“Yep.”
‘Jessica. Say it.’
A snorting laugh escaped her as she walked backward toward the hall. “By the way...”
“Hmm?” The fae’s gaze flickered around the lobby.
He was clearly distracted, probably also a little disappointed. Or a lot disappointed in being relegated to the crappiest room ever offered by a sentient bank that literally used to provide room and board way back when.
“The bank says thank you.”
‘Jeeze, was that so freaking hard to say?’
Leandras looked sharply at her, his scowl unchanged. “Is that so?”
“Yeah.” It was almost impossible to keep the smirk from spreading across her lips. “So, I guess you have it from both of us now.”
Finally, he seemed to pick up on the humor of the situation. Or maybe he’d found some other private joke of his own. Either way, a low chuckle escaped the fae man as he spread his arms. “Then I suppose I have no choice but to accept the bank’s gratitude.”
“Probably a good idea.” Her smile broke through with a weak laugh of her own. “For what it’s worth.”
Leandras grinned and dipped his head. “Good night, Jessica.”
“Yeah. Good night.” Then she whirled around and booked it toward the hall, puffing out a sigh when she knew he could no longer see her.
‘Look at that. You do know how to make friends.’
Yeah, and you know how to make one insufferable fae very, very confused.
‘Hey. It’s the least I could do.’
With a wry chuckle, Jessica stopped at the kitchen entrance to drop the fortunately unused cooking pot on the counter, then headed back up the stairs.
So the fae had his own private little cheap-motel bedroom here for the next two nights. Great. She didn’t know if she felt better or worse about these new accommodations than having shoved him into a dusty closet during the binding, but at least it made one thing perfectly clear between them.
‘Yep. Read you loud and clear, witch. No fae in the master bedroom. Though I still don’t get why you have to be so stingy about it.’
Because it’s my bedroom. My bed. My choice.
‘Yeah, but wouldn’t it be cute if you—’
“This is not a conversation we’re having. I’m going to bed. And then I’m waking up in the morning to spend a whole awkward day sharing this...you with him before we do the same thing tomorrow night.”
And after that, Jessica and Leandras would be gone on the other side of the Gateway.
When she reached the top of the stairs, she stopped to take in the sight of the anchoring stone strapped to the floor by the still-glowing vines of purple light. The Gateway was as dull and quiet as ever. No ominous whispers. No sickly-green light. Not so much as a rumble or shudder.
Good. As long as it stayed that way, Jessica could have her two final days of relative peace on Earth before she stepped into the Laen’aroth’s old life. Or whatever had become of it since he’d crossed over centuries ago.
‘Hey, you think anyone’ll throw him a Welcome Home party?’
Pretty unlikely. Especially if this epically bad Dalu’Rázj guy still had as much power over that other world as Leandras claimed.
She stepped into her bedroom, closed the door, and caught herself two seconds before she would have scratched at the growing, tingling itch on the side of her neck. Slapping her hand back down against her thigh, Jessica kicked off her shoes and stripped on her way to the bathroom, tossing her old clothes over the back of the gray couch.
‘Still no idea how to keep that time-warp bomb from snatching you away again, huh?’
“Nope.” Jessica paused inside the bathroom to study the circular purple rune on her neck in the mirror. “The fae doesn’t know, either.”
‘And you actually believe him?’
Her reflection frowned back at her. “Maybe I do. I think. At least about that.”
‘Well that’s a first. But hey, a few hours here and there isn’t that big of a deal. I’ve been here for hundreds of years. Not sure you’d like that part very much, but trust me. If I’d been able to hop forward to the next century in the blink of an eye, I totally would have. Or at least skip over the 90s and early 2000s.’
With a snort, Jessica turned on the bathtub faucet to let the water run hot and sat on the edge of the tub.
She could deal with a few lost hours here and there too, if that was what it took. Just as long as the time-jumps didn’t get worse on the other side of the Gateway. It didn’t make sense—she knew nothing about Xahar’áhsh other than what Leandras had chosen to show her in the strange vision of his own memories—but she couldn’t help the feeling that if she froze up over there, even the Laen’aroth might not be able to handle what they faced on his own.
FULLY CLEAN, TOWELED-off, and surprisingly exhausted, Jessica tugged on an old t-shirt over a pair of pajama shorts and crawled under the comforter of her twin-sized bed. Settling into the blissful nothingness of sleep came quickly and easily for once. The bank took it upon itself to switch the lights off for her and, thankfully, didn’t try to torture her back out of sleep with incessant talking in her head.
And Jessica dreamed.
It didn’t even occur to her that she shouldn’t have been having the dream at all—that the bank had formed a protective barrier around the memories and all the missing pieces of her past that had flooded back into her when that damn immortal lizard had healed her wounds and then some.
All she knew was that she was right back where the nightmare of her life on the run had started—with Jessica running down the dark alleyway between burning apartment buildings. The frigid night air whipped her hair around her face, freezing the warm streams of tears on her cheeks. Broken glass from busted-out exterior lights and dozens of shattered apartment windows crunched under her sneakers. The roar of the flames growing higher inside the building on the right—her building, her home—and flickering through the smashed windows followed her like a hungry, vengeful beast as she fled the wreckage.
