for me?

From a human?

“Did you . . . want . . . help with that?” she asked.

And for a moment I could see a series of choices for myself, rather than sheer fate pulling me along a pre-ordained track with her—we would always be reaching the same destination together, of course, but suddenly there were too many paths to get to her death to count, and I found it disconcerting, like standing on the edge of a high building without knowing you could fly.

“No,” I said quickly. “I am fine. And—it does not matter. We have a murder to plan, do we not?”

She nodded and dismounted me, giving me one last look. “But promise that you’ll let me know if that changes?”

“As you may let me know if you have need of your throne again,” I said, as regally as I could, before dissipating myself to safety.

34

MINA

“LET ME CLEAN UP, and then I’ll be back in murder-buddy mode,” I said to a seemingly empty room, retreating to the theoretical sanctity of my bedroom.

It’d never occurred to me that Sylas wouldn’t enjoy our encounter in the traditional sense, and I absolutely felt like an asshole now.

He’d consented, but—I guessed I’d just wanted the whole thing to feel magical? I had no idea why it should’ve though, or what I was thinking.

There’d always been just two pathways for me, for The First Time after My Assault, because it felt like moving back twenty spaces on the Life board, and becoming a virgin again.

Either it was going to be something sacred and life affirming—shit with candles lit everywhere and sheer silks blowing in a gentle wind—the kind of sex that people had on TV shows—or it was going to be something I never, ever mentioned after.

Like a box I checked, or a corner I turned: Operation Mina Gets Sex Done.

But what that’d meant was that I’d been so up in my head about my own stuff, I hadn’t even considered him—even though there were still dents on my thighs from where his claws had held me. I put a fist to my lower belly, where I felt a little good-sore from bouncing on him—he’d been the perfect size. And then I let my fingers sink to the outside of my underwear, which were so wet I could’ve wrung them out—I didn’t know what he’d done with his form at the end there, but oh, God had it felt good.

So I couldn’t complain about it being my last time before dying . . . but I guess it just made me sad that it might be his, for the next century or three, and it hadn’t made him happy.

Good thing I knew what would, though—I cleaned myself up, then grabbed all of my notes about Nolan and took them out to my living room, to plan a murder-night.

“AND SO HE does the same thing every evening after practice?” Sylas asked, after I explained my new plan—wait in the bar where I was sure Nolan would wind up, slow down time, kidnap him, and take him someplace quiet for torturing.

“Yeah, like clockwork,” I said with a nod. In my pre-Sylas world I was going to shoot Nolan from a safe distance in the bar’s parking lot, but now we needed to keep him alive some, to figure out what the fuck was going on with Ella.

“That’s not very wise of him.”

I snorted. “He’s never had to fear anything, ever before. And he’s—huge,” I said, with a wince.

Sylas considered this, with a nod. “And is there nothing about the other boy? The handsome one?” The way he said it, I knew he was making fun of me, so I rolled my eyes as I pulled out my phone, scrolling through the most likely webpages.

There was finally something online about Logan. “A car accident?” I snarled—but there was a picture of Logan’s huge truck, totally gutted out by fire.

“What?” Sylas snapped, looming over my shoulder at once.

“When you exploded him, Sylas—what’d you do with his belongings? His keys?”

Sylas flowed up at once to start pacing, which for him meant zooming back and forth in my small living room. “I do not recall.”

I made a sound of pure frustration. “You probably flung them three blocks over, then someone found them, took his stupid truck for a joyride, crashed it, and now they’ve—I don’t know. Got the wrong body or something.” I couldn’t very well hop onto a public forum and tell them to try to match dental records—or to go to his tutor’s house to pick human flesh out of her lawn. “Fuck!” I shouted, and then I looked up.

If I thought I was pissed—Sylas was very, very much more so. He was glowering in a way, like if I saw him in a store, I would not only run out of the store, I would leave the goddamned state.

“Tonight’s death will have to be ten times more memorable,” he said, sinking back down to be beside me. “Show me what structures are nearby,” he said, and I switched to street view on a map.

THREE HOURS LATER, we were in my Fiat, driving out to Nolan’s favorite bar to scope out the parking lot.

“This vehicle doesn’t leave a lot of room for company,” Sylas said, looking around inside.

“Usually renting a van to do murders is a bad idea, but yeah, you have a point.” The sun had fallen, Nolan’s practice would be done soon, and I didn’t have a back-up plan for snagging him—he was the RRP I had the least amount of information on, because he scared me the most.

“You have me,” Sylas said, like he was reading my mind. I glared at him, then noticed how tense I was, my hands white-knuckle wrapped around the steering wheel.

I didn’t see any other familiar cars present, just the normal mishmash of rides, some too nice to be believed—kids who’d gotten Teslas from their parents for their sixteenth birthdays—and other beater cars that had pieces of them zip-tied on. Alcohol was the great equalizer in the current equation—Swords and Daggers was the bar closest to campus. Their logo was the three of swords from a tarot deck, and the rumor was the owner had an in with the state so they didn’t closely card.

“What did he do to you?” Sylas asked.

“Yelled at my grandma.”

“I thought you didn’t have a grandmother?”

“I thought I told you not to ask.” I kept my gaze straight at the parking lot’s only entrance, but I could still feel Sylas’s gaze.

“But what if I need to know? To break Ella’s curse?”

I whirled on him. “You don’t. Trust me. Things overlap, but they’re not directly correlated, okay? I’m certain of it.”

“Mina,” he said, darker than the growing shadows inside my car.

“Goddammit it, Sylas! I thought you had to do what I said? And I said not to ask!” I shouted, as he went terrifically still in front of me.

“Do not turn around.”

Of course after he said it, I had to—and Nolan was there, all six-four of him, grabbing his crotch and shaking it with his hand.

I heard the sound of him unzipping in my nightmares—closely followed by the memory of my squeals of agony.

“Couldn’t get enough?” he asked, giving me a shit-eating grin, right before spitting his dark chew on my window’s glass.

I wanted to run, hide, or spontaneously combust.

“Sylas—Sylas please, do your thing,” I said, feeling my throat start to close shut.

“I need more time,” he said, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. “He is warded, with the same magic that controls your friend. I need to perceive all of the magic surrounding him, before I may act.”

Nolan leaned over and made my whole small car rock with his hands, before kicking the door and making me shriek. I could feel Sylas seething, but I just wanted to collapse into a shuddering heap.

And then Nolan leaned over, putting his hands on my window, on either side of his dripping chaw. “You know I still jerk off sometimes, thinking about the way we—” he said, but then he didn’t finish his words.

“I know enough,” Sylas hissed, sweeping by me in a rush—and a second later, Nolan’s eyes were wide.

He was screaming, but his mouth was sewn shut.

I had no idea when it’d happened, Sylas must’ve slowed time without me noticing, but there were precise, almost surgical stitches, all across Nolan’s lips, like embroidery—and I realized the thread was the same color as my hair.

Nolan dropped to his knees, suddenly, cupping his crotch again. “He seems particularly vulnerable there, no?” my Nightmare asked of me. “Open your passenger door, my queen.”

I lunged across the car to do as I was told, and a struggling Nolan was transported into my car almost immediately, covered in a swirl of smoke and shadow, like a cocoon he couldn’t break free from. He twitched and twisted, and he was still screaming, but Sylas had him contained.

He couldn’t hurt me again.

“Please drive to the football field, like we had planned,” Sylas suggested, like we were going on a picnic, and I didn’t question a thing—I started my car and threw it into drive.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I was walking besides an immobilized Nolan, who was . . . floating was probably the best verb for it, although he kept spasming in a herky-jerky fashion inside a blanket of fog, as Sylas propelled him along. I didn’t know if he was still fighting, or if Sylas was doing something to him, but he’d stopped shouting at least, and Sylas put him down beside the cushioned bottom of a field goal.

“As for what comes next,” Sylas said, forming his body separately again, standing in front of me. “You don’t have to listen to this, my queen. In fact, I think I’d prefer it if you went back inside your car.”

I hugged myself. I wanted that too—but Sylas didn’t know this time period like I did, or have any background on the RRP. “I’m staying.”

“As you wish,” Sylas said, then reached forward and ripped the binding across Nolan’s mouth open with a claw.

“HELP!” Nolan screamed. “HELP ME!”

His shouts reverberated over the field and went unanswered.

“I’m going to ask you several questions now, human,” Sylas said, conversationally. “And now is the time to be honest, because while I can guarantee you will not survive the night, you still have many paths to get to your doom.”

“THEY’LL KNOW YOU TOOK ME!” Nolan shouted at us both, with full force. He was bleeding from the many holes on his lips, and he pissed himself, a wet stain leaking out around the same region he’d grabbed less than an hour ago.

“Who?” Sylas asked, with eternal-seeming calmness.

Nolan finally came back into himself again then to realize his situation. He was panting, and his eyes were wide. “I’m not telling you shit!”

Sylas looked to me. “My queen, which of his arms is the one he used earlier to gesture rudely?”

I blinked and thought back. “His right.”

Sylas nodded, and made a circle in the air, on Nolan’s right-hand side. “I’m going to put your arm into that hole there,” he announced, and I tilted my head so I could see through it, a dinner plate’s worth of darkness hovering in space. “On the other side is a cadre of ravenous beasts that will eat anything I give to them. The problem for you is that their mouths are very small and their teeth aren’t very sharp. It will probably take them a thousand bites to get up to your elbow. I promise you will feel each and every one, and then when they shit your essence out the other side I will gather it up and feed it to you. Or, you may choose to answer me.”

Sylas said everything so matter-of-factly it made my jaw drop.

“I’m protected!” Nolan shouted—which was an answer, of sorts.

Sylas moved an arm, just to telegraph what was coming, I realized, because he could’ve done it invisibly too, and Nolan’s right arm rose like it had puppet-strings attached to it.

“Are you so certain?” Sylas taunted him, and I realized he would be taking his time with Nolan, just because he could—he didn’t feel the need to act as purely as I did.

“What the fuck did you do to Ella!” I shrieked, rushing up to shove Nolan’s hand higher, putting his fingers into the interdimensional hole.

Nolan started screaming right after, and I yanked his hand back, finding all of his fingertips bitten down into stumps.

“No—NO!” he howled—and I remembered asking for help, too, when I had needed it, and not getting any, and it helped to harden my heart.

“Fuck you!” I shouted back at him, and spit on his bleeding fingers. “What did you do to Ella!”

“We needed her!” he said, his knees buckling, as he faded into snotty sobs. “Okay? It’s why Trent was with you. We needed someone pure—and you sure as fuck weren’t.”

I planted a boot into his chest, knocking him backwards. “How do we stop it?”

“You can’t,” he said, and his sobs turned into harsh laughter. “There’s powers at large here—the golden wolf—you came as close as it’d been to being stopped in a century—but we were still stronger.”

Sylas came to my side. “He’s going into shock.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“I have ways of regaining his attention,” he said, creating another circle with his hand, showing off another darkened disc. “Shall I press this one against your genitals?”

Nolan’s eyes went wider still, as he dredged fresh adrenaline up from somewhere. “No!”

“Then tell me everything about your magic that you know. Now,” he demanded.

Nolan looked at me, his mouth opened—and then the two of them disappeared.

“What—the—” I sputtered—then I clenched my fists at my side and shouted, “Fuck!”

My anger echoed down the empty field—then I heard the screeching of revved engines nearing, closely followed by braking tires.

My mouth went dry. “Sylas?”

More tires, and now doors slamming, and men shouting to one another.

I felt how a fox must feel during a foxhunt, and I had already felt that way once before.

I bit back a scream and turned to run.

35

SYLAS

“CONSIDER YOUR NEXT WORDS VERY CAREFULLY,” I said, with my hand wrapped around the human’s jaw to keep it shut. I’d taken him someplace dark and cold, full of shuffling sounds of danger, like large reptiles were coming near, their scales sliding over stone. “The creature you were about to insult is my queen, and she shouldn’t have to listen to the likes of you ever again.”

I’d read the flash of hate in his eyes—he was going to say something ruthless to my Mina, rather than tell me what I want.

“Her friend. Tell me what was done to her,” I demanded, letting him go.

“Where are we?” he blubbered with his bleeding lips, looking around in panic.

“It doesn’t matter. Tell me everything I need to know. Begin from the beginning, or I will press in one of your eyes and start scraping answers out of your skull,” I said, showing him a hand full of claws.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this—everything was supposed to be easy for me!”

And this phase of torture wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. When all else failed, people often tried a total abdication of reality.

“Easy?” I probed. “How?”

“Money—women—my life, man, my whole life!” he shouted, then showed his right hand to me with all its bitten down fingers. “What the fuck! This was supposed to be impossible!”

“And the only thing you had to trade for all your good health and luck was . . . the blonde woman?”

“Yeah!” He shook his head. “Of course! She was a fucking nobody! Trent said so!”

“Hmm.” And I wondered just where this Trent rated on Mina’s kill-list. “And what did you do to Mina?” I asked, and watched him grow pale, as though he had an even larger wound somewhere else that all his blood was seeping out of.

“She’s fucking crazy man. Everyone knows it!” he tried, and then his eyes focused on me. “I’ll pay you—more than whatever she’s paying you. I can double it—triple it—just cut this out and save me!”

It was finally my turn to laugh. “If you knew what she was paying me with, you wouldn’t agree to that so easily.”

Then I felt something twinge. It was an uncomfortable sensation from the center of my chest, like a pinch. It happened again, and it felt like a sting. I assembled myself and looked down, remembering my cord.

“Mina,” I whispered, and disappeared.

36

MINA

I RAN across the football field in full flight, aiming for the cave-like entrance where teams came out for gametime. I threw myself inside, and then kept running—into a wall—and knocked the wind out of myself, plus probably gained a concussion. I landed on my ass with a grunt, feeling brained, and then tried to get up, while the shouting got closer behind me—I trailed my hand on the wall for balance and stumbled away as fast as I could.

I couldn’t get trapped again.

I wouldn’t survive it.

I would rather die—hadn’t I already made that patently clear?

I passed locked doors and padlocked gym cages and there was no place in here that was safe, everything that’d already happened to me once was going to happen to me again—was I in hell? Because it felt like it—especially once the men chasing me started shouting, “Clear! Clear!” to each other as they worked to systematically to hunt me down.

I found myself inside a room full of cement benches and the stench of old sweat, with a dry erase board on one wall laying out a final play—but I had none, because the next doors were locked, and there was nowhere else to go. My mind was unravelling, and I was going to let it. I did not want to be here.

“Mina!” I heard someone call, but I wasn’t sure who it was—then I heard angry shouting.

I curled into a ball and locked my arms around my knees. I knew I should’ve brought my gun, but I thought with Sylas it was safe to leave it home—little did I know that my Nightmare would abandon me, just like everyone else in my life had, and right now I knew I didn’t have enough me left to rebuild myself after any more bad things, okay? I wasn’t strong enough for that. I’d done everything I could already—I’d sold my soul, and even that hadn’t been enough.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

Why was everything so hard?

Why didn’t anyone ever, ever care?

“MINA!” The shout was louder now, closer too, and then I heard sounds like entire bags of popcorn popping, first tearing sounds and then a spatter, like a sprinkler going over a window, over and over again.

“Mina,” someone said from in front of me, and I braced because I knew exactly what was coming next.

I was lost, and after this time, I knew no one would ever be able to find me.

37

SYLAS

WHEN I FOUND Mina she was a trembling mess, and I knew it was all my fault.

I’d murdered the men who were following her, squashing them easily like so many bugs, taking out my anger at myself on them, until I’d reached her at the end of a series of stinking caves, curled in over herself, her tears streaming from her eyes. She didn’t respond when I talked to her, so I picked her up and started carrying her home.

Nothing changed while we were on our path. Wherever she was, she wasn’t going to return to me so easily. I held her with one arm, while reaching through her apartment door with the other, to unlock it from the inside for us, and then dissipated some of myself in a broad perimeter around the building.

I hadn’t killed Nolan, and I’d made it so the act of me taking him into one of my other dimensions shouldn’t have broken the magic that hovered around him—but I was surprised, again, to discover it was magic very much like my own, same as the magic on Ella. But since I hadn’t severed his connection to it yet meant that he must have been being watched, for us to have been followed, and Mina to have been attacked.

The knowledge that I’d unwittingly put her into danger made me roil. When I got back to that boy, I would pick him apart—and I would kill all of the men who hurt her, eventually.

But I couldn’t stop her, right now, from hurting herself.

I carried her into the bathroom she’d shared with the other girl, and carefully sat her inside the tub, then pulled her clothing off of her like she was a doll, leaving her bra and underwear on because those things had seemed important to her, before beginning to run the water.

I made a scoop of my hands to wash her hair and wiped away the lines of old tears beneath her eyes, and slowly, ever so slowly, like ice thawing at the end of a cold winter, she came back to me, her breath deepening, her eyes blinking, and a confused furrow appearing between her brows.

“Sylas?” she whispered, and I relaxed a thousand degrees—I shouldn’t have. “You left me.”

“I did, my queen. But only for a moment.”

“Why?” Her voice was soft and defeated.

“He was going to say something cruel, my queen. I didn’t want you to hear it.”

She nodded sorrowfully to herself. “So instead of trusting me to handle myself, you just left me alone? And in danger?”

I fell in on myself, kneeling outside the tub on her level, the almost the solidest I had ever been. “It was not my finest hour.”

I watched her breathe for long moments, while staring straight ahead, until she said, “Get out.”

“My queen?”

Her gaze flickered my direction. “You heard me.”

I dissipated myself at once, as though I’d followed her orders directly, but if she thought I would be leaving her alone ever again, for her brief time left on earth, she was a fool.

She waited in the tub, the steam leaving the water, her shoulders slumped, the hair I’d gotten wet making her look bedraggled. And then she cried some more—how could someone so small have so many tears?—before grabbing a small cloth and soaping it, to rub over herself, even on top of her clothing, in a long familiar path, over and over again.

I couldn’t bear it, even though it would prove I’d disobeyed. I made a portion of myself visible. “They did not touch you. I made sure of it.”

She paused, and then whirled at me, throwing the washcloth in my direction—I let it pass through me and it hit the door I was in front of. “How would you know? Were you there?”

“My queen,” I said sorrowfully, coming more into my body. “I murdered everyone who chased you. When I reached you, you were alone. They did not touch you,” I repeated. “Not this time,” I added, and that made her look up at my face.

“Did you kill Nolan?”

And now she was asking if I’d read his mind near death. “Not yet, my queen,” I said, daring to come nearer the tub again, and settling down. “But he is a man, and I have seen men do many horrible things.”

She rolled her eyes and gave a harsh dry laugh. “Yeah, I bet you have. That’s another great thing about being assaulted. It’s not even a particularly unique experience, it’s more like you’re joining a shitty pirate crew. Welcome aboard the USS You’ve Lost Your Bodily Autonomy, Now What?—no, literally, I’m asking.” Then she took a deep inhale, and sank beneath the waterline, holding her breath below it.

I wondered how long I should give her before I pulled her back up. But then she emerged and swiped her hair back from her face. She waited long more moments, clearly thinking, before closing her eyes and shaking her head.

“Grab me a towel?” she finally asked, and I did as I was told.

38

MINA

SYLAS WAS ACTUALLY SORRY, which was a novelty in my current existence.

It didn’t erase all of my disappointment in him, especially because he’d only needed to apologize because he thought I couldn’t take a little derision—after all that I’d been through already?—but I guessed it didn’t matter anymore, because nothing did, really, and I’d been an idiot to think that anything in my life would ever, ever change.

I wrapped the towel around myself and went over to look in my nightstand. This time I was going to find the Xanax, because fuck this noise—fuck everything.

“What are you doing?” Sylas asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Pretending I’m a pharmacist. You?” I asked sarcastically as I rummaged around.

“I don’t want you to take any more pills.”

“I don’t think you fucking get a vote,” I muttered, finding the bottle I’d been looking for. It only had one more pill in it—guaranteeing probably only four to six hours of quiet time in my head, which was, proportionally, probably a sixteenth of the time I had left on this planet to enjoy the company of my Nightmare and assorted fucking rapist fools.

“Don’t,” Sylas said, wrapping his hand around my wrist.

“You can’t stop me,” I said, yanking it back. He spun me around to face him, and the towel fell free—good thing he’d put me into the tub with my underwear and bra on.

“You have such little time left. Why would you want to spend it this way?”

“You weren’t there tonight, Sylas,” I said, opening the bottle.

“I know. I will regret that for the rest of my days—and when I say that, know that I mean literally, until time stops.”

I tossed the pill into my mouth without swallowing. “No,” I said, pocketing it against my cheek, letting its bitterness burst across my tongue. “I mean inside my head. I don’t want to be there anymore. I don’t want to remember things anymore. I’m so tired of being me.”

“And what about Ella?”

“I bet she’s tired of me being me, too,” I said—and his hand snaked out and grabbed my jaw, forcing it open. I gasped in shock—and before I could stop him, he’d swiped the pill out of my mouth and crushed it.

“Fuck you!” I shouted when he released me. “You just want me to hurt so you can feed!”

“I haven’t fed off of you once!” he shouted right back. “And I just killed twenty men to save your life—and I didn’t feed off of a single one of them!” He took a step forward, pushing his clawed fingers into my wet hair. “But I won’t lie, Mina. I am tired of watching you give your tears to those ingrates, who I will be murdering shortly in painfully imaginative ways—because I want all your tears for me, the same as I want the rest of you, until I pull your heart inside myself, to beat beside mine for an eternity.”

He was so close to me now, and whether or not he needed to he was breathing hard, as though he’d just exerted himself.

“You’re frightening,” I said. Not currently to me, in particular—it was just a statement of fact.

Sylas bowed his head in my direction. “Says the woman who fed an unseen ravenous horde a man’s hand.”

I snorted. “And Nolan’s . . . really still alive?”

“I could take you to him, if you wanted. Let you watch me torture him, preferably after I pull his tongue out.”

I swallowed, and pretended to pout. “But what if I wanted to hear him scream?”

“Men don’t need tongues for that.” His hand was still bound in my hair, the cotton over my nipples was drying, and I was righteously fucked in the head.

I was never going to manage to be normal.

I shouldn’t have ever tried.

“Sit down on my bed, Sylas.”

His brows pinched with confusion, but then he released me, to do as he was told, and I moved to kneel in front of him, pushing his knees open and taking his wrists in my hands. “Do that again,” I said, bringing them up to the sides of my face. “In my hair.”

He hesitated though. “What are you doing?”

“You killed those men for me. I heard you. And you’re right—you are going to kill everyone else—and I think that deserves a reward.” I glared up at him, then smirked. “It seems you can be surprised, after all.”

One of his eyebrows arched. “And perhaps callbacks are indeed attractive.”

I sat back on my heels and bit my lips. “I don’t entirely know what you’re working with, Sylas—but I’m willing to find out.”

His dark eyes searched mine before he answered. “Continue.”

39

SYLAS

I WATCHED as she brought her hands up to “undress me” although that wasn’t really what it was, but I allowed it, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I had flickers of imagination and memories of what things had once been like for me, so very long ago, and I knew what anatomy I ought to possess, but as for what she intended to do with it, and if I would truly let her, I could not say.

