Page 6 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

I moved with the shadows, careful not to be seen. Eventually, a hunter—or five—would sense me and alert the rest, so I couldn’t stay long. I didn’t want to annihilate dozens of mortals. That wasn’t how I wanted to spend an evening away from the city. It would be messy and inconvenient, for starters. Then there were the ethical considerations.

At first, I worried that the girl would be at home. That was where she should’ve been, eating dinner with her family, safely tucked away from lurking monsters. But she wasn’t. She was submerged in night, on the edge of the forest, just as drawn to the darkness as she’d been the first time I’d seen her.

This time, she half-heartedly swung on a wooden swing attached to a thick branch above. Her home must’ve been near, one of the small cottages that were gathered on the outskirts of town. I knew that area well. The streets and houses and mortals who all looked the same, different characters in the same story that repeated itself on and on for eternity.

Nothing changed. Not in Crescent Haven. Not in Valentin. Not in Ravenia. Not anywhere in the gods’ creation.

But this girl—she was the red and orange of autumn leaves in the looming, dark woods. She was the flame of life that burned on and on, the warmth I would never feel again, the embers that had dimmed when I’d forsaken my humanity for an eternity of ice and death.

I watched her from the darkness. Though I should’ve been on high alert, scanning and listening for sneaky witches and shifters on the hunt, I eventually sank down to the dirt and observed her from the ground.

At first, she was sullen. She lifted into the air, swinging her legs out as she moved back and forth. Little Flame was thinking. A crease dug into her forehead where her brows drew together, and her lips turned down.

What in the heavens was this child thinking about so damn hard? I wanted to promise her that when I was here in Crescent Haven, there was only room for one of us to be mentally torturing themselves in excruciating, meticulous detail.

But she wouldn’t have understood any of that.

Then she stared straight ahead, as if she saw me, cocking her head an inch. I held my breath as I went unnaturally, inhumanly still.

In her impossibly clear blue eyes, I saw defiance. As if she was saying to me, like hell, I wouldn’t understand.

I understand.

She looked away, and the moment passed. And not only did I feel insane, but I also felt like the world’s biggest creep. I was watching an unsuspecting human child have a silent existential crisis, stalking her by her scent.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

It was certainly excellent fodder for the self-inflicted psychological torture sessions. If hunters came for me at this moment, I wasn’t sure if I’d even put up a fight.

Well, I would. But I’d feel a bit guilty about it.

That thought lifted like mist when Little Flame began to sing. And it felt like I’d been waiting three years, fighting and killing and drudging along just so that I could be here, sitting in the dead leaves and mud to hear this voice again—the voice of this now nine-year-old girl that I saw in my dreams.

Her song was not about woodland creatures and sunlight. This time it was about loneliness. The kind of loneliness that a human child shouldn’t understand, though I’d felt it too at her age, and I still felt it now. The aloneness that extended for an eternity was a different beast entirely, like a thorny rose frozen in a block of ice, once of the earth and now disconnected and stuck somewhere between life and death.

I lifted an arm, my sight piercing through the darkness to see those inky black vines that crawled along my forearm and up my biceps. They pulsed and thrummed with power, the pointed tips of the thorns sharpening and dulling with the hard, slow beat of my heart.

Little Flame’s song had knocked the breath from my lungs all over again, and when my eyes returned to hers, it felt as if I’d been cut right down the center. Like a dagger had sliced through the sinew of my chest muscles and hands had pried open the bars of my ribcage.

Perhaps she was the one haunting me and not I her, my control of this situation merely an illusion.

As if she had worked through some unspoken puzzle, her song took a turn, going from hemorrhaged bleeding to the slow patching of herself back up again. The clouds parted, revealing her soaring flame once again, blinding me with its warmth and light.

Her lips turned up, and she giggled, the sound of it melting me to my core. She snapped out of her trance, the song fading into a hum as she swung more vigorously now. It was as though she was reaching for the sky, or above the sky and straight for the heavens, her legs pumping and yearning to transform into wings that could carry her away.

Like the first time I saw her, I felt my lost humanity return for a brief, fleeting moment, a relieving break in my timeless, everlasting existence.

I could finally breathe again, pulling as much of the damp, earthen air as I could into my lungs.

I smiled as it all came rushing back, all the pain and the fear and the desperate cloying for survival, broken up by small pleasures and dreams forever on the horizon.

Through Little Flame, I remembered how it once felt to stare up at the great expanse of the cosmos and reach.

4

SCARLETT

The feeling of being watched hadn’t dissipated as I walked home from the tavern at the end of the night. It wasn’t uncommon for me, but again, this intuition was different. It was the distinction between the ringing of a bell and the cacophony of dozens of clock towers all rattling off at once.

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