Page 33 of Guarded By the Nightmare

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 Iknew 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 aliarand that she hadgotten 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

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