One of her hands pressed into my pants and I allowed her to pull a portion of me out, a fraction that she could easily grasp, a thick piece of black smoke atop her pale white skin, and I gave it weight immediately, letting it solidify so that she could feel its heft and . . . interest.

Because that was what she wanted, right? A piece of me for her. In her, perhaps, too, if I were lucky, so I could taste her again from the inside out.

I watched her lick her lips and then the tip of her tongue reached out to also lick me, gracing the head of the cock I’d created for her with a kiss.

I wanted to break out in lips to kiss her back—or in eyes, to see her everywhere—but I knew doing so would only make her shriek. It was hard to just let this solitary piece of myself be this one forgotten thing, when being everything, everywhere, all at the same time, was so incredibly grand—but when her tiny mouth dropped open to engulf me, I began to see the point.

She sucked on me, her cheeks hollowing out, her tongue stroking at my underbelly and across my tip, bobbing her head back and forth with no encouragement from me, taking my shaft in bit by bit, her pink lips riding higher on my darkness, and from out of nowhere, I gave a moan.

Her eyes flashed up at that, and she sucked harder, pulling again, swimming her hands in to circle the bottom of my shaft, working the last few inches her mouth couldn’t get to.

All thoughts of extra lips and eyes were forgotten, as most of me stilled to watch her work. She was making soft, quiet sounds now, like she enjoyed it and needed me to know and I . . . I enjoyed it too.

Not solely because she was, but because I could feel myself inside her, stiffening, as a pressure I had forgotten lifetimes ago began to ache to be released.

I wanted this—from her—and I wanted to give it—to her—and if she kept licking and sucking and moaning like that, I would gladly strip off some of my essence and let her have it as a reward, assuming it wouldn’t kill her.

“Mina,” I purred, and that made her work harder. She was trying to please me, and I finally did as she requested earlier, setting my claw tips at her temple, gently stroking them back against her scalp. That made her shiver and stare up at me with innocent eyes. “Keep going,” I urged her, and she rose up, bobbing her head harder now, further, somehow fitting even more of me inside, the tight heat of her throat sucking at my tip. My hands clenched into fists, pulling at her hair, which made her hands clutch at my thighs as she groaned and buried her face against me deeply, some obstacle at the back of her throat giving way as she took all of me in and—

“Mina,” I growled in warning, thrusting my hips up, wanting nothing more than to spear her on them. “Get off of me—now—”

She made a sound of confusion as I let her go and pushed her back, making her land on her ass as I took myself in hand. The stuff of time couldn’t be trusted with mere mortals, and I didn’t want to kill her on accident, but I did fucking need to relive this—pressure—this—hunger—this—need—

I growled again and then gasped, as my body betrayed itself, gathering a portion of my being to separate and jet out in black spurts against my palm. I grunted as I continued, feeling a shuddering pleasure ignite with each piece of me I might have shared, until my body was through, and everything I was, was mixing up again.

I closed my eyes—I couldn’t remember ever feeling half-so-human, even when I’d been alive.

“Sylas?” I heard Mina’s voice, soft and curious. I opened my eyes and found her kneeling nearby.

“My queen,” I answered her, watching the inky substance I’d wanted to give to her fading back into the composition of the rest of me. No one else who’d ever hired me had wanted to give me anything, ever. All they wanted to do was take.

Whereas she . . .

“My lamb,” I breathed—and watched the color drain from her face.

40

MINA

I SHOULD’VE KNOWN the next dick I put in my mouth would belong to a liar.

“Mina?” Sylas asked, quickly reabsorbing himself away, because he could do that—he could just erase any part of him at will, whereas I was trapped inside my broken mind.

“Fuck you,” I said, and started crawling away from him at once.

“What?” he asked, with sharp concern.

He should’ve thought of that before he lied to me though.

Nolan was dead, he’d shucked out his mind like an oyster, and that was how he knew . . . everything.

Everything, everything—everything!

“You heard me!” I said, making it into my bathroom, where I slammed the door and locked it, for whatever good it would do.

“Mina!” he shouted from the other side. “Are you all right?”

“You lied to me!” I howled back at him, hitting the cheap plywood door with both fists.

“I don’t understand!” he shouted back.

“Neither do I!” I hit the door again and sank down. “You were supposed to—I thought I could trust you! Why the fuck?” This last statement was directed at myself. “How could I be so stupid? Again? I fucking am the lowest common denominator.”

Sylas phased through the door, appearing halfway through it, like he was frozen in carbonite.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I yelled. I was sure all my neighbors were up by now, and my lease would be cancelled tomorrow.

“Mina,” he said low, patting the empty air between us with his palms.

“I’m not your fucking lamb,” I snarled.

“Okay,” he said. “I am sorry. Again.”

I searched his eyes, his face, his entire being, for anything that was untrue in the moment—and when I didn’t find anything, I started doubting myself, all over again.

“Why can you not trust me?” he asked.

“Because you lied. You said Nolan was alive—but clearly he’s not—you ate his mind when he died.” I leaned back and pulled a wad of toilet paper off the roll to wipe my nose with—and then started trying to swipe the taste of him out of my mouth.

“Mina, I did not,” he said, catching my wrist to stop me, and fully entering the room.

“Then how did you know?”

“Know what?”

I shoved him back and rose up on my knees, pulling down the edge of the underwear I had on so he could see. “That they made me their lamb. Here,” I said, pointing at the hastily carved mark of a lambda, that Trent and the others had etched into my skin in the woods that awful night.

“Oh, Mina,” Sylas said, like his breath left him. “I didn’t know.”

“Then why did you say that?” I asked him, halfway through a sob. I was so fucking tired of crying. I didn’t want to cry anymore.

“I saw it in a nightmare of yours. You were a lamb, being chased by wolves. And I suppose I’ve thought of you like that, ever since.”

“A stupid, stupid lamb,” I said, falling back, sinking my head—but he caught my chin.

“A lamb who’s helped me kill three people—and been responsible for twenty more. A lamb growing claws and teeth.” He pulled up my face so I was forced to look at him. “Tell me how this Nolan hurt you. I want to take all of your pain and give it back to him.”

My jaw dropped, and then I snapped it shut again, as he removed his hand. I couldn’t imagine telling him, seeing as Nolan’s ingress had been particularly humiliating—but then I realized that even if I didn’t, he’d eventually read it on the inside of Nolan’s skull.

“When the police couldn’t find the cellar, I went back myself one night. Mostly to prove I wasn’t crazy and imagining everything.” I sank back on my heels and looked down.

“And no doubt set off one of the magical tripwires they had there, protecting it,” Sylas said, as I wrung my palms against my lap.

“Well. I like that version of things better, at least. And here I’d been thinking all this time that I was just an idiot.” Especially seeing as everyone else in the world seemed to think I’d gotten what I deserved.

Except for Sylas.

“They attacked me, it was bad, the end,” I said, roughly truncating what had seemed like hours’ worth of agony. “They mostly took turns, except for Nolan, who went twice.” As if having his massive wall-like body over me the first time hadn’t been bad enough—having him flip me over and shove himself up my ass had been—I shook my head roughly. “I don’t want you doing that to him.”

Sylas tilted his head to look at me. “But murder is allowed?” he asked, with bemusement.

I snorted. “It’s different.”

“So be it,” he said with a nod. “And do you trust me now, Mina?”

I blinked. This was an awfully strange conversation to be having on the floor of my bathroom, but it was far too late to turn back now. “Do you actually care?”

He seemed to consider his answer before he gave it, like it was complicated. Maybe caring for him was like his dick—all muddled up with the rest of him. “I believe I do.”

“Then . . . okay.” I had no idea where he was going.

“Good. Take off your clothing for me, please.”

I made a face, but did it. Why not? Trent had already shared my nudes all around campus. My tits were practically public utilities at this point—accessible, overused, and taken for granted. And now that I wasn’t hiding the lambda, taking off my underwear didn’t matter either, really.

“Why?” I asked, as I was pulling it off.

“Because I would like to see the places that he hurt you.”

“Oh, God,” I muttered. I didn’t realize he wanted to turn me into one of those dolls they gave to little kids at the police station. “Sylas—”

“May I touch it?” he asked, now kneeling on the same level I was, coming closer with his hand, reaching for the mark.

I nodded while frowning. I’d keloided like a motherfucker. “It’s so ugly. I think they did a bad job on purpose. So people would think it was me who’d done it—jokes on them, I never showed anybody.” I already knew there was no point in going to the police, so why bother?

“Till now?” Sylas asked, tracing a clawed fingertip around its ridges.

“Yeah.”

“Then I am glad you are trusting me,” Sylas said. “I think I’ll make this pattern on Nolan repeatedly, as I flay off his skin. What do you think about that?”

I bit my lips, as his fingertip continued tracing. “In general, I don’t think it’s a great idea to hurt people . . .”

“But in particular?” he pressed.

I didn’t know what it said about me—all I knew was I didn’t care anymore. “It’s kind of hot.”

“Hmm,” he said, as his finger stilled. “Then may I kiss you here, Mina?”

I stared down at the small point of contact between us. I’d just had his dick in my mouth, but somehow this felt more intimate to me.

Probably, because unlike all of the dicks in my past, it could actually mean something.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. He pressed his fingertips to cover my mark, and I felt a movement over it, although I couldn’t see anything. “What—”

“I could kiss you—or taste you—with any part of me,” he said, and a forked tongue lashed out from where his fingertips were by way of demonstration, licking towards my slit. “I only maintain this shape so that you find me more comforting.”

I gawked down at his hand. “That’s not the word I would use for it.”

“Perhaps understandable is,” he said, and chuckled darkly. “So tell me the rest of things.”

I watched his hand, trying to parse what I was seeing and feeling simultaneously, before realizing I wanted to just give up.

I was tired of holding everything in—and everything back.

“I begged him to stop,” I continued, as the parts of Sylas that were not touching me became more diffuse, clouding the small space around me like fog.

“He didn’t listen to my queen?” Sylas asked archly, in a whisper by the side of my face. I felt him against my cheek, not like a kiss, but a caress, and on my jaw and neck, too. “For that, I will cut off his ears and feed them to him.”

I was taking bigger and bigger breaths now, and I supposed I ought to be worried about inhaling him in, but I figured he could manage that—and—maybe that was what I wanted besides. To take some of him inside of me, so that I could make it through my rest of my days, relying on his strength instead of mine.

Because if I’d been like Sylas, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt me in the first place—or ever get to Ella.

“Ella—” I said, squeaking her name.

“I will go back to torturing him for answers soon,” Sylas purred, “but not until you finish sharing with me.”

I closed my eyes and sank back some—and found myself caught, like I was in an embrace. After so long alone it felt so—so—good—to have someone else be there for me.

And I did trust him, whether I wanted to or not.

So I grabbed his wrist away from where his fingertips were still kissing my mark and pulled it behind me enough that he would get the idea. “He hurt me here, too,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper.

“Oh, my queen,” Sylas whispered back. “Turn around and put your elbows on the ground.”

41

SYLAS

MINA GASPED, but then she did as I asked—it felt like her trust was just as much an object as the sand in my hourglass, and every moment we spent together she poured more of it into my hand.

I would endeavor not to spill any.

“I would like to kiss more of you now, Mina,” I warned her, as she looked back cautiously.

“Where?” she asked, her eyes dark.

“Everywhere. But I suspect if you close your eyes, this will be easier on you.”

She bit her lips, but then shut her eyes tight, and I sank part of myself up as a shadow to run across her lips. Her brow rose with surprise, but then her lips parted and moved as I did gently—so I used more of me to kiss her. Her shoulder, her waist, her ribcage, the space behind her knees—slowly and fervently, with deep and unending desire. She threw her arms out in front of herself, like a stretching cat, and then rose up, and I could taste her nipples, sucking on them as I ran a tongue across the space beneath her breasts.

“Sylas,” she whispered, her closed eyes squinting.

“Don’t look. Just feel.”

She made a whining sound, and then gave a nod.

I grabbed hold of her ass so she would know where I was going, and lowered my face so that if she did open her eyes to look, she would see me, using the tongue from my mouth, to rim her.

She squirmed the second I did, but it was surprise, nothing more. “Sylas—no one’s ever kissed—” she started, and so I stopped, but the second I did she panted “keep going” and trembled.

I loved it when she shook. I couldn’t help it—it was the predator in me. And there was something in the moment, of this little broken doll of a human, allowing me into her most intimate space, so that I could lick away all her past memories of harm and replace them with new ones, of her, here, like this, completely open and safe—I soared in the power she was granting me over her, pleased to be taking it back from all who had wronged her.

She wriggled again, making another small sound beneath me.

“What do you need?” I lifted my head to ask her.

“If I can’t look . . . tell me what you see?”

She momentarily disarmed me again, but then I took her in, largely cradled by me in her reality—and looking like a creature of light being engulfed by darkness in my own. Streamers of light kept bursting through my darkness where it thinned as I swirled over her, making the space where we met look like a battleground where no one was winning, or fireworks in a cloudy sky.

Then I pushed myself back to join her time again, and looked down, at her slick folds dripping and—I longed to cover her with all of me.

In this world, and the next.

“I see a creature of light, being mounted by a creature of darkness,” I told her. “Do you want that, Mina?”

She moaned and rocked her head back. “Yes.”

42

MINA

SYLAS SLID into me at once, and I groaned when I felt him land, clawing my hands out on the cold tile floor.

He’d been—exploring me was probably the best word—with all of his mouths for so long it’d made me ache. I was willing to keep my eyes closed, but I needed to get fucked, I couldn’t stand it anymore, the emptiness inside me had lasted long enough.

So when he thudded home, I fought back, trying to keep my hips closer to his, to make each thrust short and hard—I couldn’t believe I’d denied this part of myself for so long—now that I had someone I trusted to fuck me, I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

“Mina,” he growled above me, shoving me forward—and I reached up to press my hands on the tub’s edge to push back—and doing so freed more of my breasts for his ravenous mouths and tongues—they’d pulled my nipples into peaks and more of them were kissing down my belly for my clit and Christ—fuck—damn!

“Oh my god, Sylas—” I hissed and winced, spreading my knees as wide as they would go.

“Yes, open yourself for all of me,” he said, grabbing my hips and thrusting hard.

And that was how I knew this was actually good for him, too.

If he were just pleasing me, he could’ve sat there and magically pistoned cloud-parts of himself back and forth.

But he was fucking me now like there were things he wanted to get out of it—things he could only find in me—and I liked that.

I didn’t want to come by my lonesome again—I wanted him to fuck me hard enough it changed him.

“Tell me more,” I begged, as he slid roughly in and out, and the lips at my clit sucked and pulled.

“I want you to be as dark as I am,” he snarled, and all of a sudden, all of the mouths and tongues and places where he was touching me gained weight and pressure. “I want to make you be like me.” He changed his grip on my hips, and began using me to work him, and knowing that made me thrill and tense. “I want you to remember this moment, and what it feels like, for eternity.”

The thought of that melted me. “Oh fuck,” I hissed, and went weak, which let him shove us both forward, until my thighs caught on the wide lip of my tub.

“And I want to make you come.”

He was fucking me so hard I could barely breathe, and I knew what we were doing would’ve looked brutal to anyone who was watching, because it was.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like brutal things. It was just that I wanted to give permission for them first.

“Fuck—fuck—fuck—” I started crying out, my hips shaking, me drooling from being upside down and breathing so fast, and he started pounding me in the rhythm of my shouts, as one of his unseen mouths latched on to my clit and licked it quickly. “Oh my god,” I said and then whined incoherently. “I’m gonna—gonna—fuck!” I shouted, pulsing hard. “Oh fuck, Sylas—fuck!”

And then I heard a wild, animalistic sound from him, all around, like all the mouths he’d been using to kiss me were giving his orgasm a choral voice, as his hips slammed and stuttered against mine, holding me tight, and rocking the two of us, matched, back and forth, until he settled.

“Stay there, my queen,” he commanded, and I felt him pull out of me with a moan—and then his mouth was between my legs again, kissing, only this time it was my pussy. “Don’t move.”

“I don’t think I can,” I muttered, barely able to breathe.

“I don’t want to leave any of myself inside you,” he explained.

I went from propping myself up with my arms to using them as a cradle to cushion my ribs and stomach from the tub’s edge. “So you admit you’re not ready to be a father yet. I respect that.”

His laughter rose up from all around me, even as he continued to work.

43

SYLAS

I BATHED HER AFTER THAT, until I was sure I’d left none of myself behind, and then carefully toweled off her hair and carried her to bed.

“I thought you didn’t want me sleeping?” she teased, as I gently set her down.

“That was before.”

“I’d ask before what, but I think I know.” Her lips curved into a soft smile and for a moment time stopped—not because of me, but because of her, because she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Statistically, it should’ve been impossible, but it was still true. “But you have to go into work, don’t you.”

“I do, I’m afraid.”

“Can I go with you?”

“I would rather you stay here.” But it didn’t seem safe to leave her. If they’d been watching us take Nolan, surely they would already know about her, by now.

“I already know what it is you do—so why?” she asked, pushing herself up in bed.

I slowed time at once.

She deserved an answer, but I needed time to think.

Why would I hesitate? I wasn’t ashamed of what I was—or what I enjoyed doing.

And she and I both knew that eventually I would kill her.

But . . .

I found that until then I did not want her to shy away from my hand, not when her submission was so sweet. And if she saw what I was truly capable of, within her human frame of morals, how could she grant me any grace?

From here, though, I was only a blink away from seeing the threads of fate that bound us together, and now that I was no longer covering her, I could see even more of them than there’d been before, so many streamers of our future, sewing us together—I brought myself back to her reality, still undecided, when she said, “Don’t be afraid,” and then laughed at herself. “I’m like an angel!”

“Are you?” I asked her. “I have never met one.” That only made her laugh more.

“No, silly. Definitely not. But—if you think I’m about to give up that,” she said, pointing back toward her bathroom, “you have another think coming.”

Her motion made the hourglass mark on her arm visible. Our time was limited, I did not want to leave her alone again, ever—it was decided.

“Put on clothing you do not care about, then. And sturdy shoes,” I said, and she was out of her bed in an instant.

A FEW MINUTES later I took her to the dimension where I’d left Nolan. She was wearing jeans, a loose navy sweatshirt, and the boots she seemed to favor.

Nothing else had happened to Nolan in the interim, because I’d surrounded the perimeter for our activities, but I was surprised that none of his magical brethren had made an attempt at rescue.

“So what do you see when you look at him?” Mina asked quietly, when we wound up behind the magical cage I’d left him in. It pulsed like a glowing heartbeat in the dark.

“The same kind of power that binds you and I. Only I believe his threads link him to Ella, after your story.”

“Is threads what you call them?” Mina asked, gesturing at her chest.

“What did they look like to you?”

“More like . . . a map. Or a circulatory system.”

“Ahh. Well, all three of those things can be true. The point is the connection between one choice to the next, one person to the next, not so much the symbology.”

“Who’s there!” Nolan shouted, returning from whatever shock-ridden place he’d been, suddenly realizing he wasn’t alone.

I felt dangerous things inside me start to soar at the sound of his voice. To think that this human man had hurt my queen—then I felt Mina’s hand on my arm. “Easy there,” she whispered, before walking straight up to Nolan’s cage. “Good morning, motherfucker.”

The boy looked between us both, stunned. “Make him let me go, Mina!”

“How do we fix Ella?” she asked, ignoring him, squatting down on both her heels so that her head was even with his, as he was sitting on the ground.

He looked between us in panic again. “I can’t. They’ll kill me.”

“And just what do you think we’re going to do?” I asked, in my most ominous voice.

“Sylas,” Mina briefly reprimanded, then returned her attention to Nolan. “Who’s they?”

“The rest of the wolves!” he said, sounding exasperated.

“You know I never bothered with any of that bullshit,” she said with a snort. “Here’s what I think, Nolan. I think your dear old alumni association used you as bait. Because they were watching you, and they followed you, but they’re not here to save you, so I think they’ve cut you off for good.”

I was so pleased that Mina’d come to the same conclusions I had about his predicament that I almost missed her next sentence.

“Whereas I just might be inclined to make my boyfriend here give you a second chance.”

I was surprised into stillness, all over again. “I am your boyfriend?”

Mina looked over her shoulder at me and beamed. “Well, I wasn’t going to fuck anyone else in the next few days. Were you?”

“Absolutely not.”

And probably never again.

“Okay, then,” she said with a laugh, then turned back to her classmate. “So save yourself here, Nolan. I’m in a good mood right now, don’t ruin it.”

“But I want to kill him,” I said, inserting myself in their conversation. And after learning what he’d done to Mina. “He doesn’t deserve to live.”

“Yes, but I still love Ella more than I want sheer revenge,” Mina explained, without taking her eyes off of him. “I want to know how everything works. But if there’s no more information forthcoming,” she said, and I took an eager step forward.

“It’s all for the Golden Wolf,” Nolan said, deciding that helping—and possibly living—was the easier path. “You saw it when you were down there.” He sniffled, and then reached up with his hand that still had intact fingers, to pull the collar of his T-shirt down and show off a wolf head design imprinted on his chest.

“Yeah, I’m well aware you all give each other shitty tattoos,” Mina said, completely unimpressed.

“It’s not just a symbol! It’s magic! We sacrifice the girls to him, and we get powers!”

Mina made a disgusted sound. “Why is it always girls? Why can’t you sacrifice carrots? Or, I don’t know, other dudes?” she asked, as Nolan gave her a traumatized look.

“It’s how it’s always been!”

“Oh, do not tell me any of your ancient fucking Knights Templar bullshit. You’re a fraternity, not a videogame.”

“We’re ancient!” the boy protested.

“Hardly,” she said, then began rubbing her own temples. “Just so I’m clear though—your whole frat’s in on this? How many people do I need to kill here?”

I watched Nolan suffer with the realization that he was a coward, before fessing up. “No—only some of the guys, every few years. We get picked by the outgoing upper classmen, we step up, and as long as no one fucks shit up for us like you did, everyone else relies on trickle down. Bros before hoes and all that—we get each other jobs, cosign loans, that sort of thing.”

“And Ella?” Mina pressed.

“I don’t know. No one’s ever tried to save one of the girls before—she’s in the wolf’s mouth now, whether you like it or not—there’s no getting out.”

Mina grimaced. “I guess you get honesty points for telling me shit I do not want to hear. Then again, you’re not half so lucky as you should be, right now, are you? Maybe us killing Logan fucked shit up.” Nolan’s expression changed, and Mina pounced. “They didn’t tell you? You honestly thought it was a car accident too?” She came perilously close to the edge of the cage I had him trapped in. “So who’s in charge of this year’s class?”

“Who do you think? Trent, of course,” he spat, and Mina’s nostrils flared, then she stood casually and made a show of popping her back. “So? Can I go home now?” Nolan asked her.

“Huh?” Mina asked, like she hadn’t known he’d been waiting for this moment—and I watched her gut his hope like a fish. “Oh, no—I fuckin’ lied. Baby, he’s yours,” she said, turning her head back to me.

“Baby?” I repeated, stunned by her word choice.

