“I will be in a second.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
I was considering my options, whether it was better to just call for help and see if any of the offices down the hall would hear us or if I should leave Jo alone for a minute and go get the nurse, when a soft voice said from behind me, “Allow me.”
I shrank aside, my head flipping to the source of the words, and found a pair of storm-gray eyes staring right back at me. My body locked up, not even a sound escaping my lips as he crouched down to reach past me, sliding his long arms under Jo’s shoulders and knees, and lifted her in a swift motion, too fast for me to object, to push him aside, to prevent the Shadowbringer from touching my friend.
He was already on his feet and walking down the hallway when I unfroze and darted after him, uncertain if there was a chance in hell that he would put down Jo and leave us alone. That if I pleaded with him to let her go, he would. Or if I would need to give myself up for that.
“Where are you taking her?” I asked before I could finish playing through all the options.
The Shadowbringer didn’t even look at me as he said in a flat voice, “The nurse. That’s where you wanted to take her, right?” He didn’t slow his pace, his long legs making it difficult for me to keep up as I ran along beside him like an outsmarted child. “When I saw your friend go down, I thought you might need some help,” he added, this time glancing sideways at me, the gray of his eyes seeming to swirl as his gaze bore into mine.
The glacial cold from before spread through my body. Enemy, my system warned me. He was after my soul, and that was the reason he was here. Not to aid me with my helpless friend who had opened her eyes again and was now glancing between the Shadowbringer and me with confusion.
He stopped and gestured at the door, indicating with an impatient look for me to open it for him.
I did—with mixed feelings—then stepped aside and watched him carry Jo into the nurse’s office, an apology on his lips, and set her down on the paper-covered bed.
The nurse got to her feet, alarmed by our unannounced entrance, and started fussing over Jo in an instant, asking questions about what had happened, if Jo had fallen, if she had hit her head—
And I … I answered, mechanical, and kept staring into the storm-gray eyes of the Shadowbringer, whose face I saw from up close for the very first time.
His features were pale and angular, his nose that elegant line of the beauty standard of another era. His brows were two groomed, dark arches, balancing the pale-pink curves of his lips and the sharpness of his cheekbones. His hair, that unnatural bluish-black, was dancing in and out of his forehead as he shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall beside the bed, his gaze like a play of thunder and lightning as it kept boring into mine.
“She was feeling sick before she fainted,” I said to the nurse, who wasn’t finished interrogating. “She has been tired a lot, lately.” The words sounded distant as though I wasn’t speaking them myself even if I felt my lips moving.
The nurse turned away from the bed, leaving the view on a pale but alert Jo, who was smiling up at the Shadowbringer, who, at her attention, released me from his gaze and sat at the edge of the bed, a smile on his lips. “Are you feeling better?” he asked, his voice like onyx, dust-covered drops of morning dew pearling along a cord of velvet. Unearthly, dark, bright, frightening, intriguing, all at once.
It wasn’t hard to miss Jo’s color returning in the form of a blush as the Shadowbringer unleashed his undivided focus on her. Only, she shouldn’t feel the way she did. She should be afraid.
“All right,” the nurse waddled past me, an ice-pack in one hand, gesturing with the other for the Shadowbringer to remove himself from the bed.
Personally, seeing him move aside made me feel a lot more at ease. The farther away from Jo, the better.
“I’m going to call your parents to come pick you up,” the nurse said to Jo before she turned to me and the Shadowbringer, who was now standing right next to me, his elegant posture seeming out of place in the small, pale yellow office. “And you”—she gave us a look that made me wonder if we had done something wrong—“get back to class.”
Jo nodded at me from the bed, her color much better as she pressed the ice-pack to her forehead.
However, I was reluctant to leave. Not because of Jo not being in good care but because of the Shadowbringer who had already walked out and was now holding the door for me, waiting for me to join him in the suddenly grim-looking corridor.
“I’ll be fine,” Jo said, sounding convincing this time, and when the nurse shot me another impatient look, I knew there was no procrastinating. I had to join the enemy in the hallway—and eventually call for Leon.
When I stepped past him, his eyes scraped over me like a hungry wolf, his nostrils flaring as if he was scenting his prey.
He had done everything right, waiting for Leon to leave my side, for me to get into an empty corridor, for Jo to go down, giving him an easy entrance…
Now, all he needed to do was wait until that door was closed behind us, and he could do his worst. He could take my soul and leave me that pained shell that Leon had spoken about.
I knew that my body should lock up in fear again, that my pulse should be racing in my throat, that I should be calling Leon already and run as fast as I could to the next populated office. Maybe I could have found an excuse to stay with Jo a little longer, but the nurse had made it clear she wanted us back in class. Only, she had no idea that neither of us would be returning to class. The Shadowbringer would return to hell where he had come from, and I—
I would remain a crying, agonized bundle, unable to think of why I had even ended up in this hallway, to begin with.
Now that I was thinking it through, fear was setting in, and my palms turned sweaty as the sound of the closing door filled the air behind me.
I didn’t turn back, hoping that if I didn’t see him, didn’t acknowledge him, he might disappear like a nightmare, like the monster under the bed when I’d been a child that Mom had said would go away if I pretended it wasn’t there.
