Page 42 of Guarded By the Nightmare

It wasn’t like I wanted to think about my past really, anyhow.

But now that I had, it was like a shaken-up soda bottle—I’d made the mistake of opening it, dropping a Mento in, and now I couldn’t find the cap.

I got us back to my apartment—we had several hours before we needed to go track Nolan down—and then I remembered that Sylas was going to scrape the memories out of the inside of his skull like the good part of an artichoke leaf.

And I couldn’t very well tell him not to, if we needed toknowthose things to fix Ella’s problem.

I was already ruining things enough with my inability to function.

“Mina?” he asked again, from beside me. I’d parked—but I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting inside the car.

“I’m here,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I madea beeline for my bedroom once I was inside, and started sorting through the contents of the top drawer in my nightstand, which was mostly bottles of pills on top of an old layer of packaged condoms. Hopefully, Sylas was staying politely outside my closed door for once while I uncapped a bottle.

You’d be surprised what you can get prescribed to you after your parents traumatically die. Not like I didn’t deserve anti-anxiety medication, because I did, I was a college-aged student in America, for the most part we were all like nervous chihuahuas, trying to figure out what the fuck any of us were going to do with our lives.

But underneath the familiar orange bottles with tight white caps was what I’d used to use to relax, before I had access to good drugs and could legally buy weed...my vibrator.

I stood there, with one tiny white happy pill in my hand, while looking down at its friendly pink silicone and little rabbit-eared head.

I groaned, tossed the pill into the nightstand, and stormed back out into my living room.

“Sylas?” I announced, and he appeared.

“Are you well, my queen?”

“Honestly? Probably not. But—you have to do things I say, mostly, right?”

“Yes.” His answer was hesitant and after my time in the car I couldn’t blame him.

“And—you can touch me through fabric, yeah?”

I knew he could, I’d felt him all over me in the car, holding me in a completely unfair fashion—like he fucking cared.

“Also yes,” he intoned, tilting his head. “Why do you ask?”

“So if I were to ever tell you to stop, you would?”

“Completely. Up until the moment I get to kill you, that is. Nothing will be able to stop that from happening.” He gestured between us, where our invisible cord of shared fate was apparently always pulling me closer.

“Okay. Can you get on the couch?” I asked, pointing. He did so, and then looked at me, making himself more solid than normal in his current state of confusion. “Answer me truthfully—do you fuck?”

Everything on him that was usually in a swirling state of motion stilled, like for once he was the one frozen in time—and I realized that considering using my murder-buddy like a sex-toy was probably not very cool of me, and that I should genuinely fucking know better.

“I am so, so sorry. Forget I asked.” I shook my head and went back to hide in my bedroom immediately, hunting in my nightstand for the pill I’d tossed.

Then there was a knock outside my door.

If he was knocking, instead of just appearing beside me, I knew things were bad.

“Mina,” he said, from the door’s other side. “You’re not the first person to try to barter with me for their life.”

I groaned. “I wasn’t doing that, but out of morbid curiosity—was anyone else successful?”

“No.”

“Please forget I asked, then!” I shouted back, rattling around the half-empty pill bottles in my nightstand for my loose Ativan. I had Xanax in there somewhere, but I didn’t trust myself to be in murdering shape by sundown if I took it.

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