She caught my face between her hands, and rose up on her toes to briefly kiss me. “Just trying it on,” she said, with a wicked smile. “Go get him . . . king.”

I touched every piece of her body as I flowed around her to go do so at once.

44

MINA

THE FIRST THING Sylas did was sew Nolan’s mouth shut again, and I was happy about that. I sat down on some rocks outside the cage—the whole place we were in looked a little bit like an old sci-fi movie set, like any minute now lizardmen in shitty latex costumes should come swarming up—and watched him work.

He was doing something above Nolan’s chest and head, and while I couldn’t figure out what it was, it seemed like it must be important.

“Whatcha’ doin’?” I asked, when I couldn’t stand not knowing anymore.

“Unlacing him. I didn’t want to sever the magic around him directly, but he doesn’t deserve for fate to protect him anymore.”

“Will that help Ella?” I asked.

“I hope. We should go and check in on her later.”

“Maybe protect her, too? What if they retaliate?”

“Their fate is bound with hers somehow—I do not think they’d risk hurting her. You, however,” he said, darkly, before giving me a look—and I remembered what he’d said about my rescue.

“Twenty guys, eh? Could you describe any of them? No, wait, let me guess, they were all muscle-y white dudes, wearing expensive athleisure, some had on backwards baseball caps, and others had vape pens?”

Sylas snorted while continuing to work. “One of them was Black.”

“Hold the motherfuckin’ phone, we’ve entered the twenty-second century here, ladies and gentlemen, equality is at hand!” I said with a laugh, as Sylas shook his head. “But if the whole frat’s involved in things—that’s roughly a small army we could be looking at facing.”

“So?”

And as he’d apparently managed to kill twenty of them out of hand, he made a good point. I stood up and came nearer—Nolan kept trying to make eye contact with me, but I just ignored it.

“I cannot believe he fell for your subterfuge,” Sylas said, appearing to finish whatever it was he was doing.

“Eh. He’s been lucky his whole life. He’s never had to think like that.”

Sylas gave me an irritated look. “Do you not get instructional children’s stories in your time, about making deals with dangerous entities?”

“We do—it’s just guys like him always think they’re smarter than they wind up being,” I said, with a shrug, as Sylas gestured, and the cage around us disappeared. Nolan was still alive, but Sylas was busily engulfing him in strands of fog. “What’re you going to do next?”

“Of course I am heavily tempted, my queen, to murder him here, for you. But now that I know there are others involved—I want to make his death a warning,” he said, while opening up a portal that I could see my college’s football field in. “My queen,” he said, while offering me a considerate hand to step through.

I went through and he followed, bringing Nolan.

“So I am going to take several miles of chain and string him up someplace quite noticeable,” he said, and pointed up, at the field goal above us.

Nolan made a horrified sound inside the smoke-cocoon at hearing that, whereas I was wondering why Sylas was telling me, not showing me . . .

“And?” I asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I would prefer you not be here for it.”

I made a face at him. “Sylas, you think a little blood’s going to scare me?”

He squared his shoulders and gave me a disgruntled sigh.

“Come on,” I said, sitting down on the ground. “How long will it take?” I asked, and mimed eating popcorn.

“How long would I like it to take is the better question, my queen. And . . . I would prefer you not see how much I enjoy it.”

“Oh,” I said quietly, putting all the pieces together at last. “You’re worried I’ll see you hurt him and think things about when you’re going to hurt me, and have you realized you’re an idiot?” His head snapped back like I had slapped him. “If you looked around in that drawer back in my room you would’ve seen enough pills to kill myself ten times over—and do you know why I’ve got them all and hoarded them so carefully? To give up and fucking do that. But now, I don’t have to, Sylas—you’ll do it for me—and until then, I am fucking on this ride. You and I, and however many hims it takes,” I said, flinging an arm out at the still-hovering Nolan. “But I’m not going anywhere. Not without you. Not from here on out.”

I didn’t realize it was true until I said it—but now that I had, I knew there was no taking it back as I continued.

“I don’t know how many other delusional people have hired you over the decades, but I totally get that this is it for me—and I’m a hundred percent okay with that.”

Sylas condensed so tightly his entire outline was crisp. “My queen,” he murmured.

“You can be my king, but only like every other Monday, and every third Tuesday,” I teased, and he broke out into the most frighteningly beautiful grin.

“I wish to enter you again,” he said, and I laughed, but shook my head.

“I want that too—but not in front of him,” I said, jerking my head at Nolan. “He doesn’t deserve to watch.”

“I could pop out his eyes,” Sylas offered.

“Or, maybe you just kill him quickly, and we go back to my apartment and have amazing time-sex?”

“Yes,” Sylas agreed, reaching into another portal to pull skads of chain out from somewhere else.

“Do you have a Home Depot over there or what?” I asked him.

“What is that?” he asked, and I just grinned.

“Never mind.”

ONCE I’D CAUGHT the gist of Sylas’s plan, I felt safe enough to wander off—not because I was disgusted, but because I was curious. It was nearing dawn, and I kind of couldn’t believe that no one had noticed the other twenty guys missing yet. But if they’d done whatever they had to cover up Logan’s death—maybe we’d been fucking when the frat’s cleaners had come through?

I took out my phone and used my flashlight, going into the cement tunnels again. This time everything smelled much, much worse, and I only had to walk in forty feet to find the first man.

It looked like something had exploded from his chest—and then I realized something had. His heart. It was six feet away from him on the ground—it’d been ripped out and had apparently rebounded off of the wall, judging from where the blood stain was at my head’s height, and then landed, rolling a little before coming to a stop.

If I hadn’t seen what Sylas had done to the man at the motel I don’t know that I could’ve stomached this entirely, but, while it was disgusting . . . these guys had been chasing after me. I didn’t need to guess what they would’ve been capable of if they’d found me, either.

If it was a them-or-me situation, I was going to pick me, every time. I might have had a death wish, but I didn’t want to die before all of these fools had to suffer.

I toed the heart with my boot—and noticed other shoe prints, when I flashed around with my phone.

Bloody ones. Leading from corpse to corpse.

I hadn’t walked out of here, and Sylas’s feet didn’t really touch the ground, soooo—I got a creepy feeling, but what the fuck? What would be the point of going from body to body, when all of these men were so clearly dead?

Had it been another student, trying to be a good Samaritan and taking wallets to get names to give to the cops? Or some opportunistic robber, looting corpses like in a video game?

Then I realized all of the bodies had been desecrated in the exact same fashion.

Sylas had torn open their chests and ripped out their hearts—but someone else had come along to cut all of their shitty matching tattoos off of . . . all of them. Each of them had a hole over their left pectoral where their wolf tattoos should be.

That was weird—and worth telling to Sylas.

I turned around and exited the tunnels at a jog, and found my Nightmare hoisting Nolan up between the field goals like a sail, surrounded, utterly surrounded, by golden chains width of my fingers, that were beginning to glitter by sunrise’s daylight like a halo, making him somehow both sacred and profane.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Do you like it?” Sylas asked. “I had to be careful when I was attaching them, so he didn’t just fall apart. They’re anchored inside of him. Bones, muscles, that sort of thing. I wove them into his body.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I confessed. “It’s pretty, but it’s also horrifying.”

My Nightmare laughed. “That’s the idea. No one is going to be able to ignore it.”

I shook my head, and pulled my phone out. “I don’t want to take any chances,” I said, taking pictures of Nolan—plus video.

“You are commemorating the occasion?”

“Better than that. I’m putting it online.” I didn’t even bother logging into an anonymous account for my college’s forums. There was no way I could’ve done what Sylas had, the police would be idiots to arrest me for it. I just titled it the image, “Holy shit, you guys!” and hit send.

Half a second later it was up on the internet, and anyone else who was looking for campus gossip after they went on their morning run or finally got to bed after a bender was going to see it.

Half a second after that, someone posted a puking emoji below the image, whose name I didn’t recognize, but their response was one-hundred-percent appropriate.

RRP could suck it—the internet was going to do its thing.

“Okay, baby—now take his tattoo off of him.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be cops here in about thirty seconds—so let’s go find my car?”

“All right,” he agreed, floating to be level with Nolan, before swiping across his chest with a claw, and returning with a palm sized scrap of skin for me. “You should get to keep a souvenir. It is traditional.”

I bit my lips. I didn’t have anywhere to put it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch it anyhow. “Can you keep it for me?”

“Of course,” Sylas said, depositing it into another hole in reality.

And then I heard the last thing I ever expected to.

Nolan groaned.

“He’s . . . still alive?”

“The thought of eating his memories disgusted me.”

Because of what’d happened to me. Knowing that he hadn’t fully fed on Nolan out of whatever strange emotion he possessed for me just about my heart explode.

“Also, I am very talented,” he went on.

“You are. You so, so, are,” I said, bouncing up on my toes to kiss him, then grabbing his free hand to drag him to the parking lot.

45

SYLAS

I LET her drive us home, but it was stupid; I should’ve opened a portal and taken her and her car back to her apartment parking lot at once, and thus not wasted any of the remaining time I had with her. As it was, I had to be patient, sitting in the other chair, keeping my hands to myself, while my thoughts and feelings—yes, somehow, I had them—run wild over me.

I was scared to look at myself with my other vision now, knowing that decisions opening and closing would be the only thing I’d see. I feared I would look like a creature made of winking eyes, as too many possibilities to count came into existence around me and then disappeared.

But in all of them, I wanted her the way it seemed she wanted me, which was a thing I could not fully understand, but would not question.

Mina’d pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt when we’d gotten into the car, and it allowed me to see the bottom of her hourglass mark again, counting down the life she had left. I didn’t like that. I wished that I could rip the mark from her—or that there was a way for me to go back in time, as I was now, knowing her, and resist her temptation in Royce’s offices, sending her safely back home.

But home to what?

The pills in her nightstand and the memories that made her cry?

It was hard to believe that death with me was better, as she proclaimed, but yet maybe she was right and it would be.

Somehow I would make sure that it was so.

When she pulled into her apartment’s parking lot, there was a suspiciously large vehicle next to her regular parking space.

She noted it too. “They’re going to come for us, Sylas,” she said, driving around and parking far away.

“Let them,” I said, grabbing her hand.

I surrounded her and pulled her through a portal into her own apartment immediately. “Pack what you want—and then we’ll leave this place.”

“And go where?” she asked, but didn’t fight me—she ran to get a bag from her closet at once.

“Someplace safe. I’d rather not guard your whole building, and I suspect you’d feel bad if you got your neighbors harmed.”

“But we’re not going to stop, are we?”

“Never,” I growled. I’d snaked a portion of myself outside, where I could see the van opening its door. “You don’t care if I kill and feed from the men attacking you, right?”

I wasn’t sure what Mina’s next plan was, things might take time, and I would lose the ability to harvest the fear we’d caused from Nolan’s display when we left the vicinity. She didn’t answer, she just laughed, and I was full of some strange and uncomfortable emotion for her.

“Good,” I said, and pulled out the heart of the first man on the stair.

The men outside were surprised, and more so when I started pulling their limbs off like the wings of so many flies, while cauterizing the wounds enough to stop them from dying, as I reassembled them incorrectly, giving them legs for arms, or putting someone else’s arms on them in reverse.

I made the mistake of leaving them their throats though, and Mina heard them screaming. “What was that?” she asked, emerging from her closet. She had her purse, a backpack, and a bag.

“Nothing, my queen.”

“You’re a bad liar,” she said, putting out her hand for mine—then yanking it back. “Wait!” she said, and ran for the bathroom.

But I noticed she’d left everything in her nightstand behind, and I was pleased.

“Okay,” she announced, returning, hand out.

I paused a moment to finish ripping the hearts out of the men we left behind, then took it.

46

MINA

WE REAPPEARED SOMEPLACE ELSE TOGETHER in a claustrophobically small cave, and I had a feeling we weren’t on Earth.

“Is this . . . hell?” I’d been meaning to ask Sylas ever since I’d seen where he had Nolan holed up, but hadn’t gotten the chance.

“Of course not,” Sylas answered easily, still holding my hand in his own and leading me down a small path between two walls of stone. He cast up a light up with his free hand—it made crazy shadows bounce from rock to rock. “Hell depends on who you’re with. And as you are here with me right now, it cannot be.”

“That might be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever told me.”

“Humanity has a lot to answer for, then,” he said, pulling me into a much bigger chamber at last, which had a large open mouth to a sky that was lit up by a moon I recognized.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

“Threadstone Mountains. This cave doesn’t have any other entrances or exits, however, so regrouping here seemed apt.” Sylas walked us both up to the edge of the cave, where the stone met sheer air. “I do not think they are in control of their magic enough to follow, but just in case, I did not want to make things easy on them.”

I kept hold of his hand, but hung back. “This may be a bad time to mention it, but I’m afraid of heights.”

Sylas chuckled at that. “Afraid of heights, but not afraid of me?”

“That’s different and you know it,” I said with a smile.

“I cannot claim to understand your affection, but I will admit to its allure.”

“I’m not hell and I’m alluring. I’m scoring so many points right now,” I said as I carefully walked as close to the cave opening’s edge as I dared. We were thousands of feet up, with only jungle below.

“If this is a game, I want to know all the rules immediately, so I can win.”

I stepped back from the edge and closer to him. “Trust me, you already have.”

His black eyes scanned over me, the moonlight shining off of them. “Mina,” he began, his voice heavy, and I put a finger up to his lips to stop him.

“Let me guess—you’re going to say something incredibly sweet, that’s also incredibly sad—so let’s just skip to the end?”

“What’s that?”

“Fucking each other’s brains out while I’m still breathing.”

He became darker than the night outside. “Yes,” he agreed, then bowed down quickly. I kicked off my boots, then his claws were at my hips and I helped him pull my jeans off right before he started to shred them.

“Hey, Mister Smoke! I left most of my clothes behind!” I warned with a laugh, as I hopped my underwear down and kicked them off. “Wait—wait—wait.” He lurched to a stop, and rose, to hover ominously—but I felt entirely safe. “Are you still hungry?” I asked, looking between him and the night outside.

“Always.”

“And—you can fly, right? And you swear to fucking God that you won’t drop me?”

“Yes,” he said, and his vehemence echoed in the cave from all around.

“Okay, then,” I said, taking a step back. I heard rocks behind me tumble and fall and my heart sped up. “Then I give you permission to scare me.”

“My queen,” Sylas purred—then unhinged his mouth and came for me.

I was too busy gasping at the fact that his ever-widening jaw made it look like he was going to eat me alive to realize that I’d backed away from him—onto nothingness itself. Then I looked around, at the jungle far below me, and the empty sky above, and screamed. Sylas made a sound of pure satisfaction and grabbed hold of me, yanking my legs up by their ankles and hoisting me up to feast.

I kept screaming as I felt row upon row of his sharp teeth encircle the space above my pussy, pushing into my belly at the front and my ass at the back—and then I felt his tongue and started screaming for a different reason. I shoved my falling shirt out of my face, which only made things worse, because then I could see around me.

“Oh, god!” I squealed, twisting in the open air, not sure if I was fighting with him or trying to fuck him back. “Don’t fucking drop me!” I panted.

“I would never, my queen,” he said somehow, from right beside my ear. More and more tendrils of smoke flew out of the cave to envelope me, and pieces of him that looked like paddles with mouths instead of suckers wrapped me at my waist and thighs. Inside his mouth one of his tongues was busy probing me, while what felt like a forked tongue worked my clit.

I screamed and ran my hands through my hair—which meant my shirt started covering my face again—and I didn’t know what was better, seeing or not seeing what was happening to me. I swatted it back, as he growled. “All of you tastes so good.” Another paddle appeared, this time full of blinking black eyes, surveying my entire trapped body. “I like to see what I eat.”

“Yeah?” I asked, stripping my shirt off at last—I made a half-hearted effort to throw it into the cave behind me, and watched it flutter off in the wind. I couldn’t afford to lose a bra on this expedition, so I shoved mine up, exposing my breasts to him. “Fucking come and get it!” I said, holding both of my tits up.

More mouth-filled paddles came for me at once, settling over each breast. I groaned—and then his tongue inside me thrust, and he dropped me a few inches at the same time. I shrieked in terror, clenched, and then howled as he pulled me back up to do it again. It was like being on a perverted after-dark carnival ride, and I was wrapped up in everything about the moment—my fear, him, the night air where he wasn’t touching me, his mouths pushing me closer and closer to the brink—and then the tongue inside me blossomed into a forest of tongues, stretching me and taking up all my space.

“Oh my god!” I howled, reaching up. He’d surrounded the entire area between my legs, a creature of eyes and mouths and teeth, and it didn’t matter that he was terrifying—I was going to fucking come. “Sylas!” I cried out. “Sy—” I began, and fell into a shriek as he dropped me, fast enough to make me feel his tongue pull at my entrance, as I started thrashing hard, feeling myself pulse around him. “Oh fuck—fuck.” I hissed and twisted in his grasp and I both heard and felt all of him purring. “I’m still—” I complained, looking up at him with a tense expression as I groaned, arcing my hips against him. “God!” I gasped, going completely flaccid and feeling completely wrung out.

He waited until I was finished, and then extricated himself from me, giving my pussy a last wicked slurp as he carefully pulled me back into the cave.

“I like filling you,” he said from all around me, turning me right-side up again and setting me down.

I was all sorts of discombobulated, and would’ve stumbled if a wall of his fog wasn’t nearby weren’t there to hold me up.

“I like that too,” I breathed.

“I wish to enter you, Mina,” he said, from deeper in the cave.

“Get with the times, Mister Smoke,” I said, giving the darkness a grin. “Oral counts.”

He stepped forward once I was safe to stand on my own, and contained himself again. “Not like that,” he warned.

“Then . . . how?” I asked, as he raised a clawed hand to put it on my chest, nudging my bra up higher so that he could cup my breast.

“Here.”

47

SYLAS

I COULDN’T BELIEVE what Mina was letting me do to her outside—her terror at falling was very, very real, and I felt it wash over me with each delicious drop, licking it off of her the same way I was licking her cunt—and when she came, it was like her suspended light was like a comet in the sky.

But it wasn’t enough.

And that was part of the problem, I knew—for me, nothing ever would be.

The fear I’d eaten from the men on her apartment stair, and the boy I’d strung up before that, only encouraged me to look for more—and Mina was the only one here.

I placed my palm on her breast and felt her heart racing against the inside of her rib cage. Her mouth was slightly open and her eyes were dark on mine. “What do you mean?” she asked, after licking her lips.

“I want what you have for me—so badly you don’t even know.”

I watched her be afraid, and then resolved, and she ran her hands behind her to unclasp her bra, sliding it off. “I trust you,” she said, tossing it aside before reaching for my wrist and pressing my hand close. Underneath her nipple was still puckered tight from my mouths and the night air outside. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

I didn’t know how to explain it to her. She’d gotten a glimpse when we were in the sickroom of her friend, but I didn’t think it was enough. “May I show you? Over there?” I said, tilting my head to indicate the other place we could go. She blanched a little at that, but then nodded—so I pulled reality apart and pushed us in.

As we were the only two creatures around capable of making decisions, we were the only things inside the pan-dimensional black—me, and her, and the veritable highway of threads connecting us currently, none more strong than the ones pouring out of her chest for me.

She gasped at seeing them so clearly, without the interference of anyone else’s will or hopes or dreams, especially now that our fates were so intertwined.

“Look at that, Mina—at us,” I said, stepping closer.

“What happens when it goes into you?” she asked, reaching for one of the strings. Her hand passed right through them, not disturbing them in the least, then she set to playing with them, trying to trace them between me and herself, tucking fingertips inside of me.

“They fill me. Briefly. When they are severed,” I said, looking down at myself. “But I’ve never brought anyone else here.”

She looked up at me, and there was radiant light leaking around her eyes. “You’ve seen your other clients like this, surely?”

I had, and I’d always been tethered to them, but it’d never been like this. It’d always been just one or two threads, like fate couldn’t be bothered to sew up the rest. “Yes,” I told her. “But none of them were you.”

She laughed, and it made the light around her ripple. “Tell me more about how special I am, Sylas. I like that.”

I took her comment at face value. “Mina, I want to touch the light inside of you—more than I’ve ever wanted anything before.”

I had her full attention again quickly. “More than you want to leave your hourglass?”

It seemed impossible, but I found it true. “Yes.”

“Then do it.” I hesitated, and her hands found my wrist again, pulling me closer. “You’ve got a girl with a death wish who trusts you. I’ll tell you if you’re hurting me.”

And if I thought I couldn’t believe her faith in me earlier—she suddenly became my everything.

I knew I was in love with her—even if I’d never known what love was before—because I knew this had to be what love was: giving someone else the power to crush your heart.

“Make sure you tell me,” I whispered, then began pressing my clawed fingertips in.

48

MINA

THERE WAS a chance I was as insane as I was brave—or that all the blood that’d been in my head outside the cave had dropped to my pussy and was empowering me to make ridiculous choices but—

I wanted to believe in something again.

Before I met Sylas I’d been at the end of a fraying rope, down to my last strand, but now with him, here, like this? I could see all our points of connection, and more of them flaring up the closer he came. He was winding me back together again, and if he wanted my heart, he could have it.

I watched his claws slide inside me with a dropped jaw, expecting it to hurt, and not having a goddamned clue what the fuck was happening with my body in the real world. “Mina,” he groaned, as the tips of his fingers sank in, and the way he said it—I ran a hand between my legs at once. He saw me, and then went incredibly still.

“Keep going,” I said, while rubbing my slippery clit. I had row upon row of teeth marks upon my belly and thighs, and the memory of him fucking me was fresh—I brought my fingers up to lick them, to taste myself. “I mean it.”

“Mina,” he whispered again, coming closer, pressing in the edges of his palm. The darkness of his hand was obscuring all of the light in that part of my chest, and I moaned, going back to rubbing myself quickly.

“If you think I’m going to die without coming again,” I said, shaking my head, and that made him laugh.

“I love you,” he said, and I nodded.

“I know.”

The look of surprise he gave me then—

“How?” he demanded.

“If you didn’t, Sylas, you wouldn’t be scared.” I pulled out my fingers, and this time I fed them to him, and he eagerly sucked my juices away. “You have to let yourself be scared to love someone. Otherwise there’s not really any room in your heart for other people, is there?”

His eyes searched mine. “And . . . you?”

“I’m letting you touch my heart, Sylas—you tell me.” His fingers had all but disappeared, as all of my light splashed back into place, taking him in—it made it look like he was pressing his hand into molten lava, as brightness overwhelmed me. I could feel his ingress, him taking up space inside, and there was no rational way to explain how it felt—not the slight swelling and pressure I felt trapped behind my ribs—but the fact that someone, who would never leave me, ever, as testified by all the strands of our future between us—wanted me terribly.

And that . . .

“Can you please fuck me too?” I breathed. “I really need to come. Please.”

“You are madness incarnate,” he said, shifting us both, so that he was over me, and I let my knees fall open. “Of course.”

49

SYLAS

IT WAS nothing to create a piece of myself to give to her, having done so already twice the same night.

But this time would be different.

I knew I loved her, and I was literally holding her heart. Her fragile organ was pumping in short excited bursts as she looked at my face, at the lines of light growing between us, and then at the space where my hand was embedded in her chest. The stuff I was made of slid between all of her atoms and time, so that I could feel her, but not hurt her, although the line between the two was impossibly close.