Only, this was not the hallucinated fear of a child. This was a Shadowbringer, someone who had come to steal my soul as a trophy.
Chapter Nineteen
“I have been thinking,” he spoke and fell into step beside me as if my thoughts of him had conjured him from the shadows I so desperately wanted to ban him to.
I didn’t look at him for fear his eyes would be as compelling, as hypnotizing as they had been back in the nurse’s office. “Great, you’re thinking,” I mumbled, hoping that some kind of humor, no matter how desperate, would make the ghost beside me less threatening.
“It may amuse you, but I actually have been wondering how I could make this happen,” he said, unfazed by my attitude.
“Make what happen?” I asked, involuntarily looking up at his face and finding him studying the floor before his feet.
“The whole trophy thing, you know.” There was something disturbingly unbothered in his tone as he spoke about taking my soul for sport. It made me turn away from the beautiful angles of his face and look at the dull colors of the school hallway instead.
“What about it?” My words came out like a rehearsed retort, the fear making way for the odd sense of intrigue that had overcome me in the nurse’s office.
“You’re rather well protected for an emerging Lightbringer.” He didn’t keep down his voice the way Leon would have as we walked side by side to … I didn’t know where to. So I just continued setting one foot in front of the other, hoping that eventually, I would make it back to the classroom.
“I thought that was the standard procedure,” I snapped at him. “To protect us from you guys.”
“Us guys,” he repeated, the words sounding wrong in his soft baritone.
“You know what I mean,” I waved one hand before me as if that would explain.
In response, the Shadowbringer stopped, pulling me to a halt with a li
ght touch on my arm.
“No, Ms. Dawson, I don’t.” His eyes swirled like the clouds in a rainy sky as he stared at me down his nose.
“Miss Dawson,” I laughed. “Are you joking?”
I should be calling Leon. Now. I should be. Still, the Shadowbringer hadn’t lifted a finger against me—yet. So I waited. Hoping that I wouldn’t need my friend’s help, that I wouldn’t need to make him disappear into thin air in the middle of a class and hence, expose him, ruin his life here in Glyndon.
We had discussed the consequences of me calling on him, that he wouldn’t be able to explain his sudden vanishing, and therefore it was reserved for emergencies only. And until the Shadowbringer made a move against me, I wouldn’t do that to Leon.
“I don’t understand,” the Shadowbringer said with quiet confusion. “Isn’t that your name?”
The laughter that threatened to burst from my lips again died away as I realized he was serious.
“You haven’t spent a lot of time around humans, have you?” I replied with sudden understanding. Leon hadn’t shared much about the Shadowbringers besides what they did and that they were dangerous. Whether or not they were mortal such as us, I didn’t know. Only, from the Shadowbringer’s demeanor, I could tell he wasn’t the social type.
He cocked his head at my pitying look as I wondered if it was possible that he had gotten in over his head, posing as a high school student. Judging by his timeless face, he could have been a high school student or a college student. The maturity of his body, the muscles cording his arms and chest under his fitted shirt suggested the latter—or none at all.
At least, his clothes appeared to be contemporary—dark jeans and a black shirt that seemed to be of some very soft material—even if nothing else about him allowed me to pin his age.
“Not in the past century,” he answered without hesitation, knocking the breath out of my argument.
“That wasn’t what—“
“What did you mean then?” he asked, reading the rest of my response from the look on my face.
I shook my head and studied the structure of the wall behind him for the better part of a minute.
The Shadowbringer waited, equally silent, for me to return my focus to him.
When I finally did, his eyebrows rose with curiosity. There was nothing threatening about the way he stood there, measuring my face in silence. Nothing but the knowledge of who and what he was—and what he was going to do to me.
“Lucas … Cas,” he corrected, “Ferham,” he eventually said, his voice like midnight and bright stars, and held out his hand. “And you are Mrs. Parker’s granddaughter,” he added matter-of-factly, leaving nothing for me to do but nod.
I didn’t take his hand, staring down at the long, muscled fingers instead. On his middle finger gleamed a silver ring engraved with something that looked like wings and some swirls I couldn’t read.
“Laney,” I corrected and looked up, meeting his gaze once more. Fear flooded me yet again, as this time, he smiled, flashing a set of straight, white teeth.
“Laney Dawson, emerging Lightbringer,” he mused, his lips splitting wider as he studied my horrified gaze.
That was it—his gaze—a trap that made me feel at ease somehow even though my body ought to tense for a fight, to coil and ready itself for a neck-breaking fight or a painful ripping out of my soul—
But none of it came. It was just a smile. Inviting and intriguing … and very much unlike the creature of nightmares Leon had painted.
“You’re still afraid of me,” Cas read my face correctly.
“And am I not right to fear you?” My heart thudded in my throat now, exactly where I ought to feel it when panic set in. I prepared to call for Leon.
“That is for you to decide, Laney Dawson,” Cas simply said and dropped his still waiting hand to his side before he started walking.
I glanced around the hallway, trying to figure out if someone had interrupted us and I simply hadn’t noticed. But the hallway was empty. I was in his power, if he so wanted, with only Leon as a backup—if he would even make it in time—and yet, the Shadowbringer walked away.
