Page 35 of Guarded By the Nightmare

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 remainedquiet 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 shebit 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.

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