I layered enough of myself between her and the ground in both dimensions, so as not to hurt her as I settled her down, and prepared to enter her. I felt her heave a sigh as I started pressing myself in, and watched her eyes close as her head rolled back—then she came back to life again as I made my first thrust, looking between her breasts at where we met, and then at where my hand was plunged into her wrist-deep. I could feel my stroke jostle her body—and then the way her heart beat more quickly afterwards.

I wanted to feel it race.

I wanted to feel it explode.

I leaned over her and started fucking her with intent while she moaned. Her little cunt fluttered, remembering what it’d given me when I’d had my tongue shoved inside her, and I reached down to stroke her clit, the light between us scattering and rearranging every time either of us moved.

“You’re so beautiful,” she said, her half-lidded gaze drifting up, as she looped her hands behind my head.

I looked down at the places where we met, both my cock and hand, where her light was swallowing me whole.

It looked like I was losing myself inside her.

It felt like coming home.

My eyes found hers again. “You are my everything.”

The words made her smile and close her eyes again, even as her heart was fluttered in my grasp like a dying bird.

Maybe a dying lamb.

All I wanted to do was extinguish it.

To blanket her beautiful brightness with all the shadows I possessed, pulling her utterly in, so that there was none of her to share with anyone else, in this world or any other reality.

And it would’ve been so easy to do, too, if she hadn’t opened her eyes again to look up at me.

“I love you, Sylas,” she said, in between the thrusts I gave her that filled her up. “And I’ve never told anybody that before.”

I knew it was true—because she wouldn’t have lied to me, and because I was holding her heart in my hand.

“My queen,” I whispered, and then I made time slow down.

50

MINA

I DIDN’T CARE that our love was wrapped with death, as long as we were together.

Then everything became agonizingly slow. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, and I could count between the beats like thunder, waiting for lightning, a thing I couldn’t have done before.

And he was pushing in-in-in and I could feel every millimeter—no, micron—of him gaining me, stretching me, pushing my walls wide, while I whined, my jaw dropping impossibly slowly—then we both sped up, and he landed home, taking my breath and making me grunt.

“Did you like that my queen?” he asked from over my head, his black eyes bright.

I nodded helplessly.

“Good,” he purred, and did it again, this time on his way out, dragging his dick out of me, setting every nerve I possessed alight, making me feel hollow at my core, before speeding us up to normal, and plunging deep. “I like it too,” he said, and as he did it again I realized that we weren’t having time-sex anymore—that I was about to get time-fucked.

So I groaned, and gave myself over to him completely.

I wanted every moment with him to erase some part of my history, to overlay the memories of how we’d gotten here and found each other, until there was only this place moving on—the unholy engine we’d created of him fucking me fast and then incredibly, almost painfully, slowly, as he drove me to the brink while still holding my heart.

I arched my hips up to take him, and had both hands on his wrist over my chest, daring him to plunge further, and to give me something to hold on to. “I need,” I began, but the word stretched out as he pulled time like it was a rubber band, until he snapped it back to place inside me.

“What, my queen?” he asked, bending over to stroke his face against mine. “My love,” he said, kissing me with his lips. The light shining from me to him when he was so close to me was blinding.

“To love you forever,” I teased, while smiling, when he rose up. “But also to fucking come.”

“One of those things I cannot grant you,” he said. “But the other . . .”

“Just normal please,” I added quickly. “Not that that wasn’t so good, but—I don’t need to be with you in surround sound.”

“Surround—” he began to question and I cut him off.

“I just want you here with me, all right?” I asked, while nodding.

“Of course.”

“Just soft. And gentle.”

“While I hold your heart,” he mused.

“Why not? It’s yours,” I said, and he bowed his head.

“Mina,” he whispered.

“Shhhh,” I said beneath him. “I’m still breathing.” He put a clawed hand at my hip and drove himself up carefully. “Yeah—just like that,” I said, and we started rocking in time. “Touch me too?”

“I can do one better,” he said, and a tongue erupted out from just above his dick to lick me.

I laughed. “Oh fuck, that’s cheating!”

“Anything to win,” he said, lowering his lips again to kiss me again.

More and more of his arm was sinking into me—instead of holding my heart from above, he was grasping it from below, his whole forearm inside my chest—but I didn’t care. I twisted my head to give him my neck, as I felt kisses begin elsewhere—some newly created part of him was sucking on my breast, while additional arms and hands grabbed my ass and helped to hold my thighs open. There was no space left between us anymore, he’d conquered all my light.

“You taste,” he began, a low growl in my ear. “You feel,” he said, and started sucking on my earlobe. “You smell,” he went on, and I felt his breath on the back of my neck. “Like me.”

“I’m so close, Sylas,” I whined. “Make me come for you—and then come inside of me. Please?”

He made a sound that reverberated from all around me, and I felt his pace between my legs pick up, at the same time his tongues licked and mouths sucked. “Sy—las,” I panted, stuttering his name—he was still being careful, it was just that I needed to come so badly it hurt.

“My beautiful, wise queen,” he murmured, rocking me harder. I felt him stiffen inside me as I clenched and I knew we were going to come at the same time, which made an impossible amount of sense, being where we were. “Your heart—your fucking heart,” he gasped.

“Sylas,” I cried out, bowing my head down and curling my hips up, as he crashed his lips onto mine.

One stroke, one kiss, and it was like one orgasm flew between us, starting in me with my pussy that clamped him tight, and then him taking it and giving it back, shooting himself inside me as he shoved himself forward, and we did it all over again. I didn’t know if he was slowing time on purpose or on accident, all I knew was that I wanted to stay like this, with him, forever—I could feel his cum in me, in a way that I couldn’t feel his hand around my heart, it was hot, and made me feel full, until it splashed at the back of me and dripped back out.

“I would give you everything,” he whispered in my ear, still thrusting into me. “If I could.”

“I know, shh, I know,” I said before crying out again. “Sylas—”

“Mina,” he growled, with one final, thudding shove, and then we were through.

I’d never come so hard in my life, and I didn’t want to fall apart. I knew whatever moment we’d just had we would never find again.

He stayed on top of me for a long while appearing to breathe and possibly thinking the same thing, while I stroked my hands down his back until he slowly released me, all of my limbs at first, before rising up to carefully pull his hand out of my chest.

I felt the lack of him at once, panging me just as bad as when he withdrew the rest of himself from between my legs, and I was just myself again.

“I have never known a woman as I have known you,” he said, looking down, his features as solid as they’d ever been before.

I kissed my fingertips and pressed them to his lips. “I should hope not.”

51

SYLAS

“WE HAVE TO GO BACK, MINA.” I meant to reality, but I was dreading the rest of it. I wanted to slow time down for us forever.

“I know,” she said, sinking back. I cradled her against myself and pulled us back into the weave of the normal world, and she made a small sad sound at once, because it hurt her.

“I am sorry, my queen,” I said, kissing the top of her head, as I laid her comfortably on a portion of myself, letting her use some of my smoke as though it were a bed, and I joined her there, stroking her side gently until her headache went away. Blood dripped from her nose again, only this time when I wiped it away from her I dipped my fingers in my mouth to lick them clean.

She squinted to see me. “That’s like really unsexy,” she said, then laughed and regretted it with a wince.

“I don’t want a drop of you to go to waste.”

“Okay, I take it back, when you put it like that. What blood type am I, by the way?” she asked, stretching out a little. “Could we have been flying everywhere this whole time?”

“It would depend on the atmospheric conditions,” I told her. Her flesh had goosebumps from a cold breeze, so I blocked the cave’s entrance for her. “How can you love me?”

Her eyebrows rose. “I don’t know, Sylas. I just do. And? You’ve never pretended to be anything you’re not.” She brought one hand up to trace the contours of my face, now that I had them, and I twisted my lips into her palm to kiss it . . . without moving the rest of me. “Even if you take some getting used to,” she said, laughing. “What time is it back home?”

“Still morning.”

“Even after I feel like I’ve been fucked for four days?” she pretended to complain, then her eyes drifted over to where she’d shed most of her clothing. “I was going to see the reaction to my post, but I doubt I have service—unless part of you can double as a cell tower?”

“No, my queen. But if they were sending people after you, they must be scared—as well they should be. You are quite formidable.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said, rocking back to nest against me. “I just have terrible taste in men,” she teased.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT, she fell asleep, and I couldn’t deny she needed it.

I’d held her heart in the palm of my hand, dipping my claws inside its beating flesh as she came—and just thinking about the moment made me yearn for her again. She’d been so close to death while she’d been filling me with her light—and then she’d let me pour my darkness into her. Each jetting burst had seemed to come from deep within and the feeling of giving her myself had been so profoundly satisfying, it felt like, that just like killing people, it was something I was meant to do.

But as I watched her sleep in my arms, and on top of me, I realized I could not allow myself to kill her.

It was one thing to lust for it—but I had gotten as close as I ever would, there, with my hand inside her breast.

I loved her.

And love was not death, not when she was so young and healthy. I brushed a kiss against her temple once more. Her mind might ache, but that was something that was fixable—there had to be a way to sever her from her fate with me.

It was just nothing that I’d ever considered doing before.

Every other person that had hired me deserved to die, oftentimes long before I met them—whereas she was eager for it, even as she loved me.

She wasn’t scared of death.

She was scared of being alive—and finding out that life had no meaning.

But time gave fate reason. And fate gave time a point.

We had not become intertwined on accident.

And from this moment forward, the only way I was willing to steal her breath was by pleasing her.

I let eyes open up across my back, so I could reach down a hand and reabsorb the inky fluids that had splashed out from her after I had filled her, pulling them back into myself, and underneath the blackness of my spill, I found a little metal T with two strings attached.

Some intrusion from the outside world, no doubt, probably brought up here by a nesting bird. I covered it with a handful of gravel from the cave floor, so that she wouldn’t see it and remember that there was anything beyond this place.

Mina slept soundly, and I kept an eye on her dreams for her. I would wake her in a few hours, take her some place to eat and possibly bathe, and then we would face the next name on her list together.

The Golden Wolf’s army would be preparing, condensing their ranks around their last precious three, but nothing they did would matter. I spent my own time dreaming of a sort, thinking of all the ways I could make them pay for hurting her. Flesh-eating beetles, pulling out their nerves strand by strand, breaking their necks high enough that they knew they were going to die but were completely unable to do anything about it . . . . I was strong, fast, and deadly, and if the men they’d sent after us already were any indication, all of this Wolf’s whelps were human.

But then there was the magic around her friend—and I pulled the scrap of skin she’d had me peel off of Nolan from the dimension I’d hidden it in. Something in both of them was vaguely familiar. I would dare say it called to me.

I stretched the gory piece of skin open with one hand. Why was this mark important? And what power did it imbue?

I’d overcome both of the men wearing it easily enough—had Mina defeated their plan in the cellar that night, or had they been lied to about its power?

Whatever the case was, it didn’t matter right now. I put the skin away and curled myself around her again, ready to chase off any of her nightmares.

She didn’t need them anymore, when she had me.

MINA WOKE when it was dawn outside, which meant it was night at her home. She turned into me before she pulled away, smiling. “I’m starving.”

“Then we will go eat before we wreak vengeance next.”

She laughed. “I can’t believe I need to eat before murdering someone.”

“Some human needs are quite prosaic.”

“And what do you need?” she asked, pulling a fingertip down my chest. I let the clothing I seemed to have on peel away at once, so that it looked like she was stroking against bare skin.

“Fear. Death. You.”

She blushed and twisted her head away—I caught it and pulled it in, to kiss at her temple. “May I enter you again?”

“Is that all you’ve been thinking of all night—er, day?” she added, after taking a glance outside the cave.

“For a large part of it. The rest of my time was spent also starving, however.” I picked up her hand and kissed it. “I want to know who we’re murdering next, and how, and when.”

She closed her eyes and nodded before answering. “Garrett Reid. He’s old school—so legacy his triple great-grandfather or something was in the RRP’s founding year. I stalked him for long enough to figure out where his family lives, in the country club outside of town, in the hills. I figured by the time I got to him he wouldn’t be staying at the frat house anymore—he’d go into hiding there, behind their brick walls and security guards.”

“And why are we not killing Trent, next?” Because after hearing Mina’s story—and Nolan’s—I longed to.

“I wanted to save him for last,” she said, and I gave her a look. “I’m not hiding from him,” she protested. “Or hiding him from you, believe me,” she said, sinking her chin.

I caught it. “I do. I will always believe you.”

I got to watch a tentative smile on her face blossom into something joyful. “Good,” she said, nodding into my hand, before she bit her lower lip. “Because I love you, Sylas. And—yeah—let’s do some entering.”

I wrapped myself around her like I was a blanket and she squealed.

52

MINA

A FEW HOURS LATER, we were back downtown, eating at a restaurant that catered to monsters—the room we were in was huge, the booths were spacious, and there were places along the walls to roost and web. I had my purse with me and my gun was in it, just in case.

“Should they be seeing me?” Sylas asked, as we entered. He looked like he was suited in gray, with a trench coat and hat on, like I was dating someone made of smoke and also from the 1920s. I wasn’t mad about it. Especially not when he took the hat off respectfully, the second he walked inside.

“Do you really want a girl in the high-seventieth attractiveness percentile to look like she’s eating alone?” I teased. I had all my hair pulled up into a bun, and was in jeans and a baggy long-sleeved T-shirt. “But really—I figure this is the safest place to be. You’d have to be an idiot to start a fight here. Also, they have really good ramen.”

“Ra-men,” he said, sounding it out, and I opened my mouth to launch into an explanation, when I realized he was pulling my leg. He laughed, and I gave him a look, then ignored him until I was done giving the server—an avian with peacock heritage, based on the lovely waving iridescent feathers she was crowned with—my order.

“Do you miss it?” I asked him. “Eating?”

“I like eating you,” he said, and I felt myself flush, all the way up to the tips of my ears. “But no. Tasting things is enough. I don’t find solid substances useful.”

“What is it like?”

“Being covered in tongues? I think you should tell me,” he said, and I laughed.

“No. The rest of it. Being a pretty-damn-omnipotent time-being.” His eyes flashed, but he waited until the server was done returning with my order to respond.

“Ask what you want to know, Mina. Don’t shy away. Our time is too short for that.”

I broke my chopsticks in two—they sounded like breaking bones. “What will you do without me? Will you be okay?”

“No.” He put his hand on the table between us, and I took it. “I no longer want to kill you—so I won’t. I will stop fate.”

My eyebrows rose into peaks. “I’m flattered as fuck, Sylas, but . . . have you ever done that before?” I asked, before leaning forward.

“I have never desired to,” he said, and I made a tense face. “That does not mean that it is impossible.”

“No, just, highly improbable, is all,” I said. “But in any case . . . we’ve got a few days. And I was hoping we could call a truce on talking about future-things. It’s too rough, and poetic, and sad.” I stirred my chopsticks aimlessly in my broth. “I always thought I was a goth until all this—and while I still am—I just want to spend whatever time I have left being in love with you. I don’t want there to be an asterisk beside it, for a footnote about dying, every single time.”

“I agree. But just as I believe in you, I need you to believe in me,” he said, with utter sincerity. “I am going to find a way to save you.”

Whether he was or wasn’t, it wasn’t worth fighting him on, so I gave him an impish smile instead. “So sex with me was that good, eh?” I teased, and he laughed so loud every other patron in the restaurant looked at him.

AFTER THAT, I scarfed my noodles down and we worked on the next murder. I’d pulled blueprints for Garrett’s ancestral home from the city after a remodel, so I knew about half the structure of the house, and once we got inside of it, Sylas could handle the rest, I was sure.

“Gates and walls?” Sylas asked.

“Just rose gardens,” I said, flipping through the pictures I’d taken between us.

“I thought you said there was security?”

“I was a cute college-aged girl in a Fiat. They weren’t super worried about me. Plus, I knew everybody’s names.” I got to the last photo in my phone. “Does anything about these pics say ‘ancient bad magic,’ to you?”

“No,” Sylas said, with a frown, sounding gravely concerned. “What of Nolan?”

“I can’t believe I forgot!” I took my phone back to frantically search.

My original account on my college’s forum had been deleted, but I quickly made another—and while there were several comments under the post I’d made—the image itself had been moderated from the boards, for being “too graphic.”

“Oh, come on!” I muttered, and hit up all the news sites—and saw a headline about a report of a “mass hallucination on campus” related to undiluted pesticide exposure at the football field’s end. My eyes about fell out of my head. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I snarled—but all the reports were the same—kids were hysterical, thought they saw something awful, but it was definitely not supernatural, and they were all being given treatment.

“They’re covering it up, Sylas,” I said, holding my phone out to him. He read the article quickly.

“All twenty-one murders?”

“They’ve been practicing for years.” I pushed the end of my ramen bowl aside. “No one ever found any of the other girls, before Ella.”

Sylas reached into our table, and brought out Nolan’s piece of skin.

“Oh, Sylas, I just ate,” I said, putting a hand over my stomach.

“Hear me out,” he said. “What if, in addition to having some rudimentary ability to control fate, they can use dimensions? Like I can?”

I did quick math in my head. If the RRP had been going strong since their founding, sometime in the late 1800s—hell, maybe they’d been created for this awful, magical reason—a girl every four years, for a hundred and fifty years? Then there’d had been at least thirty deaths, counting the ones that’d happened before newspapers were kept for historical purposes and the internet.

Suddenly I was queasy for a deeply different reason.

“But why take the tattoos from them, if they were going to hide the bodies anyhow?” I asked. “They took those tattoos off of all of the men in the stadium tunnels.”

Sylas ran his fingers over the skin again—and quickly disappeared it when our server neared to take my bowl away.

“I think there’s something in the mark,” he said, when she was out of hearing range, then pierced me with a look. “Where do they keep the dye they make it with?”

I grimaced. “I don’t know. Trent already had his when we hooked up. I know there’s a big annual ceremony when the new members get theirs, but as a lady I wasn’t invited.”

He made a thoughtful sound. “Perhaps we can discover that before we murder this man tonight.”

53

SYLAS

MINA EXCUSED herself from the table after that, and I sent an innocuous amount of myself with her to the bathroom, extending it in a long unseen tendril to follow her like an obedient dog.

I had no prurient interest in seeing her excretions, but I would never make an assumption about her safety ever again, not after finding her in the tunnels. I licked the old blood and scabs from the boy off of my fingers, to try to place the magic, but it melted away too readily to be tasted properly.

And then, since I knew Mina was still in a stall—I pulled the skin out from the place where I’d hidden it, and ate it up entirely.

I didn’t have a digestive system in the common sense, but I could destroy things from inside of myself just as well as without. I felt the structures inside of me pull apart the scrap of the other man’s being, shredding skin cells, collagen, and hairs, until there was nothing left, and I still had no answers.

“I’m back,” Mina announced, threading her way through the large tables to rejoin me. “Are you ready?” she asked, offering me a hand.

“Yes,” I said, bringing it up to kiss before walking beside her outside again.

WE DUCKED into an alley to portal to our new target’s home, finding ourselves in the rose bushes in front of the mansion that Mina had warned me about. All the windows were dark, and the curtains were drawn.

“I think they’re expecting company,” she whispered.

“Should I blow a hole in their wall?”

She considered this. “As tempting as it would be to watch them run around like ants, no. Let’s just knock on the door.”

“That’s foolhardy. They might try to shoot you.”

“If they do, you’ll protect me,” she said, while pulling me forward. “We need to find out more information this time, Sylas. I think we should try talking to them.”

“Why? They’re not going to tell you anything without pressure. The Wolf has them scared.”

“I know you’re right—but once we’re inside, I can stall, and you can search everywhere, and it won’t matter what they say,” she pressed. “Don’t get me wrong, I like torture, and Garrett’s gonna die, but I bet there’s a lot of history in there. These assholes commemorate everything. Trust me?”

I made an unhappy sound. “I do.”

“Thank you, baby,” she said, then walked right up to the front door.

There wasn’t a doorbell, just an ominous gold wolf’s head shaped door knocker.

At least we were in the right place.

Mina shouldered her purse, and then grabbed it, tapping it politely on the door. Shortly thereafter a frail-looking elderly woman in an ivory pantsuit opened it up.

“Mina Moore,” she said kindly. “We’ve been expecting you. Garrett’s not here right now, sweetie. Would you like some tea?”

“I’d love some, thanks,” she said, as the woman let her in.

54

MINA

I FELT AWKWARD the second I walked in—not because I was having a hard time imagining murdering Garrett’s grandmother, although I was, but because I was probably the first woman who hadn’t worn pastels in this house for a decade.

Everything in her house that wasn’t a dark warm wood was different shades of ivory, ecru, or eggshell, from her sofas that looked like no one had ever sat on them, the white roses in vases that we passed, all the way down to the two yappy dogs that came out to dance around our feet.

“Monet! Picasso! Settle down!” she commanded, and they backed off, following the two of us from a few feet behind.

“So you, uh, know who I am?” I asked her, following her to her spacious kitchen’s breakfast nook. She gestured for me to take a seat, so I did. I had no idea where Sylas was, but I didn’t feel particularly in danger currently.

“I know you’re the reason Garrett’s had to go into hiding. But, unlike the others, I think you can be reasoned with.” She set a kettle to boil. “Chamomile?” she asked.

“Sure. Why not.”

I watched her putter around her kitchen.

“You’re not the first, you know,” she commented. “I’ve been around the block.”

“The first to . . . ?” I wondered out loud.

“To want to get ahead,” she said, as the tea kettle whistled. She took it off the heat and poured a generous amount into a white mug for me. “I’ve seen a lot of girls here in my time. Saying things. Most of them untrue. Some of them, though . . . maybe? Garrett’s grandfather had an uncle. He was . . . rough.” She set the mug in front of me.

Nothing about the moment belied the fact we were talking about sexual violence.

“Drink up,” she said, pouring herself a mug, and sitting across from me.

I got a slight sense of déjà vu, as I picked up my mug and pretended to take a sip.

I wasn’t going to drink a goddamn thing anyone associated with the RRP gave me, ever again.

She gave me a smile with thin, pink, lipsticked lips, and took a deep drink from her own.

“But here’s the thing, sweetie. Most of those girls were just looking for a check. So,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her pantsuit to bring out an ivory-colored checkbook. “How much?”

“I don’t want your money,” I said.

“Nonsense. Everyone wants money. Let’s just nip this thing in the bud, shall we?” she said, bringing out a pen as well, and dotting its tip on her tongue.

“One million dollars,” I said, picking a number out of thin air. Her eyebrows rose, but then she gave a weary sigh and opened her checkbook up. “No—wait—four,” I pressed, curious what she would do, and how high she would go. “Five,” I said, watching her eyes.

“Don’t get greedy,” she said and tsked. “You’re not buying a racehorse.”

She started writing my name across the top of the check in swooping letters.

“And just what do you think me being assaulted by your grandson and his friends should be worth?”

That made her pen stop in its track. “Playing helpless after you’ve played house isn’t a good look.” And then she glanced up. I followed her gaze quickly, and saw a tiny black spot in the ceiling’s corner.