As I watched, dumbfounded by how he sauntered down the corridor, the worn beige of the floor almost an insult to his elegant moves, he lifted a hand and waved. “Don’t bother to thank me for the assistance with your friend,” he said over his shoulder, and the shadows on the side further away from the windows seemed to draw toward him.
Before he turned back, he gave me a look that somehow made me feel like a thank you wasn’t what he needed when it was some different sort of payment he expected for his help.
When I returned to class, minutes later, the Shadowbringer … Cas … was sitting at a desk by the window, his face attentive on the teacher, who demanded to know what had taken me so long. A brief explanation that Jo wasn’t well sufficed to turn the focus of the class back to the blackboard and the unintelligible scribbling that I tried to decipher instead of following my impulse to turn my head and stare at the Shadowbringer.
The rest of the hour passed with a knot in my stomach from subsiding fear and authentic confusion. Cas hadn’t attacked me as Leon had suggested he would, the first moment he found me alone, but had helped—helped—me get Jo to the nurse’s office. I wasn’t sure if that should make me feel relieved or disturb me.
Avery’s giggle frequently interrupted my thoughts, which were hardly any more coherent, now that I was confused, than what they had been from fear when the Shadowbringer had shown up beside me in the hallway.
Every now and then, I allowed my gaze to drift toward the side where I found Avery peeking at Cas from the corner of her eye.
Great. They deserved each other. The wicked high school queen and the boy who took the wicked to hell.
I huffed and leaned back in my chair just when the bell rang, and within moments, Leon appeared in the doorway where students were bolting from the stuffy air of the classroom.
“How about getting out early?” he asked, a terse smile on his lips as he watched me slouch toward him. “You look like you need a break.” His eyes scanned me with cautious intensity as if he was looking for cracks in a porcelain cup.
I nodded and let Leon wrap his arm around my shoulders, feeling my heart lightening at the safety of his touch. When he led me from the room, I finally allowed myself what I had been fighting for the past forty-or-so minutes and glanced back over my shoulder.
Cas was still sitting by the window, about to stuff the book he was holding into his bag, his gaze flipping up to mine as if I had called his name.
The knot in my stomach thickened as he didn’t even attempt to hide his stare but winked at me before he tucked the book under his arm, got to his feet, and slung the bag over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” I murmured to Leon, tearing away from the storm-gray of Cas’s eyes, and pulled the Lightbringer at my side forward.
The drive back to my place was quiet. Leon didn’t inquire about the hour I had spent apart from him but watched me from the side while I was driving. He got the door for me when I was ready to get out of the car and held his hand out to help me out of the car. I took it without hesitation, his sun-kissed skin familiar and reassuring on mine as he closed his fingers around my palm.
The moment I got into the house, I called Jo. She had made it home safely but still sounded tired. Leon’s forehead creased as he listened to the conversation, perched on my desk, fingers flipping through a textbook.
“Is she all right?” he wanted to know once I ended the call, asking—judging by the look on his face—not only about Jo. “What happened?”
I nodded, answering for both Jo and me. I hadn’t shared the details about my encounter with the Shadowbringer yet, too grateful for Leon to come up with the idea to ditch the last class of the day. But now that he asked about Jo, the fear rushed back into my body like a tidal wave that had been held up by my temporary preoccupation.
“She felt nauseous and faint on the way to cla
ss,” I retold what had happened after he’d left us in the hallway.
I didn’t spare him any details about how the Shadowbringer had shown up, that he had carried Jo to the nurse’s office, that he had offered his hand in greeting—
“Lucas Ferham,” Leon repeated the name I’d given him.
“Better than Lucifer, right?” I tried to joke, but Leon’s lips didn’t even twitch.
“Why didn’t you call for me?” he demanded, something like disappointment shining in his eyes.
“It didn’t”—I searched for the right words—“feel like an emergency,” I suggested. “I didn’t want to expose you.”
In response, Leon frowned, his Lips turning pale as he pressed them into a tight line.
“I could have just snuck out of the classroom and found you,” he said after what felt like an eternity of silence.
“He didn’t attack me,” I reminded him. “He was polite, helpful. No sign of the soul-sucking monster I expected.” I wasn’t even sure what I had expected. Anyhow, it was nothing like the boy who had winked at me. Nothing like the fear-instilling intrigue of that pale, beautiful face—and I couldn’t deny that he was beautiful. Just in a completely frightening and inappropriate way.
A Shadowbringer. A danger. A messenger for hell.
With a sigh, I leaned back on my bed and crossed my ankles.
Leon must have read it as fear, despair, frustration … whatever he saw, it made him get up from the chair and come to sit beside me, his hand resting beside mine, just an inch away. The frown was gone from his features. “I am glad you didn’t get hurt,” he said and locked his gaze on mine. “For a moment, when you said he had followed you, I thought he might have succeeded.”
Chapter Twenty
It took a solid week to get used to the Shadowbringer’s presence. Leon was on high alert at every step we took at school—and outside of school.
Torn: A young adult paranormal romance (Breath of Fate Book 1) Page 10