But there was a real monster after her, wasn’t there? A beast of either flesh and blood or swift and deadly silver mist eating up everything that remained of Jessica’s past.
Her parents were gone, but somehow, she’d managed to escape. Somehow, she’d used the only window of freedom available and had made it out of the burning building. The screams of everyone still trapped inside—the screams of her mom and dad telling her to run, get out, don’t look back—still followed her.
So did he.
He moved through the dark alleyway as a swarm of silver mist, roiling and churning with so many faces Jessica both knew and didn’t but would never forget. How could she? She’d seen too much already.
Another explosion wracked the building beside her and made her duck as the windows on the highest apartment floor burst and rained shards of glass around her.
She kicked herself to run faster, to keep breathing, to make it out alive and never look back because nothing remained behind her anymore. There was nothing to look back upon.
When she reached the end of the alley and the pool of ruddy light illuminating the asphalt of Pine Boulevard beneath the streetlamp, she paused. Sirens blared in the distance up ahead. Trapped and terrified neighbors who faced a different kind of torturous end screamed in the distance behind her.
And the howl of her parents’ murderer barreling down the alley rose above all of it.
Jessica turned around to face the crackling cloud of silver mist moving in like a thunderstorm. But instead of lightning, this storm flashed with all the faces of those who’d just met their end minutes before while this terrified young witch had flown from the jaws of death before they closed.
That didn’t mean she wouldn’t die now, right here, in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans at the end of the apartment alley.
The silver mist screamed at her. “Wherever you go, whoever you seek to help you, you can never outrun your fate!”
A barrage of silver darts
hurtled from the churning cloud toward her, slicing at her flesh, cutting up her bare arms and neck, stabbing her in a million places all at once.
Jessica lifted her hands to shield her face, and she thought the pain alone would kill her right then and there.
But it didn’t. She found herself sprawled across the cold, damp cement of the sidewalk when the attack finally stopped. How was she still conscious? How was she still alive?
Her heart thudded in her chest as she gasped for breath that hitched and wheezed. The roar of the deadly silver storm had stopped, but now the sound of slow, methodical, terrifying footsteps had taken its place.
With a groan, Jessica tried to push herself up off the sidewalk, to face this monster one final time.
A man with a hooked nose and a thick, jagged scar up the left side of his neck approached her. That scar—the one she knew she’d never forget—drowned out the blaze of the burning apartments behind the man, glowing with a silver light brighter than anything she’d ever seen. Like the deadly, torturous light inside him would explode again at any second and he’d bring his vacuous, soul-eating storm down on her next.
“There is nothing you can do to escape me now.” He leered at her, reaching out with both hands. “I’ve already claimed what’s mine, Lilith. You are mine.”
Jessica fingered one of the icy shards of his magic scattered around her on the sidewalk. A dark flicker of her own power—dormant until now—curled around the hard sliver in her fingers.
“You can try to fight me all you want,” he hissed. “I actually prefer it that way. You’d never know it, but fear and desperation are so very sweet...”
Everything after that was a blur—Jessica relinquishing herself to the power of her magic fully grown to its true potential; the shards of his magic changing, darkening, rising from the ground around her and from her quickly healing flesh; his wide eyes when he saw what she was about to unleash—what she was about to become.
The young vestrohím launched her own special brand of consumption right back at her attacker, enveloping him in a storm of black daggers that had done their master’s bidding only to betray him now. Jessica screamed as she released all her fear and her anger and her pain into what felt like an endless stream of magic. The man howled in rage as his own power turned against him, eating away at his flesh and dampening the glow of that scar on his neck.
Even still, Jessica didn’t stop.
She couldn’t.
Dark energy lashed from her hands, encompassing the monster in a swarm of her own. Black, glistening tendrils snaked around his arms and legs, curled tightly around his throat, whipped out to slash back toward him again and pierce through the physical form he’d made the mistake of taking.
Through her tears, Jessica jerked down with both hands and forced the monster to his knees, then onto his stomach and chest as her magic pierced down like angry swords into him, over and over.
His screams stopped long before she did.
When it was over, Jessica stared at him through her tears, her chest heaving with effort and release. With pleasure.
Then she realized she was grinning.
That whipped her back into the present moment. Emergency lights flickered at the far end of the street, the sirens growing louder. She backed away from the body of her very first victim—the body of the first monster who’d made her a killer—and turned to flee again.
That was where the memory would have ended, if this was just a memory. But it was a dream, and before Jessica could take two desperate, terrified steps, there he was.
Alive. Sneering at her. Rippling with silver light as it coursed through his flesh and he burst apart into something half-man, half-cloud of silver mist.
“There you are.” The pure blackness of his eyes blazed brighter than the blinding light of his transforming magic swirling all around her, drowning out everything else. “You knew you couldn’t hide from me forever, and now I see. I’m coming for you, Lilith.”
Chapter 14
In the pitiful excuse for a guestroom on Winthrop & Dirledge’s main floor, Leandras’ eyes flew open. He couldn’t immediately place what had roused him from the deepest part of his sleep, even on the lumpy mattress he would have burned before offering to anyone who still breathed.