We were being watched—and there was no way they were going to let someone who knew as much as I did out of here alive.

I took my mug and flung the tea at her.

She gasped and sputtered, and then the color drained from her face, making her look as pale as the rest of her belongings.

“I—” she said, then began to rise up. “You slut!” she shouted, coming for me across the table—before collapsing with a gasp. She rolled off of the table and hit the floor with a sickening crunch.

“Oh shit!” I hissed. “Sylas?”

“My queen,” he said, from the space around me.

“Did I just kill Garrett’s grandmother?”

“No,” he said. “I slowed time, switched your mugs, and neither of you noticed. However, I knew you wouldn’t drink anything she gave you.” He was on the verge of coalescing.

“Don’t—we’re being watched,” I said, pointing up to smile and give whoever was manning the camera stream a cheerful wave.

Sylas laughed, and I knew he was speaking only for me. “This place is very interesting. I killed several security guards, both upstairs and down below. But there are things there I want to show you.”

I stood up and took Sylas’s invisible hand to help me step over Garrett’s grandmother. “Let’s hurry—I’m sure they’ve called the cops.”

HE PULLED me through the mansion to a library full of leatherbound tomes, and I let go of his hand to clap mine. “Oh my gosh—this place has a secret room!” I ran to the wall and started pulling books down and trying to twist sconces off of walls.

“It does,” Sylas said, making a portal in the wall for us to go through.

“Ugh, you’re no fun, Mister Smoke,” I said, faking a pout, before walking into a dimly lit hall set behind a bookcase. It went down and looped in on itself. There were hieroglyphic looking symbols carved on the walls all around us—and etched into the floor. “What the fuck?”

“They’re not real,” Sylas said, in a tone of disdain.

“How do you know?”

“If they were, I would be able to read them.”

I snorted. “It’s an interesting design choice for sure though. Lot of commitment, for some rich white people in the club-urbs.”

Sylas got us through another locked door, into a wider open space, although the walls still verged on amusement park. There were marks on them, too, of where . . . pictures had once been? And been taken down?

“And this is where the ceremony takes place,” he said, drifting over to a table where there were a row of sticks with sharp points all carefully laid out, beside an old ornate gun safe. “I can sense the remnants of the dye for their marks at the end of these.”

“And I can still smell the bad decisions in the air,” I said, jerking my chin at the safe. “What’s inside? Flintlocks, for ceremonial duels?”

Sylas reached into the safe’s door with a hand, worked the dial, then opened it up, revealing a small bag. He stroked a hand through this, and said, “It’s ash.”

“That needs to be locked up?”

He opened the bag and poured it through his fingers, and it reminded me of the sand dropping in the hourglass on my arm. “It’s magical too. Ever so slightly.”

I was listening hard for sirens, but didn’t think I’d hear any down here—and then I realized we hadn’t crossed a bank of screens here yet. I was certain they were streaming feeds offsite, but there had to have been someone here, too, keeping an eye on things, before streaming technology. “Sylas, can you go back upstairs and trace the wires in the walls? Even if the cameras are all wireless now, with a house this old, with its pretty plaster walls, they wouldn’t have pulled the old wires out—there’s a chance we missed a room.”

“My queen,” he said, and disappeared at once, returning almost instantaneously. “You are so smart. Come with me.”

He opened up a portal.

I stepped through it into a small room as Sylas wrapped a screaming Garrett Reid into his shadows.

The walls here were lined with stacked portraits, rolled up rugs, framed medallions, a few trophied heads of rams—all sorts of old world bullshit. It was probably everything they’d taken out of the ceremony room to hide, and one of the walls had a few flatscreens. Garrett’s dead grandmother was clearly visible in one of them.

Garrett was leaner than the other boys in Trent’s crew, and he’d always reminded me a bit of a hyena, quick to be opportunistic and cruel—probably because he felt untouchable, since his family had all this Hitler’s-bunker bullshit here.

I took a moment to survey things, then rounded on Garrett after steeling myself, making it very clear we were on my schedule, not his. “Hey, Garrett, long time no see,” I said, walking up to stand in front of him. “Meet my new boyfriend—Garrett, this is Sylas, the Nightmare, and Sylas, this is one of the guys who raped me.”

Garrett kept fighting Sylas’s smoke. “Shall I let him talk?” Sylas asked.

“Sure. Why not.”

Sylas kept Garrett hovering, while peeling the portion of himself blocking the man’s lips aside. “This is supposed to be a panic room!” was the first thing he shouted.

“Huh,” I said, making a show of looking around, before coming back to frown at him. “Seems like it’s working.”

“You killed my grandmother!” he shouted, trying to reach me with a hand.

“I’ve been informed that technically she killed herself. Plus—I wouldn’t even be here if not for you.”

“What did you do with my guards?” he howled, still struggling.

“That, I can answer,” Sylas said, opening up another portal. The scent of death washed out, making me gag. I couldn’t see what was inside of it, but Garrett could—he stilled immediately. “And they all had these on them. I found that quite interesting,” he said, flicking palm-sized chunks of skin tattooed with wolves to land at Garrett’s feet. “Would you care to explain its significance to us?”

55

SYLAS

“THE OTHERS WILL KILL ME!” the boy protested.

I wanted to shake him so hard I broke all his bones, but if I did he wouldn’t be able to talk, so I waited. “That’s what the last man told us. And yet he was left to die alone, strung up on a—Mina?”

“Goal post, baby.”

“Ahh, yes. Goal post.”

“Mina!” the boy shouted past me. “I didn’t want to!”

“Then why were you first!” Mina shouted right back at him.

“It wasn’t my decision,” he said, with a sob.

She made a sound of disgust, before arching her eyebrows and tapping a finger on her lips. “Was it, or was it not, your dick? ’Cause it really seemed like it was attached to you, at the time.”

“I could detach it now,” I offered, and that broke something in the man.

“I don’t want to die—I don’t want to die,” he started blubbering, and I knew he’d reached the point of madness there was no returning from, and thus was useless to us. I set him down while still maintaining a hold on him, and Mina walked up, frowning.

“I have had to deal with all your shit in my head, and on campus, and in my life, for six months now, and you can’t handle a minute-thirty?”

That didn’t stop him from blubbering—he just reached for her ankles in supplication. I yanked him back. He didn’t deserve to touch her, not now, and not then. I bound him up completely, so he could neither hear, see, or speak. “I’m afraid I need to eat his memories, my queen. He’s past the point of reasonable interrogation.”

Her flashing eyes met mine. She knew what that meant. “Yeah. Get to it.”

“Here, or . . .” I said, offering to portal him away.

“No, please don’t open a sewer lid again, this room is too small. Just do what you have to do. I’ll be waiting,” she said, and turned her back on me.

I reached for him, and then I hesitated, for the first time in centuries.

I didn’t want to know his thoughts or read his mind. Kill him, yes. Know him, no.

“It’s okay, Sylas,” Mina said, looking back over her shoulder. Her arms were crossed but she gave me an encouraging nod. “I love you.”

“And I love you,” I told her—and then reached into the shroud of my smoke to begin chipping away at the top of the man’s skull like I was entering a hard-boiled egg.

56

MINA

IT WAS hard to ignore the noises and smells coming from Sylas’s side of the room, but I tried. He’d walled off whatever he was doing with a cloud of smoke, and I knew you couldn’t pay me enough to go in there and see it.

But there were plenty of other things here to entertain me—like all these portraits, going back-back-back. I squatted down to thumb through them, wondering how far these assholes could traced their genealogy, when I got to a sepia-toned picture I recognized.

“No fucking way,” I whispered, freeing it from the rest. It was an image of two men, shaking hands at the edge of a desert, with some old-timey columns behind them.

And one of them, I was very sure, was Royce Bannerman’s dear old great-granddad.

I set the picture aside and started digging through other strata of the stacks, feeling like an archeologist myself. I didn’t find Royce’s relative in anything, anymore, but I found more images of the other man—quite a few.

“Sylas?” I asked, which briefly silenced the savage snarling happening behind me.

“My queen?”

“See what he knows about this man?” I said, holding the image up, without turning around.

“Of course,” he said, and the sounds started right back up.

57

SYLAS

Garrett’s Past

June 12th, Midnight

MY PHONE RANG with its special alert—someone was driving up to the cabin. I opened my phone, hopped onto the cameras, and rolled the feed back, spotting Mina’s stupid little Fiat cruising up the logging trail.

Who? Trent demanded in a group text.

Guess? I texted back, before leaping out of my bed and pulling on my pants.

I heard a thump from the room above—Braden, waking up and reading the convo. Nolan lived off campus, but we’d pick him up on the drive.

Who’s up for revenge? Logan said.

Fuckin’ A, Nolan chimed in.

Five minutes later we were all out the door, piled into the cab of Logan’s truck, and soon squeezed in tight by the addition of Nolan, as we talked over one another.

“Why’d you have to date such a cunt, Trent?” Braden asked, and Trent growled at him.

“Do you know how hard it is to find virgins these days? And—I didn’t see any of your asses volunteering to date her, or her friend, so fuck all of you. Six fucking months of my life wasted, that I’ll never get back.”

“At least Mina put out,” Logan said. “A lot. A-lot-a-lot. Can you imagine in the olden days? Having to keep your dicks out of the girls, for reals?”

Nolan rolled down the truck window to spit out of it, making Logan bark a complaint.

“Do not get that shit on my paint, man!”

“Yeah, but in the olden days, it would’ve been easy as shit to get a girl up here. No phones, no internet, no Me Too,” Braden said.

“That’s what my dad said,” I said. I’d asked him for the story again and again. I didn’t pretend to understand the magic that we were all in service to; all I knew was that I believed. So did my dad, my dad’s dad, and his dad before that. All we had to do was a little ceremony every few years, and make sure that anyone who got one of our tattoos always gave them back.

Logan hauled his truck around a turn, slamming us all into one another, and my phone buzzed as we triggered the same camera that Mina had. “She still up here?” Trent asked.

“Yeah. Get off me,” I said, shoving Nolan back.

“Why? Scared you might actually get some?” the much bigger man teased.

“Fuck you,” I muttered, as Logan parked the truck.

“Spread out, she’s somewhere nearby,” Trent hissed.

“Did she trigger any other cameras?” Braden asked.

“Not—” I began, but then my phone buzzed. “Far side of the cabin,” I said, scrolling quickly through the screen. “On the trail into the woods.”

Nolan laughed and started running in that direction. Trent was after him in a second, and I knew I needed to keep up for appearance’s sake.

While it wasn’t my fault personally that things’d fallen through with the blonde, my entire family knew I’d been part of the group that failed to keep the bargain for our line. We’d almost finished the entire ceremony before we were interrupted—which was the only reason it hadn’t blown back in our faces—but Mina’s arrival had fucked everything up. It was too late for her virgin friend, but because she was still alive, we didn’t get the same amount of juice out of her that other cohorts had from their sacrifices. She was still tied to us, but we’d missed the window to make the full offering—the ceremony demanded perfection, and without it, the power we drew from the ritual was weakened.

In fact, we were lucky we’d gotten any powers at all—hopefully the next cohort’s sacrifice would go better. Because without the full force of the ceremony, we were living on borrowed time. The powers we had now were just a fraction of what we should’ve gained—temporary, unstable, like a spark instead of a flame. If the next cohort’s sacrifice didn’t go perfectly, we risked losing everything we’d worked for, everything our families had sacrificed for generations. The ability to sway others, win money, make women want us who were far out of our league. I didn’t even want women—but the rest of it? Fuck, yeah.

I heard a howl from ahead, then another, and I knew that they were on her trail and were just messing with her now. We’d all been taking vacations up here since we were toddlers—she’d never had a chance.

Braden ran back to get me. “You’re doing this,” he said, as I heard Mina shriek.

“What?”

“Look, I’m your friend, and I’m telling you, this is happening. Otherwise—you want us to sacrifice you? Because we could—everyone knows you’re a virgin.”

“We’re not sacrificing her!” I sputtered.

“Yeah, this is just about getting even—but you’ve gotta get in there, champ. You have a legacy to protect. Go make your dad proud.”

“Which is exactly what I want to be thinking about when—”

Braden grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “No one here is gonna suck your dick for you. Get hard and get in and prove you’re a man.”

“Fuck you, Braden,” I cursed. But I still ran forward, grabbing my dick with my hand.

“SYLAS?”

I heard Mina’s voice from far, far away.

“Baby?”

I was exerting a great force on . . . myself, apparently, at this point, holding a man’s shattered head in my hands. Pieces of splintered skull were poking out between my fingers and a low ebb of blood was pulsing out of a hole in his neck.

“I’m pretty sure he’s dead, baby. Are you . . . okay?”

Her voice was small—not because of distance, but because she was falling into herself, and away from me, afraid of whatever it was that I’d learned.

“I am,” I said. My smoke was still obscuring the space between us. “In a manner of speaking, I did feed him his ears.” They were at the top of his throat now, at least. And if you counted having shoved and compacted most of his organs into the vicinity of his stomach, while I’d been wreaking havoc on him, he’d eaten his penis, upper thighs, and lower ribcage, too.

“I’m glad, baby, but can you come back out? I want to see you.”

I disappeared everything to do with the man, after harvesting his mark from him, and putting it with the others.

“I have returned,” I said, making myself as solid as possible, pulling back all my smoke to reveal her standing there, holding something in a frame with a worried expression. “Were you scared?” I asked, and she nodded. “I did read his mind, Mina. And somehow now I love you even more, which I did not think was possible,” I promised, sinking to be precisely on her level. One beautiful tear quaked on the outer corner of her eye, and I reached out to draw a line down its most probable path with a claw tip. “May I?”

Mina nodded, and I leaned in to kiss it, pulling it into my mouth, far sweeter and more valuable than all the rest of the death and fear I had just eaten, because it had come from her. She sighed and fell into me, where I caught her, running my face into her hair, and we stayed that way for a long moment, me holding her, until I was certain she could stand on her own.

“What do I taste like?” she asked.

Like someone worth keeping alive.

“Perfection,” I said.

The corners of her lips pulled up slowly. “And what’d you find out?”

“That your classmates were the same assholes you knew them to be. But we need to get into that cellar where they were performing their rites.” I stroked a lock of hair out of her face.

“I found this,” she said, holding the frame she held up. There were two men shaking hands in it, and I recognized one of them.

“That’s—” I began.

“Royce Bannerman’s great-granddad. I know. I recognized him from my research.”

“And who is the other man?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

I took a moment to close my eyes and sift through the last of Garrett’s impermanent ingested memory. “He’s related to the boy we just killed.”

“I kind of figured,” she said, staring into the photo again, before looking at me. “I’d rather talk to Royce again than visit the cellar.”

I considered the man in the photo, the first man to have trapped me—all I remembered of him was a sodden, bloody mess, one I couldn’t ask any questions of.

“I think I would, too.” I could see police on the monitors over her shoulder, swarming the elderly woman’s corpse like ants. “My queen,” I said, offering her my hand, and creating a portal back to the Monster Security Agency.

She hesitated, looking around the room quickly. “Can you make sure no one else ever finds all this?”

“Absolutely,” I said, before setting the place on fire behind me.

I BROUGHT us into the reception room where we’d first met, which felt like a lifetime ago. It was currently empty, but then the door swung open as Royce arrived, with a possible client of some sort following, an angry looking man in a suit.

“Excuse me”—he turned to tell them with a smile—“I’ll be meeting you in the next room over. Give me a second?” I heard him say, before he burst back into the room with us to hiss, “What the fuck? You are not killing her here. Not inside the building!” he growled, like I was a bad dog.

“Cancel your other meeting. We need to talk.”

Royce looked up at the ceiling. “Security!” he shouted, up to someone else.

I moved myself to block Mina. I’d seen most of Royce’s other agents through my hourglass, and while many of them were dangerous . . . they weren’t me.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, Royce—but I would prefer not to hurt people.”

Royce’s head snapped back. “What is that, some kind of shitty joke?”

And then Mina stepped in front of me, because of course she would. “Don’t hurt him!” she shouted.

“My queen,” I said with a dark laugh. “Your lack of confidence pains me.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, with a snort. “I couldn’t help myself! I love you too much!”

Half a second later, a girl with blonde hair that streamed down to her waist in perfect waves ran in—although oddly, pieces of her eyes and jawline looked like Royce. And behind her was Royce’s Arachnaea agent, who first climbed up the wall outside and entered the room sideways, tilting forward so his human half could angle in the door.

“You’re not security!” Royce shouted at the girl.

“Dad,” she groaned, crossing her arms. “Being a receptionist is so boring.”

“It’s supposed to be!” he shouted, while the spider-human neared.

“Did you need assistance?” he asked, with a mechanical voice. I realized it was coming from a translation device by his ear.

“I’m not attacking anyone,” I said. “And neither is she,” I went on, winding a portion of myself around Mina. “We just need to talk to him,” I said, pointing to Royce—while Mina offered out the picture she’d stolen from the cruel boy’s hidden room.

Royce’s eyes darted down in anger, but then his expression became solemn. “How did you get that?” he asked, snatching it from Mina’s hands.

“It’s a long story—but that’s your great-grandfather, right?”

The blonde girl grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, this is family stuff, I’m staying for sure,” she said, dropping into the nearest seat.

58

SYLAS

BETWEEN MINA AND HIS DAUGHTER, Royce never stood a chance.

“I’m Mina,” my queen said, walking up to introduce herself.

“Sirena.”

“How did I not know you had a child?” I asked the bald man.

“Because he’s never let me out of the water before,” Sirena answered for herself.

“That’s not true,” Royce muttered, still looking at the photo he held.

“It’s not, not really,” Sirena told Mina more quietly. “If my mother had her way, I’d be chained to a rock at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Your mother just wants what’s best for you. As do I,” Royce said, slowly taking a seat beside her—keeping himself equidistant between her and me.

“I mean you no harm,” I reiterated. “I’ve eaten recently.”

“I’m not sure how that’s supposed to make me feel better.”

“Should I stay?” the Arachnaea asked Royce, via his translator.

“Yes. If anyone human in this room seems like they’re suddenly dying,” Royce began, than shook his head. “Start fucking praying and call a black alert.” The spider’s human spine stiffened at hearing that. “Now,” Royce said, rounding on Mina. “Out with it.”

“We found that photograph in Garrett Reid’s secret bunker, along with a ton of other Rho Rho Phi fraternity-themed trash,” she said, taking the framed image back from him. “Do you know anything about your great-grandfather and Egyptian stuff? Maybe something mentioning a wolf?”

Royce made a face, before looking at me again. “The thing I don’t think anyone told you—and that you didn’t stick around to learn—was that my great-grandfather was insane.”

“‘Didn’t stick around’ is a rich way to say that I’ve been trapped in that hourglass for almost two hundred years,” I growled.

But the hourglass itself must’ve come from somewhere—and I’d never gotten the chance to investigate that, seeing as I could only come out when fate summoned me, and was then forced to perform tasks for strangers.

“This is Wheaton Ellis,” Royce said, pointing at the other man in the photo. “He changed his last name over to Reid when he ‘changed his life.’” Royce said the words like they ought to have one of Mina’s fateful asterisks. “They were friends back in the Victorian era, back when men with too much money had fun exploring things, pretending to do research, but mostly just fucking things up for local cultures. It seemed like the more lawful any given area became, the more men like Wheaton, and my great-grandfather, honestly, went there to take advantage of the underground interest in newly unattainable artifacts.”

Royce spun the frame on the table and shoved it down to me, where I caught it. “Do I want to know why you were in Ellis’s great-grandson’s closet?” he asked both Mina and I. “Or should I just assume it had something to do with the sudden disappearance of several college-aged boys?”

His daughter gasped and lightly clapped her hands in excitement, while the Arachnaea tilted his head profoundly.

“We were killing them. They had it coming,” Mina stated bluntly, and I loved her for it. “How insane was insane, precisely?” she asked, lifting the picture up. “Because he looks like he managed to get over to another country and tie both of his shoes, for this photo. And this is a pretty dapper suit.”

Royce frowned. “The insanity part came later. My grandfather told me he’d inhaled too much mummy dust,” he said, with a snort. “He was somewhat normal when he went over there, when my grandfather was a little boy, but when he came back he was obsessed with protecting a magical rock from Ellis.”

I slid my presence over the table towards Royce dramatically—and the Arachnea hoisted up a skein of silk, which would do precisely nothing to me if I attacked.

Then I realized his goal in throwing it would’ve been saving Royce’s daughter, who seemed oblivious to the danger she might be in, as she leaned forward, eyes wide.

“And his plan for that was . . .” I prompted Royce.

“You. Which clearly backfired. Because all you do is kill people.”

59

MINA

“I WOULD LIKE to see my hourglass now,” Sylas demanded, in a very low voice.

I reached forward, and the part of him I touched became solid, so I could pull him back. “Baby, don’t be scary.”

“How do you kill people?” Sirena asked.

I could sense Sylas was about to tell her, when I cut him off. “How old are you?” I asked her.

“Eighteen. And I want to know.”

“Sirena,” Royce said, in a tone of disappointment. “Go upstairs and get the hourglass off my desk, will you?”

The girl made a face, but she ran off to do as she was told, while I gasped. “Is that safe?”

I remembered what’d happened to me when I touched it, and glanced down, pulling my sleeve up—my hourglass was still marking my time on my arm.

“Yeah. She’s my bloodline. Your boyfriend there is going to be her problem, after I die. I’ve been meaning to have this conversation with her for a while now.”

“But he hasn’t because when my mom finds out, she’s going to be so pissed!” Sirena said, racing back into the room, holding the thing.

“Your mother knew what she was getting into when we met,” Royce grumbled, but then took it from her hands, so she wouldn’t get any nearer to Sylas than she already had.

I intercepted the hourglass after he put it on the table. It didn’t hurt me to hold now—and the level of sand inside of it matched the level on my tattoo precisely. There was a band of gold across the top of the hourglass that said, “Sleep and dream of me, till dreams become reality.”

“And this . . . is the rock?” I asked, tapping the bottom chamber of glass.

“It is. I mean, I think. At the end, he locked himself up in one of the rooms of his house, and lost the ability to ‘tie his shoes’ you might say. Then he went up on the roof, waving his hourglass around one fateful full moon, and this happened,” Royce said, waving at Sylas in a derogatory fashion. “My great-grandmother reported his death, he had a mysterious hourglass tattoo on his arm that some asshole in the city’s rudimentary coroner’s office took a photo of, along with the other carnage, and the rest was history.”

“Do you have any other memorabilia from him?” I asked.

“No. His wife burned most of it in disappointment. Before he’d gone down to Egypt, he’d been a credible man. When he came back . . .” Royce’s voice trailed off. He shrugged, and I looked over to Sylas, who had gone worrisomely still.

“Why did Ellis want it?” he asked, very slowly.

“I have no idea. He hassled my great-grandfather for it endlessly, even sending Pinkertons over to toss the place, but everything stopped after he died.”

“I can’t believe you were holding all this out on me!” Sirena said—and I had a sense of déjà vu again. Like time had taken a hiccup.

I whirled on Sylas at once. “We need to go talk in the hall.”

He turned toward me in surprise. “Why?”

