Page 75 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“Here, or...” I said, offering to portal him away.

“No, please don’t open a sewer lid again, this room is too small. Just do what you have to do. I’ll be waiting,” she said, and turned her back on me.

I reached for him, and then I hesitated, for the first time in centuries.

I didn’t want to know his thoughts or read his mind. Kill him, yes.Knowhim, no.

“It’s okay, Sylas,” Mina said, looking back over her shoulder. Her arms were crossed but she gave me an encouraging nod. “I love you.”

“And I love you,” I told her—and then reached into the shroud of my smoke to begin chipping away at the top of the man’s skull like I was entering a hard-boiled egg.

56

MINA

It washard to ignore the noises and smells coming from Sylas’s side of the room, but I tried. He’d walled off whatever he was doing with a cloud of smoke, and I knew you couldn’t pay me enough to go in there and see it.

But there were plenty of other things here to entertain me—like all these portraits, going back-back-back. I squatted down to thumb through them, wondering how far these assholes could traced their genealogy, when I got to a sepia-toned picture I recognized.

“No fucking way,” I whispered, freeing it from the rest. It was an image of two men, shaking hands at the edge of a desert, with some old-timey columns behind them.

And one of them, I was very sure, was Royce Bannerman’s dear old great-granddad.

I set the picture aside and started digging through other strata of the stacks, feeling like an archeologist myself. I didn’t find Royce’s relative in anything, anymore, but I found more images of the other man—quite a few.

“Sylas?” I asked, which briefly silenced the savage snarling happening behind me.

“My queen?”

“See what he knows about this man?” I said, holding the image up, without turning around.

“Of course,” he said, and the sounds started right back up.

57

SYLAS

Garrett’s Past

June 12th, Midnight

My phone rangwith its special alert—someone was driving up to the cabin. I opened my phone, hopped onto the cameras, and rolled the feed back, spotting Mina’s stupid little Fiat cruising up the logging trail.

Who?Trent demanded in a group text.

Guess?I texted back, before leaping out of my bed and pulling on my pants.

I heard a thump from the room above—Braden, waking up and reading the convo. Nolan lived off campus, but we’d pick him up on the drive.

Who’s up for revenge?Logan said.

Fuckin’ A,Nolan chimed in.

Five minutes later we were all out the door, piled into the cab of Logan’s truck, and soon squeezed in tight by the addition of Nolan, as we talked over one another.

“Why’d you have to date such a cunt, Trent?” Braden asked, and Trent growled at him.

“Do you know how hard it is to find virgins these days? And—I didn’t see any of your asses volunteering to date her,orher friend, so fuck all of you. Six fucking months of my life wasted, that I’ll never get back.”

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