Page 11 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“Six kills then, in under a week,” I said with a nod. “I can manage.”

“Counting that one?” she asked, glancing over my shoulder toward the now empty room down the hall.

“No, counting you. Who I will kill in front of the Monster Security Agency building where Royce can see.”

That pulled her short for a moment, but then she shook her head, turning back to her bedding. It took me a moment to realize she’d spread a sleeping bag out atop the mattress. “Are we going camping, later?” I had had some enjoyable moments in my past, walking into campsites full of teens on full moon nights, if so.

“No,” she said, taking a careful seat on the bed and kicking off her shoes. “I just didn’t want bedbugs.”

I still had some few human gestures and mannerisms that it amused me to possess, and this elicited one of those, making my eyebrows—such as they were—rise upon my forehead. “Oh.”

Mina put a hand out to stop my most obvious response. “I know I’m going to die soon. But I don’t want to die itchy.”

I bit my lips—another distant, for me, gesture—to hide a laugh. “Fair.”

She crossed her arms. “You don’t get to judge me, just because you haven’t had to itch in a century.”

“Try several millennia.”

It was her turn to be surprised. Her jaw dropped. “And you’ve just been...you? That whole time?”

“If by me, you mean an insatiable vortex for pain and suffering, then yes.”

Her full lips fell into a frown. “Which means you’re on the bedbugs’ side, aren’t you.”

That, I could answer her truthfully. “Oh, no, dearest Mina. All of your future pain is mine. From here on out, anything that wants to hurt you will have to come through me, and I promise they won’t survive it. Even bedbugs.”

I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she wriggled into her sleeping bag regardless, leaving all of her clothing on.

“Please don’t be joking about the protecting-me-from-bedbugs thing,” she said, then reached over to turn off the light.

9

MINA

I had just watchedSylas kill someone, and I really thought I should be more frightened.

Was this shock?

I didn’t know.

I’d had to deal with a lot of shit in my short life, and there was always the possibility that I was already dead inside.

In fact, that seemed highly likely.

Because if I didn’t know that Sylas was still watching me, I would’ve been staring up at the ceiling until dawn, replaying scenes from my past, letting my memories burn me from the inside out like coals until they charred all of me to a crisp.

The worst part was remembering the good times. With me and Ella and Trent. Back when my life—well, it hadn’t made sense, except in retrospect, when I realized Trent was setting the both of us up—but back when Ithought that I was lucky.

Lucky enough to be the somewhat weird goth girl, who bleached her hair and then dyed it two different colors, who painted her nails red and black, and that Trent Donovan, Treasurer of Rho Rho Phi and son of the well-known businessman Jack Donovan Senior, wanted.

He was smart, athletic, pre-law, and somehow we had the same taste in music, a thing which I could not believe, but I swear to god Sleep Token was on his playlists before he even met me—and he wasintome.

My high school boyfriend had almost been scared off by my high sex drive, but Trent took it like a challenge, and there practically wasn’t any place on campus that we hadn’t fucked.

Ella and I joked that I was doing all of her sex for her, too, since she was ace and aro and totally uninterested in having relationships except for friendship and sheer fun. We were both getting biology degrees—me in microbiology, so I could go on to become the doctor of my dead parents’ dreams, and her in ecology, so she could go study elephants in Africa someday—and while things between me and Trent didn’t make sense on paper, on a day to day basis they were good, for six months. His frat friends tolerated me, and he made it so I hardly ever had to deal with them...up until that night in May when he’d wanted me to come to an end-of-the-year party at the Rho Rho Phi cabin.

I knew it was going to be rowdy nonsense, but I figured when he told me to bring Ella he was acknowledging how bullshit it was, and wanted me to have a friend to hang out with while he got wasted with his buddies because it was periodically expected of him.

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