Page 93 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“Even though they wouldn’t listen to me,” Omara said. “And I am the far superior telepath.”

“Mmmm, you made my mom mad,” Sirena whispered, just for me. Omara glared at her, which sent Sirena into quiet snickers.

“But you stopped them?” Sylas pressed.

I was quick to nod—before I realized it might not’ve actuallybeenme. “Or it was our time-baby?” I asked, my voice arcing high. “But that’s insane, Sylas. It’s like the size of a period right now—the kind at the end of a sentence!” I turned in his arms to face him fully. “Speaking of, though, how did you know I was pregnant? And why didn’t you tell me? And—what the fuck happened to my birth control? Because I feel like we were both on the same page about things.” I pushed a palm into his shoulder and shook him—and even though the smoke he was made of was still trailing away at all of his edges, he felt increasingly solid to me.

“We were—and I honestly don’t know.” He raised a hand to his chin to scratch it, and the level of detail on his fingers for him was insane. “I didn’t want to give any of myself to you—until I did. And then once I knew you were pregnant...” he said, his voice drifting.

“You couldn’t tell me. Because it made you the father of an asshole,” I said, even though I was grinning.

“Everything comes from somewhere, Mina. Clearly, our child is destined to be a jerk,” Sylas said, grinning back.

“You two don’t make any sense,” Sirena complained.

“They don’t have to, anymore, now that they have each other,” Royce said, reaching for Omara, to carry her out over the minefield of corpses.

70

SYLAS

I foundout on the ride home that I’d lost the ability to control time.

Mina was sleeping with her head on my shoulder, on a bench in the back of one of the Monster Security Agency vans. She smelled appetizingly of decay and when the light coming through the tinted window hit her face once we were past the forest’s tree line, I wanted to slow time to appreciate her perfection—but I couldn’t.

It made sense—I’d never had the ability to control time before being trapped in the hourglass, so it was understandable that I’d lost it, now that the hourglass was gone.

I’d kept hold of that final grain of sand, however, depositing it into a dimension only I could get to, which is where it would safely stay.

Royce and his family were sitting in the bench across from us, and he was apparently processing. “So my great-grandfather wasnotinsane?” he asked.

“It seems so,” I said. After all, he’d been the one to write the inscription on the band in front of the hourglass—and the one on theinside, where only I could see. “And for what it’s worth now, I’m sorry for killing him.”

Royce snorted heavily. “Well, you didn’t know any better, at the time.”

“True.”

“But—how are you going to continue on?” he asked, his gaze flickering between Mina and me.

“I believe I’m just back to being a Nightmare.”

“What does that even mean?” Sirena asked, with her feet kicked up onto the empty space across from her.

“I still feed off of fear,” I said, before searching inside of myself for answers. “But I believe I no longer need to eat fate.” Now that neither of the stones were active in the world, I suspected things had balanced out. “I don’t hunger like I used to.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” Omara said, giving me a sly grin and a snort. Her leg with its sprained ankle was tossed up onto Royce’s lap—one of the MSA agents had wrapped it for her before we’d started our drive home.

“How so?”

She and Royce shared a knowing look. “Because you’ve never known true fear till you’ve had a child,” she said.

I tilted my head. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Just wait a little,” Royce said, with a low chuckle, as he pulled out his phone and began typing. “You’ll see.”

I wassurprised when the van drove past the exit it would’ve needed to go to Monster Security Agency headquarters and took us toward Mina’s apartment instead.

“Do we not need a debriefing?” I asked Royce—I’d seen a thousand of them before, while trapped in the hourglass.

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