“Now, Mister Smoke,” I said, storming away from the rest of the people in our small group.

60

SYLAS

THE SECOND THE door was closed to the reception room, Mina accosted me. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean?” I hated playing innocent with her, but I couldn't tell her what I knew—or the plan that I had forming.

“There was a little blip just a few seconds ago, and I felt it before—when I was drinking tea with Garrett’s grandma, and you were switching out the mugs.”

“You are just attuned to me is all,” I told her. “I was only searching out to see if there were any threats in the building.”

She nodded curtly. That answer made sense—as opposed to my real reason. “Well? Were there?” she pressed.

Only me.

“Mina—I need you to know that I love you. More than life itself,” I said, and stopped time for her entirely.

“What the—” I heard Royce sputter, from the other room, where I’d also frozen his daughter and the Arachnaea.

“They are fine!” I shouted, returning to him. “They’ve just been slowed—it will not harm them, and they will not know it.”

“What did you do to her?” Royce shouted, like he hadn’t heard me, experiencing an outrageous fury that I might have hurt his daughter in any way.

“Please, stop,” I said, pushing a hand out at him, and holding him back from me with a wall of smoke. “It’s your line’s fault that this is happening and that I’m here. I am releasing you now. Stay calm,” I said, and waved my hand to free him.

“This is a new low, even for you, Sylas—”

“I saw you with your daughter,” I told him. “Over there. Where fate threads people together. I could tell she was yours from her jawline, but you have no idea how brightly the thread between you and she burns. You love her, don’t you?”

“Of course!” he sputtered, reaching for her face. “She means the world to me—if you only knew how much I wished I could be with her—something I couldn’t do, because my fate is tied to you.”

“I know,” I said. “I see it.”

A single bright thread had always bound the two of us—and up until now I’d only thought of it as a leash.

But now I knew it was my salvation.

Because when I’d gone to look at the connection between Royce and his daughter, of course I’d looked at Mina too. She’d looked like an explosion of fate to me—only with one tiny new difference.

There was a little thread between the two of us, that met halfway.

That we shared ownership of.

Together.

“Sylas?” Royce asked, calmer now.

There’d never been a chance I was going to hurt Mina before this—but now that I knew she was carrying my child?

I would sooner quench the sun.

“I need to go.” I walked back into the room and picked up my hourglass. “I cannot hurt her, and there’s only one way for me to prevent that, I think.”

“What are you doing, Sylas,” Royce said, his voice low.

“If I tell you, you might be tempted to follow me—but I need you here. Protecting her. Put your best agents on it, for the rest of her life. Promise me.”

My tone made him stand straighter. “Whatever you’re planning to do sounds like an incredibly bad idea.”

“I don’t disagree. And Mina will be upset. But she will understand my reasoning shortly.” When her actual period didn’t come . . . “If you know what love is, you will promise me now.”

Royce was still pissed, but he gave a curt nod. “Fine,” he spat, then looked at Mina. “How will I know when whatever you’ve done is over?”

“She’ll rejoin time properly.”

Royce’s brow furrowed in concern. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but—what will happen to you?”

“If it works . . . I will be nothing anymore. It is the only way I can save her.” I went to stand in front of her. I’d stopped time for her mid-realization that I was about to do something drastic, so her eyes were wide and her lips were parting. I pressed another kiss against them. “All that I do now, I do out of love,” I told her, before looking at the other man. “Tell her that, too,” I said, beginning to open a portal to a forest behind a cabin I’d only seen once before, inside a boy’s mind.

“Do you want weapons?” Royce shouted at me. I laughed once at hearing him, and then the portal closed.

61

MINA

I FELT like I’d taken the world’s longest sneeze—and I was still in the hallway—only the light coming in through the windows outside said it was dawn.

“What . . . the fuck,” I said, coming back into myself and looking around.

“You’re up!” a woman squealed—it was the same blonde girl I’d met the night before, she was sitting on a desk and clapping her hands.

“Sylas?” I asked, whipping my head back and forth. “Where’s Sylas?”

“Your mate had to leave you,” said a different voice, this time mechanical, from the room’s ceiling, where the Arachnaea was tucked into a corner. “Royce explained what happened to us, after he left. Your mate froze time for you. He needed to complete a task.”

“Which was?” I asked—but I was afraid I already knew. I ripped up the sleeve of my shirt, and sure enough, the sand inside my hourglass mark had stopped moving. Our fates were no longer intertwined. “Where did he go?” I demanded, storming up to the girl.

She was fearless though, and she held up her hands and shrugged. “We were frozen too. He only talked to my dad.”

I looked around. “Where is he?”

She leaned back and hit a button on the phone behind her. “She’s up now!” she crowed into the intercom.

“I’m coming!” her father announced.

“Here’s your purse,” Sirena said, offering it over to me. “Nice gun.”

The elevator door opened shortly thereafter. “We’ll be starting a twenty-four-seven security detail on you at once,” Royce began the second after spotting me, while gesturing for me to follow him back into the reception room—which was the last place I’d seen Sylas.

What had happened right before I’d been frozen?

I’d had a sense of déjà vu, I’d called him on it, and then—

“I don’t think she’s listening to you, Daddy,” Sirena said.

“He didn’t want to kill me,” I said out loud.

“And that is surprisingly admirable of him,” Royce said, giving me a tense, all-business smile.

“No—it means he went off and did something stupid. By himself.”

“He’s practically an elemental being. He only does what he wants. So wherever he is now is where he wants to be,” Royce said calmly, trying to pat down my rising emotions.

I put my head in my hands. I never should’ve brought anything up at the restaurant. I would’ve talked about dying a thousand times over, if it hadn’t meant that he’d leave me a second earlier than he had to . . . to go . . . where?

To try to make a deal for my life, with the only other people who might know how to help him stop himself.

The remnants of the Rho Rho Phi.

“Fuck!” I shouted, loud enough for it to echo.

62

SYLAS

AFTER I PORTALED over into the forest, I spent some time performing reconnaissance. It was easy to hide from the tripwires and cameras, and I found the gate to the cellar. When I neared it, it appeared, and when I flew far enough back, it went away—it recognized my magic, somehow, which was why Mina couldn’t find it with the police, or again by her lonesome when she tried—and lent more credence to my growing theory that the magic the boys had and that I possessed was similar somehow.

I seeped through it and dove into the cellar, which was dark now, without a ceremony going on—but when I cast a light I could see it glinting off of the wolf-head altar’s golden tongue. I inspected this, feeling out for a secret space, in a sphere, all around—and found it, hidden inside a secret chamber in the wolf’s throat.

I reached through, pulled a chain, and the tongue receded into the statue, where the rest of the throat decoration would’ve scraped off whatever had been on board . . . into a stinking pit of bones below.

But underneath all of them somewhere was a portion of the same stone that allowed me to control time.

I could feel its presence, and I used my other sight to find it at once.

What I found instead surprised me—a tangled, chaotic mess of glowing threads. Fates that’d apparently been severed from their owners and trapped by the stone below.

I didn’t want to touch them. I’d never seen fates disconnected from their humans before—the entire situation seemed wrong.

Almost . . . sickly.

I snapped off one of the railings of the stair that’d led down here and used that to stir the bones instead, and the threads moved with them, still attached to their original owners somehow, no matter the state of decomposition they were in.

And because of that, it took me a long time to find what I was looking for, twenty feet down, at the bottom of the pit: the other portion of the stone, the one they hadn’t crushed for dye. Because, I realized, just as Royce’s great-grandfather had ground his portion of the rock up to use in my hourglass—so had their Ellis. Only he’d had them impregnate the crushed stone into their tattoos—which they retrieved, and reused, so that the magic wasn’t lost when bodies were buried.

And they’d learned to use its magic, even if they didn’t fully know how, to sever fates to better their own.

All they had to do was periodically kill an innocent victim and . . . harvest their interrupted fate for them to use for power?

No—if so, why were so many of them left behind? Fates, in and of themselves, did not have power—not until they were manipulated. The chaotic mess in the pit felt dangerous, but it was currently undirected.

Whereas I remembered the highly organized threads of fate I’d seen circling Ella.

At the time, I’d assumed they were draining her fate from her, so slowly it was almost imperceptible.

But what if I was wrong? What if they were giving it to her instead?

Loading her up with all of the bad outcomes that the boys were avoiding, sheerly by virtue of belonging to their group? Making her sicker and sicker, as they became increasingly lucky and better equipped to move through life?

If so, then what was in the pit represented all the poorer fates of the men that had come before, that’d been wrapped around their victims like chains, until they were sacrificed and took them with them.

I was attuned to the sands of the hourglass when it was with me, because it controlled my life, and I could sense the last bit of the stone below. I moved the bones to see it clearly.

It was in a gilded cage, set into the floor, with slats above it like it was in a drain, so that everything that poured down from above—cum, blood, decay—eventually went into its setting, where it used it up like kindling, burning it away.

And I could tell its powers were waning.

Whereas Royce’s great-grandfather had kept his portion of the stone largely intact, albeit it in a different form inside my glass, and I only had to surrender to its powers of fate occasionally—the men of this organization had been continually drawing power from their piece of it for over a century.

Using it like a battery they were poorly equipped to recharge.

But they’d managed to constrain it—with threats and magic and nostalgia.

Which meant there was a chance that they could also constrain me.

“Like what you see?” asked a brash voice from the top of the stairs. He sounded strong, but I could sense the guilty fear in him, and I knew who he was at once, from Garrett’s memories.

Braden.

“It is interesting,” I said, pulling the chain again, and resetting the contraption. Once it was sealed away, I couldn’t feel it anymore.

That . . . was promising.

He made it to the first landing, and then kept striding down. “We knew you’d come here.”

“Yet you appear defenseless.”

“Not entirely,” he said, putting his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “The fact that I’m still alive means you want something from me.”

And that, I could not deny.

“My father’s a businessman,” he said, tapping his head. “So I get my business-sense from him. What do you want? Let’s make a deal.”

I made a gesture at the hidden pit. “How much of this magic do you really understand? Not much, I’d wager,” I said, swirling around. “These carved grooves were meant to channel energy. You fed it with cum—but it hungers for blood.”

It didn’t, actually—the grooves on the ground were as made up as the rest of the carvings, with the pseudo-Egyptian aesthetic, that their forefather had brought over.

The only magic present in the room was inside the pit—and on their chests.

“What if I told you, I could replace your dwindling power?” I asked him. “For a price?”

“I would ask you what it is.”

“Mina Moore’s life. None of your men ever touch her again.”

Braden made a snorting sound. “Done. We’ve been trying to ignore her—”

“And the life of your last friend from your crew,” I said. “The one who is not here.” I gestured at the symbol on the ground. “What was his name?”

“Trent,” the man said slowly, and I gave him a deep nod.

“If you kill him, and feed this sigil his blood, my power is yours.” I didn’t need his blood—but my Mina did. Particularly if I was going to disappoint her by leaving this final boy with breath.

“What do you get out of this?” he asked, squinting at me.

I decided to tell him the truth. “I’m fated to kill her. I would rather not. I believe your pit here can contain me. Once I am inside of it, to protect her, I will never come out again.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“Would we still be talking if it wasn’t true? I believe by now you know what I’m capable of.”

I watched him weighing his options. “And . . . just Trent?”

“Yes,” I said, and he heaved a sigh.

“I’ll go get him. Everyone else is waiting up top. Expecting me to clean up this mess,” he said, raking a hand through his hair. “Stay here,” he said.

“Hurry. I hunger,” I said—and it wasn’t entirely a lie.

63

MINA

“OKAY, so I know where he’s gone,” I said, gathering myself up quickly. “I’m going to need help.”

Royce waved his hands in an apologetic fashion. “I promised to watch over you. That doesn’t mean I’m going to help you commit homicide.”

“I will!” Sirena said, while her father leveled her with a glare. “Or, maybe not.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, beginning to plead my case. “I hired him to kill men who hurt me, yes, but it’s expanded far past that. The entire fraternity they belong to is evil. They’ve been killing women for over a hundred years.”

“Oh, I’m back in,” Sirena said, grinning viciously. I noticed that her teeth looked sharp.

“Why?” the massive Arachnaea asked, crawling down the wall to rejoin us on the ground.

“I know it sounds crazy, but it makes them lucky. There’s something about their ceremonies that messes with the girls’ fates, and that empowers them.” I looked between all of them. “It’s true—we were attacked by fraternity members multiple times, and a grandma tried to poison me.” And there were probably hundreds of alumni up at the cabin by now, either swarming Sylas as he tried to go out in a blaze of protective glory before killing me . . . or doing something, far, far worse, that I couldn’t think about without screaming.

“A small army, you say?” Sirena asked, considering.

“Yes—uh,” I answered her—and then realized I hadn’t said anything about how many frat guys there were—and the girl flushed.

“Sirena,” Royce said, in a growl of warning.

“I’m telepathic. Sorry,” she apologized. “But I can probably take on fifty.”

“You’re not taking my daughter on a suicide mission,” Royce said, moving to stand in front of her.

I looked up to the Arachnaea. I recognized him from his documentary on TV. He’d rescued his girlfriend from kidnappers on a skyscraper a few months back—so I knew he knew what true love was.

“Please,” I asked, my voice small.

“Sylas didn’t mention that the person we’d be guarding you from was yourself,” Royce muttered.

“The thing is, if we don’t stop them, they’ll only kill someone else. It’s not about me anymore—it’s about all the girls we’re saving in the future,” I said—and then I heard my phone ring.

I’d turned my volume back on, because I wanted to know if my post of Nolan’s picture got any further responses—but there was no one around who’d be calling me.

I pulled it out of my pocket, wondering if it was Brad Kirk from beyond the grave, only to see a picture of a cheerful blonde pop up.

Were the RRP guys at her nursing facility, holding her hostage? “Ella?” I shrieked, panicking. “Are you all right?”

“Mina?” asked a familiar voice back. “Yeah!”

“Oh my god, Ella!” Sylas had saved her somehow. I started crying big snotty tears at once, as I fell to my knees. “Where are you?”

“I’m in this shitty hospital bed. My mom’s here. She’s freaking out. Has it really been six months?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How do you feel? Do you remember anything?”

“Better now? But . . . everything before this feels like a dream. I was at that party at the cabin with you, and then . . . we were in some cave-place.” I heard Ella’s mother saying things off to the side, and Ella refuting her. “You weren’t there, Mom! Mina was! She rescued me!” And to me, she asked, “What happened to my car?”

“I, uh, totaled it,” I said, smiling through my tears. “Sorry!”

“Oh my god, Mina, you’re such a bad driver,” she said with a laugh.

And when I thought about all the times I’d almost driven Sylas and myself off the road recently. “You don’t even know,” I said, laughing back.

“Are you okay?” Ella asked. “And—what the fuck happened?”

I looked around the group currently surrounding me, and remembered what I was trying to convince them to do. “I’ll tell you all about it later. I swear. But I’ve got to go—I’ll come visit you as soon as I can. Tell your mom to take me off the no-visitation list—I love you,” I said, and then hung up on her quickly.

“They tried to sacrifice your friend, didn’t they,” Sirena said, and I nodded, wiping beneath my nose with the back of my hand.

“But I saved her. And—Sylas saved me. But—I can’t leave him behind. I love him, too,” I said, looking around at them one by one. “I know you know what that’s like. I’ll do it alone if I have to—but I could really use some help.”

“As the agent currently assigned to you, it seems I have to follow you wherever you go,” the Arachnaea’s translator informed me with its mechanical voice—and I recognized Sylas’s dry sense of humor in his tone, as did Royce.

“Are you encouraging her?” he said, confronting the massive monster.

“I don’t get out enough anymore,” the spider complained, lifting both hands.

“Because you’re famous!” Royce complained.

“Well, then, let me go use some of my fame helping to rout a small army. They’re humans. How hard can it be? I will go get my bag—stay here,” he said.

“And, uh,” Sirena said, emerging from behind Royce’s shadow with her own phone. “I called Mom. She said I could go.”

Royce rolled his eyes. “The fuck she did,” he said, taking Sirena’s phone away from her, presumably dialing her mother up.

We all heard the ringing inside the arriving elevator, whose doors parted to reveal a beautiful blonde woman, wearing tight jeans, comfortable looking heels, a blue dress shirt and a set of pearls. She looked like a slightly taller and older version of the other girl.

“I said you could go if I could come with you,” she corrected her daughter, before looking at Royce. “One week. She’s on land one week, and already you’ve got her wanting to gallivant off, making a poor use of her powers.” Then she strode over and reached out for my chin, staring deep into my eyes. “Then again, we sirens are known for our willingness to retaliate against violence to women. And you are carrying his child. I could hardly abandon a mother in need.”

“I’m sorry, what?” My jaw dropped, and I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.

“You’re pregnant. I’m sorry if you didn’t know.”

I cupped a hand over my belly. “I did not.”

But . . . I bet Sylas did. Which was why he’d made his decision, without telling me.

“Nevertheless, since I am here now,” she went on, “I’m Omara, and I suppose we’ll be helping you. Sirena needs experience in the wild, since she wants to take over her father’s company someday,” she said, giving Royce a look.

And the look he gave her in return was complicated. They clearly had affection for each other, and a deep, deep history—he finally acquiesced. “The family that slays together stays together,” he said. “As long as all members of that family are wearing bulletproof vests.”

64

SYLAS

The Not-So-Distant Past

BRADEN WENT UPSTAIRS while I considered what my fate would be. If I used my stone to facilitate their powers, absorbing everything bad that was going to happen to them, I would be able to keep Mina—and our child—safe from me.

Forever.

And when Braden returned, it was with Trent in tow.

I sensed the other man’s apprehension. “He just wants to kill us both at the same time, you idiot.”

“No. Only one of you,” I said, appearing solid enough to sit on the altar-tongue, casually holding my hourglass on my lap. “I don’t actually care who it is. I just assume that the weaker one of you will die—and the other will get to be the one who replaces all of this,” I said, gesturing downward, “with an actually functional system. All I need is Mina’s safety, and fresh blood.” I ticked my two requirements off on my fingertips—and Trent reached into his pocket.

He produced a switchblade and jabbed it into Braden’s throat, before the other man could turn to give him a look of surprise. Braden sputtered, his hands flailing over Trent’s, trying to remove the weapon.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” I counseled. “Unless you’d like to bleed a whole lot faster.”

Braden gave me a haunted look, and I gestured Trent to bring him over. “I want his blood in the grooves,” I said, just to make the man work for it, and Trent warily lugged his friend forward, planting his neck in the right spot, before reclaiming his weapon.

“So you’re the ruthless one?” I said.

“I am,” he answered, cleaning his knife’s blade on his jeans before folding it shut again.

“What a pity. I was hoping most you would die,” I told him. “So listen to me when I tell you this. If anyone in your organization so much as injures a hair on Mina Moore’s head, I will consider our pact null and void, and I will come out and kill all of you all, on my way to kill her.”

“Hmm. It seems like I have the upper hand.”

“Only for as long as you don’t fuck up. So—don’t. If you like living, and providing for the rest of your fraternity, that is. And you never sacrifice another girl again. In fact, if I were you,” I said, leaning back to pull the pit’s door open with the chain, “I would forget that this place even exists. I would write it out of your histories, and fill the rest of this cavern up with dirt.”

“And what about the ink? To connect us to you?”

I let myself drop into the tangled morass of fate below, taking my hourglass with me. “Conserve it as you have been. The theory will be the same—I will take on all of your bad fates, commingling them with mine—but you will not ever have any more ink to create with, because this pit will be locked. From the inside. Irrevocably.”

I lay down on top the bright and twining strands, feeling them welcome me, even as what was left of me that was real felt old bones grinding beneath me below.

I opened my arms wide, grabbed hold of the edges of the pit’s covering, then hauled it closed above myself, hearing stone grind over stone, as I fell into my fate.

65

MINA

NOT LONG AFTER THAT, we were all settled into some sort of battle-van, which the Arachnaea only barely fit into the back of, while Sirena and I—now wearing bulletproof vests—were squished into tiny jump-seats, and Royce and Omara were up front.

I took out Ella’s pot of Perfect Blue Pigment from my purse, and drew aggressive streaks of it beneath both my eyes.

“Can you give us any more details on what we’re going up against?” Royce asked.

“They’re all dudes. I haven’t seen them use weapons so far, and”—I preemptively winced—“they’re all going to be really lucky.”

“They cannot be that lucky, if we are going to attack them,” the spider-monster pointed out.

“You have a point. I’m Mina,” I said, sticking out a hand.

“Nine,” he said, taking it.

“I, uh, saw your documentary.”

The Arachnaea didn’t say anything to that—he just let out a long-suffering sigh.

“And the layout of the grounds?” Royce pressed.

I thought back to the night when I’d seen the cabin last, beneath an almost full moon. My heart swam into my throat at the memories, and when Sirena caught my hand to squeeze it, I realized she was probably able to see everything that’d happened to me in my mind.

“I’m sorry,” I said, ducking my head down in shame.

“Don’t be,” she said, letting go of my hand with a pat, and then tucking both of her thumbs into the armpits of her vest, looking incredibly official, though her long blonde hair, now braided up in a ponytail, made her look like Commando Barbie. “This is what we’re here for.”

I gave a stiff nod, then continued. “It’s an old two-story cabin, with a pretty wide fire break all around it—but the whole thing’s deep in the woods. Heavy forests, with old trails. And they’ve got magical tripwires and probably some plain cameras, so they’ll know we’re coming.”

Royce grumbled, then hit some buttons on his center console.

“What’re you doing?” Omara asked.

“Summoning reinforcements. Just in case.”

“You don’t think I can take on a contingent of human men?” she teased, and he picked up her hand to kiss it.

“I don’t want you to break a nail, handling the bodies,” he said.

Omara gave him an indulgent smile and Sirena snickered.

THE ROAD we were on started being flanked by parked cars—BMWs, Mercedes, and Teslas—until we reached a gate that was blocking the road.

“Nine?” Royce asked, and the massive spider let himself out instantly—making the back of the van spring up several inches without his weight. He walked up to the gate slowly, probably investigating it with his spider’s senses—and then someone took a pot shot at him.

After that he leapt into the trees, leaving a row of shaking green branches behind him.

“Boy, did they just come at the wrong guy,” Royce muttered. Then the spider reappeared, bounding from the sky down to the road in front of us, holding up a middle-aged man, fully trussed.

“Darling?” Royce said to Omara.

“There’s only a hundred of them,” Omara said with a frown. “They’ve been waiting for us, but someone else beat us here—there’s a ceremony going on—and he knows he’s not allowed to touch you,” she said, twisting back to eye me, before cocking an eyebrow.

That had Sylas’s thumbprint all over it.

“Also he feels bizarrely safe right now, for someone wrapped in webbing,” Omara said, making a face.

“It’s the luck thing—I told you,” I said, and overhead clouds rolled in, even though it’d previously been a sunny day. “See?”

“Are we allowed to kill them?” Nine asked of Royce.

“I’d prefer that we don’t,” he said. “Too much paperwork.”

