Page 9 of Guarded By the Nightmare

The same man who was still alive, but had lost the ability to scream.

My gut started refuting me at once—there was no way, he’d lost too much blood for that—the already-fragrant room smelled like tampons left in the trash in summer too long—but then I saw something fluttering inside his chest, like butterfly wings, and realized I was watching his lungs.

Breathing.

“Oh, fuck,” I whispered—and then leaned over and threw up.

The alcohol burned the second time too, only this time it was worse, because some of it went up my nose.

8

SYLAS

I’d almost killedthe man in the hall.

I stepped through the door, after Mina had given me permission. The man’s fear of me was instantaneous, as was my desire to feed from him.

And he couldn’t see it, but in that moment, we were bound by hundreds of incandescent threads, as I took over his fate completely and started eating his future—and his horror at losing it—at once.

I wanted all of his light for my own, and I would crawl into his skin to scoop it out of him if I had to, sinking my shadows into his mouth and eyes and ears and anus.

His panic was immediate, and I shook him like a dog, hitting him against the wall so that I could finish overwhelming him.

A small voice of reason said that I should make it last longer, to sip on him more slowly, to enjoy this first small burst of my freedom, but then the rest of me longed to ravage him, to place one finger in his mouth and another just behind his balls, and slice him lengthwisewith my claws until they met, making everything inside of him spill out like he was an overstuffed couch cushion.

Breaking his chest open and showing him his entrails was a distant third option, a combination of the prior two, an effort to keep him alive slightly longer, because his rich desire to live was so much more pungent and enjoyable as he was on the cusp of death itself—and then Mina arrived.

I’d heard her coming down the hall, of course, and I could’ve stopped or hidden what I was doing more quickly, but I honestly didn’t want to. Just because I wasn’t going to kill her right away didn’t mean that I didn’t want to feed on her, too. I’d been starved for a decade, I wasn’t going to pass by a mealora dessert.

But when she started throwing up, I decided to rethink my plan—it wouldn’t do me any good if the terror I could cause rendered her insane.

I surrounded the foul man—foul indeed, because now that he was on death’s door, some of his thoughts were open to me, and he had done many awful things—with my smoke, and then disappeared him, along with everything else that might show that either of us had been here. All of his blood, the little sliced bits I’d sliced off of his organs, and the entirety of Mina’s puke.

She blinked several times, trying to understand what she’d just seen, probably wondering if it had been real—and when I would be doing that to her.

“Where did he go?” she asked me, rather than breaking down or running away screaming.

That was good. I could work with that.

I gave her a simple shrug. “Into one of the places I can send people.” There were entire dimensions that were empty except for bodies I’d deposited inside them.

She looked past me. And thenthroughme, the parts of me where my smoke was not so thick. “But—but,” she stuttered.

“But?” I mocked her, and then wished I hadn’t, because it was like I’d flipped a switch inside her.

Her jaw shut with a click, and she turned on her heel, stalking back down the hallway to her room, more pissed at me than frightened.

What a strange girl,I thought, trailing after her.

When I reached her room again, I closed the door behind myself. I chose not to lock it, hoping that other men would make bad decisions tonight. Mina was inside the bathroom—throwing up again? No, brushing her teeth assiduously.

Like someone who wasn’t going to die in a handful of days.

I’d seen a lot of humans process a lot of changes, once fate bound them to me. Almost all of them came to regret it by the end, and there was usually a fair amount of begging or pleading to sparetheirlife, seeing as it was singular and special to them, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.

I found the begging boring, as I had no heart for it to work on, but I did find myself intrigued about the thought of a frightened Mina on her knees.

Right now, though, that was a distraction. I settled myself into an upholstered chair that might have been as old as I was, and played with the threads that dangled from its arm as I waited for her to emerge.

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