Then he heard the screams.
“Jessica.” The fae tore the stained coverlet off his legs and leapt to his feet, not bothering to reach for his shirt draped across the corner of the shelf or to slip on his shoes.
Something crashed upstairs, and the screams continued.
He threw open the door to the back office and hurtled across the dark lobby, his bare sleep slapping against the wood. The overhead lights flared to their full brightness, then grew even brighter and flickered in and out, momentarily blinding him. With a growl, the fae barely avoided running right into the desk and hurried down the hallway. Now, that hallway was flickering with electric-blue light. Thicker threads of that light crackled over and over across the walls from the lobby toward the staircase, strobing like a warning alarm pointing him in the right direction.
If this was the bank’s way of telling him something was wrong, it came too late.
Leandras took the stairs two at a time as Jessica’s screams grew louder and more terrified from behind her closed bedroom door. Something heavy and powerful knocked around inside that room, eliciting the crunch of splintering wood and the rocking of furniture wobbling precariously off balance.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the purple glow of the Hruandir’s anchoring hold around the stone in front of the Gateway, but he didn’t stop to investigate the efficacy of their incubating spell. Or whether it had failed now that someone or something had gotten ahold of the Guardian when he’d least expected it.
It should have been impossible.
“Jessica!” he roared as he threw open the bedroom door.
A thick bolt of black light nearly took his head clean off as it whizzed through the open door. Leandras ducked, hearing the wayward magic crash into the wall of the hallway behind him as he dove into the room and summoned a disembodiment spell in one hand. Whoever had made it past his defenses around this establishment most certainly deserved the punishment he planned to deliver.
But there was no one else in the room.
The overhead light was on, and the tall lamp beside the bed most likely had been before it had toppled to the floor and shattered. Chunks of wood split from the ceiling beams and fell in dusty piles to the floor. The door to the attached bathroom had been ripped off its hinges and now lay broken against the dresser, which somehow remained standing. A thick tendril of glistening black destruction whipped across the room, cracking into the ceiling beam again before plummeting down toward where Leandras crouched inside the door.
He leapt away, searching for the source of Jessica’s screams and the intense battle causing them.
Then his gaze fell on the bed.
There she was, tangled in the sheets and kicking out at them as she bucked and jerked. A spray of black darts arced from her flailing hand toward the bay window, leaving a trail of black smoke behind them before dissipating in a flash of crackling blue light erupting along the window panes.
She was still asleep.
By the gods, she was fighting off an attack, and her tormentor wasn’t even here.
Leandras dodged another flickering black tendril and raced toward the bed. “Jessica!”
Her other hand whipped toward him to deliver a backhanded blow across his cheek. Fueled by the erratic magic spewing out of her, the blow sent him flying two feet backward with a snarl.
She kept screaming.
He dove toward the bed again in a crouching leap and practically threw himself on top of her. “Jessica, wake up!”
Expecting another unwitting attack, he caught her hand by the wrist the next time it lashed toward him as she bucked on the bed, her back arching dangerously far.
“Wake up!” He seized her by the shoulders and hauled he
r upright. Her elbow jabbed up to crack against the underside of his jaw, but he wrapped his arms around her to pin her flailing limbs at her sides. The second he clapped both palms down tightly against her back and held her in that rough embrace, the flare of his own magic illuminated beneath his hands and into her. Leandras leaned forward against her jerking body to bring his lips to her ear. “Come back. You need to wake up.”
The ragged gasp erupting from her mouth sounded like someone awakening from the dead. Jessica whipped against him, bashing her head into the side of his cheek. The fae leaned away with a hiss, then the witch in his arms stopped screaming.
In fact, she grew incredibly rigid and motionless in his hold, and for a moment, they sat there like that on her bed, both of them breathing heavily.
Another wooden beam above them groaned before splitting with a sharp crack, but nothing else fell.
If he hadn’t managed to bring her back, it meant whoever had gotten to her in that vulnerable space where dreams met reality would now take them both. But he couldn’t just keep holding her like this with her arms pinned at her sides. He had to check.
Slowly, he released his hold around her and leaned farther away to get a good look at her face.
Her eyes were closed, though tears streamed from beneath her lashes as her breath shuddered in and out. Still, she didn’t move.
“Jessica?”
Her lower lip trembled.
“Jessica, are you here? Are you with me?” Leandras almost hesitated before reaching up to cup her flushed cheek. “Can you—”
Her eyes flew open, the irises and whites completely consumed by pure black lit by the colorless internal light of a vestrohím’s power.
He didn’t have time to react, but there was no need. As Jessica turned her head slowly to meet his gaze, the blackness faded quickly into wide, lucid, terrified eyes staring back at him.
She took in another shuddering breath and whispered, “Fuck.”
IT HAD BEEN SO REAL. The entire dream, every single bit of it, had played out exactly as it had played out in Jessica’s past ten years ago. Except, of course, for the very end when the Brúkii had found her.
The Poisoned Veil (Accessory to Magic Book 4) Page 13