“Well, that should be fine,” Omara said, striding forward, one hand outstretched. I felt her mind brush mine, but knew it was going after fraternity member’s thoughts with intent—then she stumbled, and cursed. “What the—” she gasped, twisting sideways. One of her heels had snapped, and she’d twisted her ankle. “Stupid legs!” she shouted, staring down at her own in frustration.

“Come here,” Royce said, moving behind her to easily pick her up.

She looped her arms around his neck and glared outwards. “We can walk in now. I’ll get the ones on the left—Sirena, you take the ones on the right.”

“On it, Mom!” Sirena said.

“And I’ll take point,” I said, trotting up to do so, as Nine followed me.

“I’m supposed to be protecting you,” he complained.

“Yeah, but they’re gonna take the not-hurting-me thing very seriously.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, and created a Y-shaped netting to hold the man he’d trussed in front of me, suspended from his two front legs, angled out, as he walked with his other six. The man was still squirming around, and in between the weave of Nine’s web on him, I got a glimpse of a Rolex watch. “He can be your shield.”

It didn’t seem worth fighting. “Okay—let’s go around back.”

Our small group angled down the road that led to the cabin, and found a wall of alumni there, all studiously not paying attention to us, which I assumed had something to do with Omara and Sirena’s telepathic abilities—I would’ve found it more impressive, if I didn’t know what Sylas could do with time.

And lo and behold, when we made it to the back of the cabin—where most of the men were—the entrance to the cellar door was also there. One wide wooden door was open and the other was closed, with Trent standing on top of it.

“Let me talk to him,” I told Omara, brushing the hanging Rho Rho Phi guy out of the way to step forward.

“That monster said you would come for him—and to not to let you through,” Trent said. There was a bloodstain on his jeans, but I couldn’t imagine Sylas letting Trent hurt him. “How’s it feel to know that no man left on earth wants to touch you?”

“Fuck you, Trent—where is he?”

Trent shook his head. “Mina—just turn around now. While you still can. Before we hurt your friends. Ella’s free, you’ve killed the rest of my crew—we’re fucking even, all right?”

I didn’t kill Braden, so I chalked that up to Sylas. “Fucking even?” I repeated with a laugh. “While the man I love is trapped below?”

Trent continued, undeterred. “We won’t have to sacrifice anyone anywhere, ever again, Mina,” he said, like that was a sensible statement to make. “Things’ll just keep working out for us. Like they’ve always done. Like they’re supposed to.” He hopped off of the cellar door and took a step toward me. “Come on—you and I used to get along. Be reasonable, just this once.”

“No fucking way,” I said, shaking my head, and Trent lifted a cupped hand to his mouth . . . to howl.

And all of the men that’d seemed so preoccupied moments ago, because of Omara and Sirena’s telepathy, turned to look at us, brandishing weapons.

“We knew what you wanted,” Trent said, pulling a knife out from his pocket, and tapping its bloody tip against his temple. “But our magic’s stronger than yours now. Just remember, you had your chance to save them.” This last was directed at me. “No guns!” Trent shouted. “Don’t hit the brunette! But everyone else is fair game!” he said, before diving into the cellar and slamming the door shut behind him. I heard him pulling a latch into place on its far side.

Nine swung his abdomen to block Royce and the other women, while unholstering several weapons from his bag—while I ran out front, prepared to use myself as a human shield.

“What’re you doing?” Nine said, sweeping me away. He threw the member he’d trussed, sending a group of the RRP sailing—their luck was good, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then a brave cluster of them ran forward, with bladed weapons out—pretentious shit, like swords they bought at the mall—but I had no doubt they’d manage to be lucky with them.

“Excuse me, dear,” Royce said, setting Omara on the ground, so he could unholster the rifle at his back. “Nine, from here on out—fuck the paperwork.” He balanced his rifle on Nine’s back to snipe at one of the men—and his rifle jammed.

“No,” he growled. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“How far out are the reinforcements, Daddy?” Sirena asked.

“Close, baby, close,” Royce said, although I had the feeling it was a lie, as he pulled a grenade from his kit, and sent it sailing into the oncoming RRP.

Somehow, someway, all of the alumni dodged it—and after that, they believed in their own powers.

Ones at the front gave a howling battle cry and tried to swarm us. Nine picked up members and threw them bodily, swinging his bulk to crush others, and Royce had pulled out a bladed weapon of his own, putting his trust in his own skills over any projectiles. Omara cursed and had Sirena wedged behind herself, I could sense her mind surging forward, only to be pushed back by the collective luck of the Rho Rho Phi . . . who were currently being enabled by my boyfriend.

My baby daddy.

And I was going to get them all killed.

“Stop!” I shouted, with my full chest, in horror at my realization. “Just STOP!”

And . . . they did.

All of them were frozen.

“What is happening?” Nine asked, whipping his head in my direction—as did Omara.

“How did you do that?” she demanded.

“I just told them to stop,” I said softly.

And for the first time ever, it’d worked.

After all the gaslighting and cruelty, the RRP had finally been forced to listen to me.

I put a palm across my belly and sobbed, as Sirena set a kind hand on my back. “Keep it together for a little longer, Mina.”

I nodded, wiping my nose with one hand. “I’ve gotta get down there,” I said, rapping on Nine’s thick shell with the other. “Help me to get the door open?”

He cast a glance back at the frozen men, then grunted, reaching down with his hands and front set of legs.

“Please back up,” he warned, and then wrenched the cellar door out of the earth and threw it aside like a discus—where it hit several RRP members and crushed them. He chuffed at that. “Spiders have always been lucky,” he explained, as I hopped into the open stairwell.

“I don’t know how long that’s going to last,” I said waving back, “but I can’t promise it’ll be any safer with me.”

“We’ll take our chances down there till help arrives,” Royce said, deciding for everyone, and hopping down, to catch Omara when she dropped.

“Okay, but stay back, just in case,” I said, as Sirena joined us, and Nine started sealing the entrance back up with silk.

I turned on the shoulder light that came with my vest, and started racing down the stairs.

66

MINA

TRENT HAD QUITE the head start—he was sitting casually on the altar-tongue when I made it down, with a lantern at his side, making the teeth around him glint.

“Where is Sylas? What did you do with him?”

“He did it to himself, Mina.”

I strode up to him. I still hated him with all my heart—and he wasn’t allowed to hurt me.

“Don’t,” Trent said, swinging the lantern at me.

“You can’t do anything to me.”

“Yeah, but we’re at an impasse—because you can’t save him. If you do, you’ll die. He told me. So—why would you?”

“Because I’m not you, Trent, obviously,” I snarled—then noticed Braden’s body on the ground, in the middle of a large pool of blood, and had a strong idea where the stain on Trent’s jeans had come from. I detached the flashlight from my shoulder and swung it around—Braden’s blood had found certain grooves in the design on the floor to seep into, before it’d dried. I eyed him again. “Do you believe in fate or not?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why do you think you deserve a better fate than others? And don’t tell me it’s because you’re a better person—we both know that you’re not.”

He puffed out his chest. “Certain lineages—”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said, cutting him off. “Look, I’m going to give you a choice here. Either I kill you, or you show me how to open up this stupid fucking thing.” I pulled out the gun I’d bought two short weeks ago and pointed it at him.

If I’d faced him with it back then, my hand might’ve shook—but not now.

Never again.

A panoply of emotions ran over Trent’s lantern shadowed face, while he tried to figure out how to play the game. “But either way, I die—”

“Yeah, you do. I guess your fate didn’t account for that. Too bad, so sad,” I said, as the others finally reached me. “Nine, I think there’s a lid on the ground down there somewhere—see where the blood trickled into those grooves at the edges? Can you pry it open, please?”

“Of course,” he said, and set about doing so, while Royce supported Omara and kept Sirena behind him.

Omara reached out to put her hand on my arm. “He’s not lying, Mina.”

“I know,” I said, while Nine put his back into the stone.

“Which means that you will die. And your child, with you.”

I gritted my teeth. “Look,” I said, staring down Trent. “Either this motherfucker’s the luckiest asshole to ever live—or I am.” I finally turned toward Omara. “Sylas is not going to kill me. I don’t care what anyone else believes. I have been through enough, and I know life isn’t fair—but it is my goddamned turn to be happy.”

“There . . . is something . . . fighting me,” Nine’s translation device told us, as the monster himself sounded pained.

A dark crescent appeared at the edge of the stone, and a horrendous stench wafted out, the sweetness of old death and decay. But if my man was down there—I was going there too.

“It was really nice meeting all of you.” I stepped up to the dark gap in the ground. “Please make sure Trent dies,” I said, and jumped in.

67

SYLAS

FOR A BRIEF TIME, I was alone, and it was quiet.

Like being in the hourglass—but I wasn’t anymore, I was still free, because my last task remained undone.

And I could read the lost fates, seething all around me, moving against my skin like bright snakes as they rattled old bones. Some were small, like missing a red traffic light, others were large, like getting bad news from a doctor. And instead of being out there, in the world, attached to their owners, giving them the opportunity to navigate life with grace, they were trapped in here with me.

Time gave fate a reason. Fate gave time a point.

I wondered at the men outside wandering through life without any knowledge of how lucky they’d become, through no action of their own. Whether or not they truly appreciated the lives they lived, because they’d never experienced any but the most trivial of struggles along the way.

And then someone was fighting me for control of the pit’s lid.

They were strong, but I was stronger—until one of the threads wove in front of my eyes and blinded me—while another tried to wriggle beneath my hand. I let go for a second—and then it was too late.

The very person I’d been trying to protect was falling into the bone pit with me, screaming in fear as she fell—I felt called to her at once, and saw her light dropping into the pit like a comet.

“Mina!” I shouted, catching her, as the bones of the other forgotten women poked against her sides. I pushed them away from both of us, so that we could have space. “Why are you here?”

“Because you’re a dick for leaving me!” she said, turning into my arms at once. “How could you?”

“I was trying to protect you, and—” I began, then paused.

“Oh yeah, I know about the baby, and I’m still here,” she said, pounding a fist against my chest. “And if you think I’m going to raise your asshole offspring without you, no. Just no.” She was still breathing hard, for some reason she was dressed in an all-black uniform, her hair was in a severe bun, there were inexplicable blue streaks beneath her eyes, and she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

“What’re you thinking?” she said, before biting her lips.

“How you are in the ninetieth percentile now, for certain,” I teased.

That made her give me a choking laugh. “You just like me when I shout.”

“Yes,” I said, bowing my head to hers.

“How could you leave me, Sylas?” she asked quietly, holding me close.

“Because I love you,” I said, pulling back. “Show me your arm.”

It took some wriggling, during which she muttered, “I’m just really trying not to think of what all’s down here,” before rolling up her sleeve. Her life was now spilling out, from the top chamber to the bottom, catching up for all the time that we’d lost. Seeing it made me gasp—and she caught my head in her hands.

“You’re not going to hurt me, Sylas.”

“My queen, you do not know that,” I said sorrowfully, as she gave a gentle nod.

“Haven’t you ever had a dream?” she asked.

“No. I am a Nightmare. We do not dream, ever.”

“Well, can I tell you what I’ve dreamt of? You already know, some,” she said, taking her arm back to wrap around me. “Normalcy. Having a best friend who is awake. Having a boyfriend who loves me. Maybe even having a baby. But none of that could’ve happened without you. So you can’t kill me, Sylas—and I need you to make all of my dreams come true.”

“Mina,” I whispered, as all of the abandoned fates I’d incarcerated myself with started to roil.

“Just trust yourself, please?” she asked, leaning forward to kiss my cheek, making the light between us burst. “And failing that, trust me,” she went on, moving to catch the corner of my lips.

I turned my face towards hers to kiss her properly. I could feel and see all of her light racing into me, and I had no idea where she stored it, wondering if it, like her tears, was an infinite property.

And then there was the tiny, little tether between us both, a light that we were supposed to share, and knowing I would be the death of it broke my non-existent heart.

“Don't make me kill you,” I begged her.

She shook her head. “Then don’t make me live without you.”

I opened an eye on my back to see where the sand was on her mark—and then realized that was how I might have a chance. If I could crawl back into my hourglass somehow without hurting her . . .

“Stay here,” I said, wedging her into the bones, peeling myself away from her and diving down to get it from where I’d set it on the ground, near the waning stone. I returned with it and put it between us like a shield, and at seeing it Mina laughed with a sad sniff.

“Is this like one of those rulers they use to keep kids apart at school dances?” she said, while the sand inside of it was pouring out—same as all of her light was pouring into me. The cloud of fates twisting and knotting behind her would’ve been absolutely breathtaking to watch, except for knowing hers would join them, severed from all the life she’d never get to lead. Moments of joy, love, and pain, all denied her, because of me.

I only wanted to watch her eyes, but her sand running out was mesmerizing, even if the quote written atop the hourglass was painful to read. Her eyes followed mine, reading it too. “Sleep and dream of me, till dreams become reality, huh?” she said, then gave me a brave smile, even as the light started draining from her eyes, while the hourglass sank down to the few bits of sand. “You’re my dream, Sylas,” she said—and I did the last thing I could.

I slowed time.

Out of all the tortures I’d ever concocted, had there ever been one as cruel as this? Watching the woman I loved die, because I was made of greed, and no force on earth could stop me?

How long could I keep her trapped here with me? In my embrace? Growing colder the stopping of one atom at a time?

I didn’t want her fate.

I wanted for her to have it, for her to live a wonderful, beautiful life, to know happiness and pleasure, to experience joy and maybe even pain—but to be breathing. Always breathing.

Liminal thoughts leaked out of her, and I would’ve done anything I could to give them back.

A man in a white coat telling me, “You should cool it off down there, young lady,” after I came in because it burned to pee—like my UTI was because my vagina was a race car, and not because five different guys had raped me!—drunkenly dancing with Ella till the bar played a horrible remix of Cotton-Eyed Joe to shut things down—the time I’d keyed Brad Kirk’s car when I saw it at a grocery store. “No, I’m fine, I’ll stay behind,” when my dad asked me if I wanted to come with him and my mom on their ride—

All the intersections of things that’d happened to Mina and things that could’ve been, and then her time with me—strong and scared, resilient and loving—as the last grain of sand in the hourglass slowly rattled down.

I couldn’t watch it drop.

I shattered the hourglass and caught it just in time, sending the rest of the sand in the bottom pouring out.

Maybe if it never fell, Mina could still be mine.

And from all around me, where the abandoned fates touched the pulverized stone, time began to speed up.

I ignored it, holding the grain of sand pinched between two fingers, and my Mina with the rest of my body. I would take a scapula from one of the mishmash of surrounding corpses, and scrape her light out of me, to return it. I didn’t want this, I wanted what she wanted—and I wanted her. She was the only thing that mattered to me and I couldn’t imagine a life, of any sort, with any meaning, in her absence.

“Give her back!” I demanded of everything that empowered me.

“Is everything all right in there?” asked someone from outside the pit.

“NO!” I bellowed—and the stone lid above slid open, letting a sliver of light in.

And the fates I that had been trapped inside the pit with me . . . exploded.

Some like streamers, others like snakes, all of them evacuating the area, as I hoisted Mina’s body up.

“That stupid bitch,” Trent said, from where he was sitting on the ground outside the pit, all tied up—and five of the streamers went for him.

I didn’t think he could see them, but I could—one plunged into his thigh, another into his chest, and a third slid up his nose—and he started making gagging sounds at once.

I was almost relieved they were saving me the trouble of killing him. I didn’t want to put Mina down. The light inside of her was still dim. I hadn’t eaten her heart, but there wasn’t enough of it left and beating.

Then there was a wicked crack from the vicinity of Trent’s leg, and he screamed, as the bone inside his thigh suddenly twisted sideways.

“What’s happening to him?” asked a young blonde.

“Come away, sweetheart,” Royce said—Royce? Here?—pulling her back behind himself before giving me a look. “Sylas? Did you do that?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“But . . . did you . . .” he went on, glancing down at Mina’s body.

“If I did, I did not mean to. I would’ve given my life for hers.”

Royce’s Arachnaea agent stepped up. “She was a fierce mate,” his translator told me—while Trent screamed, and the young girl shrieked.

“But if you’re not doing that,” Royce went on, “then what is?”

“Fate,” I said, as I realized it myself. “You’re only allowed to push the universe so far.”

The college-aged boy gasped, and then fully collapsed, sprawling within the confines of his ties on the cold, blood-stained stone.

And a tiny piece of light rose up from somewhere inside of him, the size of a gnat, and flew straight towards Mina’s heart . . . where it . . . stayed. I watched it land there and pulse, like a tiny star, as I processed what might be done—where were the rest of the threads?

I flew up the stairs with Mina immediately.

68

SYLAS

IT WAS clear from the ground up here there’d been some sort of skirmish—there were divots missing from the earth and bodies lying all around.

Then I realized not all of the people on the ground required burial . . . yet.

One man exploded. Another one was covered in growing, crusting tumors. A third was somehow, unbelievably, being pressed flat.

And each time one of them died, or reached some threshold of impossible agony, a spark lifted from their chest and raced to Mina.

Rekindling the light inside of her, bit by bit.

Returning the future they’d stolen from her.

“Mina,” I whispered, while the young blonde woman ran up.

“She’s alive!” she hissed, then shouted back to the others. “Hurry up!”

And finally—a cavalry arrived. Additional MSA agents, pouring out of freshly parked vans—alongside additional alumni, too, who’d been too far away to participate in the original battle.

I twisted back to see Royce. “Tell your men to stand down.”

He tapped at a radio near his throat, while I watched even more threads of fate pour up from below, attacking these fresh fraternity members like they were ravenous wolves—and I realized that’s exactly what they were.

Every deferred, denied, or irreparably stolen fate was searching for an owner. And instead of getting to spread out a portion of bad luck over a hundred and fifty years—the fraternity members that were left were experiencing all of it now, all at once, in every facet of its terrifying glory.

I was watching the other MSA agents look around in horror, as the surrounding men were mutilated in horrible ways, when I felt a hand on my chin, pulling my attention down again.

“Sylas.”

“My queen.”

From where she was in my arms, all she could see was me and the sky above me. “Am I dreaming?” she asked, with a tentative smile.

“No, but I am,” I said, kissing her so that I blocked out the sun entirely.

69

MINA

I DIDN’T FEEL PARTICULARLY lucky, at least not at first, when I still had the strands of dead women’s hair caught in my own.

But as I sat in Sylas’s lap on the edge of the cellar while he cradled me protectively, watching the remaining members of the RRP reap what they had sown, things began to settle in. I knew living meant having to accept that sometimes bad things happen and there’s nothing you can do about them.

Except how you carry on.

If you can.

If you get to.

“Are they all going to die?” Sirena asked, coming down to sit beside us. Nine was out in the field with other MSA agents, cataloging bodies and clearing us a path.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And how did you stop them earlier?” asked her mother, still leaning against Royce and favoring one ankle.

Sylas’s hold on me tensed. “They fought you? They weren’t supposed to touch you!”

“More like I fought them—I told them to stop, and they did.”

“Even though they wouldn’t listen to me,” Omara said. “And I am the far superior telepath.”

“Mmmm, you made my mom mad,” Sirena whispered, just for me. Omara glared at her, which sent Sirena into quiet snickers.

“But you stopped them?” Sylas pressed.

I was quick to nod—before I realized it might not’ve actually been me. “Or it was our time-baby?” I asked, my voice arcing high. “But that’s insane, Sylas. It’s like the size of a period right now—the kind at the end of a sentence!” I turned in his arms to face him fully. “Speaking of, though, how did you know I was pregnant? And why didn’t you tell me? And—what the fuck happened to my birth control? Because I feel like we were both on the same page about things.” I pushed a palm into his shoulder and shook him—and even though the smoke he was made of was still trailing away at all of his edges, he felt increasingly solid to me.

“We were—and I honestly don’t know.” He raised a hand to his chin to scratch it, and the level of detail on his fingers for him was insane. “I didn’t want to give any of myself to you—until I did. And then once I knew you were pregnant . . .” he said, his voice drifting.

“You couldn’t tell me. Because it made you the father of an asshole,” I said, even though I was grinning.

“Everything comes from somewhere, Mina. Clearly, our child is destined to be a jerk,” Sylas said, grinning back.

“You two don’t make any sense,” Sirena complained.

“They don’t have to, anymore, now that they have each other,” Royce said, reaching for Omara, to carry her out over the minefield of corpses.

70

SYLAS

I FOUND out on the ride home that I’d lost the ability to control time.

Mina was sleeping with her head on my shoulder, on a bench in the back of one of the Monster Security Agency vans. She smelled appetizingly of decay and when the light coming through the tinted window hit her face once we were past the forest’s tree line, I wanted to slow time to appreciate her perfection—but I couldn’t.

It made sense—I’d never had the ability to control time before being trapped in the hourglass, so it was understandable that I’d lost it, now that the hourglass was gone.

I’d kept hold of that final grain of sand, however, depositing it into a dimension only I could get to, which is where it would safely stay.

Royce and his family were sitting in the bench across from us, and he was apparently processing. “So my great-grandfather was not insane?” he asked.

“It seems so,” I said. After all, he’d been the one to write the inscription on the band in front of the hourglass—and the one on the inside, where only I could see. “And for what it’s worth now, I’m sorry for killing him.”

Royce snorted heavily. “Well, you didn’t know any better, at the time.”

“True.”

“But—how are you going to continue on?” he asked, his gaze flickering between Mina and me.

“I believe I’m just back to being a Nightmare.”

“What does that even mean?” Sirena asked, with her feet kicked up onto the empty space across from her.

“I still feed off of fear,” I said, before searching inside of myself for answers. “But I believe I no longer need to eat fate.” Now that neither of the stones were active in the world, I suspected things had balanced out. “I don’t hunger like I used to.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Omara said, giving me a sly grin and a snort. Her leg with its sprained ankle was tossed up onto Royce’s lap—one of the MSA agents had wrapped it for her before we’d started our drive home.

“How so?”

She and Royce shared a knowing look. “Because you’ve never known true fear till you’ve had a child,” she said.

I tilted my head. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Just wait a little,” Royce said, with a low chuckle, as he pulled out his phone and began typing. “You’ll see.”

I WAS surprised when the van drove past the exit it would’ve needed to go to Monster Security Agency headquarters and took us toward Mina’s apartment instead.

“Do we not need a debriefing?” I asked Royce—I’d seen a thousand of them before, while trapped in the hourglass.

“Nah,” he said, waving a hand. “We’ve got things.”

Somehow, I doubted that. “There were easily a hundred deaths out there.”

“Those were just the ones you saw,” he said, shaking his phone at me. “Members of that fraternity died on planes, and in cars, causing accidents—deaths that we clearly were not responsible for—and you’re forgetting there was a pit full of corpses on the site. The second after my people had taken down all of their security cameras and traced their servers to wipe them clean, I called reporters to come in and investigate. You saw that place, it looked plenty evil. I’ve already spun it that they were performing human sacrifices, and their magic backfired on them, which isn’t that far from the truth. It’ll be on the front page of every newspaper in America tomorrow, and no one’s going to give a shit about things actually went down.”

“Tell your reporter friends to hit that cellar with luminol and a black light,” Mina said, as the van pulled into a parking spot, wiping her face with a hand. She looked tired and I felt a spike of fear, for her sake, and the baby’s.

Maybe Royce was right.

Not that I would ever tell him.

“So what are you going to do after this?” Sirena asked, sitting up.

I wasn’t entirely sure. Stay with Mina, for certain. But past that?

Somehow live a life?

“I’m asking because we try to avoid wet work, whenever possible. That said . . . the need for it does come up, from time to time, and we pay very competitive rates,” she went on, pulling a business card out of her pocket.

“Give me that,” Royce said, intercepting it to read. “Co-owner of my branch of Monster Security Agency?”

“I didn’t come out of the ocean to sit behind a desk all day, Dad,” she said, and rolled her eyes—missing his prideful smile.

“Well, I suppose someone has to take over the family business,” he said, turning her business card over to me, and I took it from him. “So if you’re looking for some work in the future, call us.”

“He won’t be, for a little while,” Mina said, unbuckling her seat belt. “But—thank you all. A lot. You can’t even believe how much,” she said, beaming all around. I phased outside, opening up the van door to give her my hand, as she stepped out.

“Good luck with everything!” Omara called out to us, and as I made to close the door, I heard Sirena again.

“Thanks, Daddy.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”

71

MINA

I STOOD with Sylas at the bottom of the stairs leading up to my apartment—there were some mysterious stains on them, but I knew better than to ask questions.

“You ready for this?” I asked him, taking his hand.

“What?”

“Unrelenting normalcy,” I said, bouncing up a few steps and turning back to face him. “Boring things. Like jobs, and grocery stores, and taxes.”

“How could anything be boring with you?” he said with amusement in his voice, soaring up a few steps past me.

“Ooooh,” I groaned, like I was gut-shot. “That just earned you so many points, Mister Smoke.”

“You should know in advance, I will be winning this game forever.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said, trying my apartment’s key.

But the door was already unlocked.

Sylas rushed in ahead of me, and then returned at once. “Close your eyes, Mina.”

“There'd better not be a fucking surprise party,” I muttered, but did as I was told, and let him lead me in—until a familiar squeal made me open them.

“Minnie!” Ella shouted, from the couch. “I made my parents bring me here, when the news started! My keys still worked!”

I ran across the living room to meet her, same as if Sylas had floated me there. “Of course they did!” I yelled, throwing myself into her arms.

She hugged me at once, then made a face. “Oh my god—why are you so stinky?”

“Dead people!” I said. “It’s a long story—”

“I’ve been following!” She held up her phone where I could see the screen, and it showed helicopters flying over the Rho Rho Phi cabin. “And what’s on your face?”

It’d been so long since I’d put the blue eyeshadow on, I’d almost forgotten. “Battle paint,” I said, and Ella broke out into the world’s biggest grin. “I love you,” I told her.

“And I love you too.”

I heard Sylas making a soft sound behind me, and Ella’s eyes flashed up.

“This is Sylas. He’s my boyfriend—he helped me rescue you.”

“I’m also the father of our baby,” Sylas intoned, very seriously.

Ella’s eyes about fell out of her head—and I started shaking mine. “We’ll get our own place soon. I swear.”

“Uhh—but if you do, how can I be your platonic life partner? We had plans, Mina,” she said with a laugh. “Joking-not-joking.”

I laughed back. “I mean, I’m down—it takes a village and all that? Plus, I don’t have any idea what the fuck I’m doing, and I don’t think I want to be a doctor anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t gone to any of my classes this semester, for one thing. And I only picked that because it was what my parents wanted. I don’t really know what I want anymore, except to be here. With the both of you,” I said, looking between them.

“Then that sounds like a great place to start—after you take a shower.”

“Only if you order pizza?” I said.

“I’m on it,” Ella said, giving me a salute with her phone, before I turned to Sylas.

“And as for you, my king,” I said, biting my lip and grabbing his hands, pulling him toward the bathroom, “you’re coming with me.”

72

MINA

Seven Months Later

“DO BABIES REALLY REQUIRE ALL THIS?” Sylas said, looking around at the small mountain of gifts we’d received, after the last guest at the baby shower had gone home.

I was daunted too. “I don’t really know.” I didn’t know anyone else who had a kid, and I was an only child. Now that I was seven months in, women in lines at the grocery store wanted to know my birth plan, and the truth was I didn’t have any.

Step one: have the kid.

Step two: don’t accidentally break it.

Step three: shower it with love, and be prepared to not sleep much for three years.

Which didn’t seem like it rose to the occasion of this many plastic doodads? And pee-pee teepees, in case it was a boy? I hadn’t even known those existed, until one of Sylas’s coworkers’ wives had given us some.

“All right,” Ella said, emerging from the back, from where she’d been putting dishes into our dishwasher. “I’ve gotta run to work! Have fun!” she said, escaping out the front door of our shared house.

I knew she’d been trying to give us maximal time alone lately, seeing as in roughly two months we would never get to be. It turned out when there was Monster Security Agency wet work to be done, it was compensated very well, and Sylas had been on enough jobs that we could afford a very nice place.

I just couldn’t tell normal people what he was doing. I pretended he was in some kind of tech and he’d signed a really stringent NDA. He left when they called him, when he was done he came home, and our lives went on. I didn’t need to do Bluebeard’s wife shit—I knew what he was capable of.

The same way I knew he always loved me, and Wisp—which was what we’d started calling the baby in my belly.

Sylas thought the nickname was because they would be a little Wisp of Shadow, or a Will-o-the-Wisp . . . and I didn’t feel the need to tell him that I’d had a Breyer horse I’d loved that I’d named Wisp in third grade.

We each had our secrets.

“This just seems like a lot,” he said, continuing to look around. He lost some coherency now that there weren’t other people watching, and opened up a few extra eyes.

“Totally,” I said, putting a hand on my stomach.

“Do babies come out with opposable thumbs?” he asked, sounding sincere.

I gawked at him. “Yes, of course!” I sputtered—and then I realized he was grinning. “You’re just fucking with me!”

“Not yet,” he said, floating toward me through a field of ribbons and bows that we’d been told we were keeping for some inexplicable reason. Some of them had been affixed to a hat, which I’d been wearing for the event, but it didn’t match my maximally comfortable, and somewhat glamorous, in an “I’m really committing to this housewife bit” way, silk teal muumuu, so I’d taken it off.

“And Ella is gone now, and usually she gives us at least three hours alone . . .” he went on.

“Yeah?” I asked, settling my arms around his shoulders. The benefit of him being somewhat incorporeal was that I could hug him without my belly getting in the way.

“I do worry that we’re traumatizing him some,” he said, pretending to sound grave.

“First off, it’s a girl, secondly, he knows his mother needs to get some.”

One of his eyebrows arched up. “You changed genders there.”

“I’m waiting for it to pick, Sylas, but in the meantime, you’ve got about thirty-seconds to fuck me.”

He gave an evil chuckle. “On the couch?”

“Absolutely—don’t hit that playset though. It looks super expensive.”

He traced a line of himself beneath my voluminous dress, but instead of coming for me with it, he raised a portion of the fabric itself, making it hover between us like a ghost while he made ridiculous woooooo noises, and I began laughing helplessly.

“If you tell me that’s your dick, we’re done here, Mister.”

“You like my dicks. All of them,” he said, laughing too, moving to catch me from the back and shift me to the couch, in one smooth motion. I squealed with delight, and he flung up the bottom of my dress, diving beneath, and with him hidden from me and the rest of his shadows trailing around the living room, it was like my vagina was about to get haunted, and I was one hundred percent okay with that.

I felt the pinpricks of his claws above the wide, high waistband of my completely unsexy underwear—at the same time as pieces of him began to press against the cotton between my legs, rolling up and down, while hands I couldn’t see rode up my dress to cup my breasts beneath my bra. We were approximately three seconds away from mouth-town, and Sylas had trained my body like Pavlov’s dog. “May I, my queen?” he asked politely, but I could hear the hunger in his voice.

“Yes—please—I’ve got more,” I promised, and he shredded them off at once. I gasped, as his shoulders became more solid beneath my knees, and pieces of him started kissing me all over, at the same time a forked tongue started teasing at my clit. I groaned and threw a helpless hand up over my head to push off of the couch’s arm, as I arched my hips up into him.

“Greedy, greedy,” he teased, while feathering a different, thicker tongue against my slit.

“Only for you.”

He made a pleased sound, then paused. “What if I hit him on the head?”

I reached down and yanked the voluminous extra fabric up around my chest, so that I could see him, past the half-moon of my belly. “What if I die of the horny? I don’t think you’re thinking through all of the possible ramifications of leaving me hanging here, my king.”

“I was teasing,” he said with a laugh.

“I wasn’t,” I said, arching my hips up and giving him a wicked grin.

He rose up at that and flared his shadows out all around me, blocking all the other light in the room. “And do you think I would ever let anything happen to you or Wisp?” he doubled down.

And in that moment . . . I had precisely too damn long to think. I shook my head and answered honestly. “No . . .”

“But?”

“My own parents died, Sylas.” And I was hit with a sudden pang of emotion, like a lightning bolt. Our baby would never know any grandparents, and my mom will never see them, and—and—and—

“Oh, Mina,” Sylas said, wrapping himself around me, right before I sobbed.

“I hate this!” I protested, turning into him. I’d read online about how emotional pregnancy could make you, but I didn’t believe it until it happened to me. “I saw a three-legged dog on a walk the other day while you were gone, Sylas, and I started bawling,” I complained to him, as my eyes filled up with tears. “I don’t even know why! The dog looked happy!”

I felt a chuckle rumble through his body. “My queen,” he murmured, and pushed me back so he could see my face.

“And then there’s everything else—what if it hates me? Or you? And what about global warming?”

He brought his lips down to kiss my tears off of my cheeks. “Your fears are as delicious as they are unfounded.”

“How do you know?” I said, pouting.

“I just do. Come here,” he said, shifting himself and me, so that he was now under me on the couch, and I was using him as a pillow. “You may cry when you like, my queen, but try to save your tears for me. You know I will make you feel good afterward.”

I sniffed. “It was a really cute dog,” I said in my defense, and he laughed, placing one of his hands against my belly, where the difference between my pale skin—now with a few stretch marks—and his fingertips was stark.

I couldn’t even see my lambda scar from here—but I wore the empty hourglass mark on my arm with pride.

He nuzzled his face against mine and whispered in my ear. “Open your legs for me and let me pleasure you.”

I did as I was told, while making a small, surrendering sound.

73

SYLAS

I DIDN’T MIND when Mina was messy.

I stayed beside her every night I could when I wasn’t off at work, even though I didn’t sleep.

I just rested, holding her, wondering about our future, and protecting her from her dreams.

Just because we were in love with one another didn’t mean everything was perfect, or that her mind still didn’t have all sorts of cruel traps to spring on her. She spent most of the first week we were back in her apartment crying, while I think everything caught up—how close she’d come to death, to losing me, missing her parents, regaining her friend. All I did was hold her, take her back and forth for daily showers, and make her eat.

She was bright, and angry, and fierce, but she also wanted to be soft, and deserved to be, after having been battle hardened by life, so I strove to make space for all the many versions of her I knew she possessed.

I knew too she was scared about being a parent. She felt terribly young, and she was—but she knew I would be there, and Ella as well. I chose not to view her deep friendship with the other woman as a threat because I knew it wasn’t, but also because I had spent centuries cultivating fear and hate . . . it was honestly probably good for me to watch love in action. Seeing as I had no needs other than Mina in my life, it was hardly any effort to lodge and feed Ella, especially when she was the reason Mina was with me to begin with—plus I appreciated her being with Mina, when my work took me away.

I had already negotiated time off with Monster Security—I hadn’t told Mina yet, but I would be off for at least the next year, while we figured out how to add a child to our life. I could sense the baby well enough—seeing as it was dreaming, in a way, inside of her—to know that it was safe and healthy, and as for the rest of everything, we’d decided to deal with it as it came. There was a hospital close by where we go could when it was time, but Mina didn’t want to go to any classes because she didn’t want anyone to stare. She was a little bit of a local celebrity, after testifying in the fraternity’s ongoing legal case, because ancillary members without tattoos but who appeared to have knowledge of the ceremonies were being charged.

She wanted precisely what she had told me in the bone pit—to be normal.

She just hadn’t quite grasped yet that she would always be exceptional, to me.

But that was all right—I would just keep showing her.

I shifted her on top of me so that my hard-on could rock through her thighs, as I stroked claw-tips over her belly. She shivered, and one of her hands came up to play with one of her newly bigger breasts and pinch a nipple—and I used my free hand to haul the rest of her dress up higher.

“I would watch you,” I told her, feeling her thighs squeeze.

“You make me come so hard, Sylas,” she whispered, sinking into anticipation.

“I know.”

“And you’re so humble,” she teased, as I leaned forward and wrapped my hands around the backs of her knees.

I knew she felt ungainly at the best of times currently, so it pleased me to make things easy for her, accommodating her in whatever way I could. I swirled pieces of myself in between her legs, rubbing at her and pulling her open, while her breathing began to slow and I felt her start to relax against me.

When we’d first moved into this place we’d had fast sex in all sorts of interesting places, before her belly got in the way. But now, just because I couldn’t control time anymore didn’t mean I couldn’t take long.

I moved myself so that I could enter her and she moaned. I had learned which diameter she preferred, at which depth, and at what angle—some through conversation, but also through rigorous, mutually enjoyable experimentation.

“Promise this won’t change?” she asked, as I slowly filled her up.

“Which part?”

“All of it,” she said twisting her face toward mine again, with fresh tears in her eyes.

“My queen,” I said, pressing her to me and kissing them away again. “Things will change—but, like you, they will only become more beautiful. Would you like me to stop?”

She bit her lips and shook her head. “No. Keep going?”

“Of course.” One of her hands trailed down, but couldn’t make it properly past her belly. “I’ve got you,” I said, and rubbed her clit for her.

“Stop reading my mind,” she pretended to complain, then moaned. “Oh god, Sylas—right there,” she said, and started to pant.

“And faster, mmm?” She nodded and whined, breathing hard. “Come for me, my queen, and then we will continue,” I swore—but this time she shook her head more meaningfully and squirmed.

“All of you. All mine. Please?” she asked, and I stopped thrusting at once. We hadn’t done that since she’d had to switch to wearing the underwear with the very high waists, like the ones I’d shredded off of her.

“Are you sure?”

She pushed up off of me, nodding, and I let myself fade while she moved to kneeling on the couch, pulling off her dress and bra and tossing it to the side. “Yeah, baby—unless you don’t want to?”

“No.” I liked it. Quite a lot. “But I am going to hold most of you. I don’t want you getting jostled.”

Mina laughed. “Okay, but, I want you to fuck me till we give our baby brain damage—or, I see god. One of those two.”

“Preferably the latter,” I said, laughing back, winding myself around her carefully.

And part of our experimentation had been this—after Mina had told me I’d missed a promising career in porn, we’d set out to see how far things could go . . . for both of us.

I held her belly up, supporting it, and slid a portion of myself between her legs before thrusting up, back into the same soft heat that’d held me earlier. Mina groaned, and held her tits together. “These are going to be terrific for this now,” she said, giving a challenging grin to the space around her—and I extruded another cock to slid through the smooth space between them.

“You’re right,” I told her, stroking with both parts of me.

“Always. Remember that,” she said.

“How full do you want to be?”

“I’m not feeling my ass today, but my mouth—yeah.”

I kept thrusting, asynchronously now, just to catch her off guard, while I placed a thumb inside her lips. “What sharp teeth you have,” I teased, before letting her jaw go.

“All the better to eat you—” she began, before me replacing my thumb with another dick cut her off. Her eyes went wide, and she made a bit of a gagging sound, but she didn’t tap out, and I trusted her.

She knew what would make her feel good—and if that was me overwhelming her, I was keen to help.

I wrapped her hair back with the fingers of one clawed hand, and watched her being taken by me, in all sorts of obscene ways—her pussy tasted delicious, her tears had been sweet, her breasts were fantastic, and every time I stroked into her mouth she gave tiny grunts—while each sheathing thrust I took into her cunt made her moan.

Then—she held her breasts up with one arm running beneath them, and offered me an empty hand.

“You are too much,” I said with a growl, landing another cock inside of it, for her to hold and stroke.

Her eyes flashed up at me as if to say, “You love it,” and—I did.

I loved all of her, every piece of her, inside and out, completely.

She sensed the change in me and started stroking faster, bobbing her head on me more quickly, and dropping her hips to meet each thrust.

“Oh, yes, Mina,” I growled, low. “Make me give myself to you. Call to me with every piece of your body.”

She twisted her head, to free her mouth so she could speak. “Right down to your very soul?”

“You know I do not have one—which is why I can do this,” I said, blanketing her with myself, spinning her on the couch, until her back was against its wide surface again. I covered her at once, pushing myself back home inside her cunt, creating more hands to push her breasts together for me to slide through, and putting a cock in both her hands.

I reached down to rub her clit with my thumb, and watched the force of my thrusts jiggle her swollen belly.

“I have never seen a woman as beautiful as you, not in a thousand years.”

“Oh please—that’s just recency bias,” she said with a laugh, stroking her hands up and down the dicks they held in both hands. “No mouth?”

“No—I want to hear your screams,” I said, leaning over her, shoving my cock deep in her pussy, while the one between her breasts felt like it was burying itself in silk.

“I like it when I can feel you getting closer,” she told me. “When all the parts of you start to stiffen up, when you start seeming desperate and hungry—”

“I am going to make you come, and then I’m going to cover you in shadow.”

I started fucking her disjointedly, one at a time, like I was made of pistons in a car—except for the piece of me between her legs enjoying her tight, wet, heat, where I was thrumming in and out, in the short perfect bursts that drove her wild—and if I could’ve slowed time to do this for the rest of my life, I would’ve. Feeling connected together with her like this, in every possible way, knowing I was about to make her scream, all of me becoming ready to give myself over.

I would give her my life, if she wanted, but she already knew that.

“I love you,” I told her.

“Oh—I love you too—oh—Sylas—oh God—oh God—don’t stop!” she cried out, and I felt her tense around me, hold me tight, and then squeeze while she howled. “Fuck—Sylas—fuck!” she shouted, curling herself up as much as she could with her round belly—and that was all I needed.

“Yes—yes—yes,” I growled, jetting myself into her. I’d learned that the more of myself I gave her the better it felt—all I had to do was learn to get out of my own way. So I clawed at her hips with more hands while she pulsed, holding her still while I emptied my most important cock, but then—

“Fucking cover me,” Mina demanded with a groan, like the queen she was.

“Yes,” I agreed, crouching forward as every other piece of myself I could let go of spilled out of me. Inky blackness shot out of the dick between her breasts and circled her throat like a necklace made of night, while the ones in her hands spurted their loads over her face and breasts, spattering her with me claiming her for me and I found I wanted to eat her up—again—but instead all I did was lower my mouth to lick my cum off of her, sucking at a nipple on the way.

“Oh my god, Sylas,” she said, catching her breath. “That’s so hot.”

I reached up to wind a hand into her hair, and then kissed her carefully, before pulling back and giving her a grin.

“Was god handsome when you met him? Because if he was, I’ll totally fight him,” I said, and Mina erupted into peals of laughter, as I held her and our baby close.

THANK you so much for reading about Mina and Sylas! Now make sure to go read Guarded by the Reaper from Cara Wylde and Guarded by the Phantom by Layla Fae!

AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT

Hey y’all!

What a year it’s been for the Monster Security Agency!

I can’t believe I started writing this series just last November, and here we are already with nine books total, three of which are mine—a quarter of a million words worth just from me!

I’ve been in love with all of these characters, and I’m ever so fond of them—but at the same time, I also need a wee bit of a break. I’m not burnt out, writing is still my most favorite thing ever, but I am pressing up against what my wrists and brain can do (and back, come to think of it.)

I love and value your trust in this series and in me and my characters so much. I know that your time and your hearts are a precious thing (same for your tears!) and for everyone that’s written a review or sent me an email, you’ll have a special place in my heart for forever.

But…I also need a bit of a break. Mostly just to heal and not have deadlines, for possibly the first time in several years. I’ll still be working on my Moth and the Monster series, because it has pre-orders, but I’m not looking to add anything to my plate for a bit till I find some more work/life balance. (Or work/work/life balance—since I still have a day job. Luckily my husband loves video games and my cats are very forgiving.) I want to take a vacation and not bring a laptop along. I want to garden more. And I want to quit my other job to make more time for this one, but that requires more marketing of the books I have out, which eats into writing time, dangit.

All of which is a TL:DR way to say that it might be a bit till you see another MSA book from me. Don’t worry, I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere, but the best way to keep track of me is to join my mailing list, for 100% certain — http://www.cassiealexander.com/newsletter .

Okay—I hate endings, even if they’re temporary, and I don’t wanna cry—just know that this experience has meant so much to me, and y’all have been the best <3 <3 <3

Cassie

SNEAK PEEK…

TAKE HER

Power, Love, Money: Pick One

I’M her father’s best friend. She’s twenty years younger than me. He’ll kill me if I touch her—but I’ll die if I don’t.

The last time I saw Lia Ferreo I was helping her with a skinned knee—and now she wants to run her father’s company. She has no idea the dark lengths her father and I went through to build the mafia-financed hotel empire we currently run, or where any of the bodies are buried, but I know better.

So much better.

Lia’s gentle, I’m cruel.

She’s innocent, I’m a murderer.

She deserves to be free—all I want to do is control her.

And I don’t think I can hold back my beast around her much longer....

Take Her: A Dark Wall Street Mafia Age Gap Romance is like if the movie Secretary met the TV show Succession, with a Beauty and the Beast themed twist. It is the first book in Cassie Alexander's The Moth and the Monster series, and marks her stunning contemporary debut.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse and author. She has written numerous paranormal novels, sometimes with her friend Kara Lockharte. She lives in the Bay Area with a husband, two cats and a million succulents.

Join her mailing list here to find out when her next book is coming out!

ALSO BY CASSIE ALEXANDER

Please see cassiealexander.com for contents and disclaimers.

Sign up for her newsletter to be informed about the release of her books.

Transformation Trilogy

Bend Her

Break Her

Make Her

The Dark Ink Tattoo Series

Blood of the Pack

Blood at Dusk

Blood by Midnight

Blood by Moonlight

Blood at Dawn

Blood of the Dead

The Longest Night (Subscriber Bonus Story)

Edie Spence Series

Nightshifted

Moonshifted

Shapeshifted

Deadshifted

Bloodshifted

The Moth and the Monster Trilogy

Take Her

Love Her

Hate Her

Monster Security Agency Series

Guarded by the Spider

Guarded by the Kraken

Guarded by the Nightmare

Subway Silk (Short Story)

Harbor of Hearts (Short Story)

The Prince of the Other Worlds Series

(Written with Kara Lockharte)

Dragon Called

Dragon Destined

Dragon Fated

Dragon Mated

Dragons Don’t Date (Short Story)

Bewitched (Bonus Story)

The Wardens of the Other Worlds Series

Dragon’s Captive

Wolf’s Princess

Wolf’s Rogue

Dragon’s Flame

Standalone Stories

AITA?

Her Ex-boyfriend’s Werewolf Lover

Her Future Vampire Lover

The House

Rough Ghost Lover