Page 61 of Guarded By the Nightmare

I didn’t realize it was true until I said it—but now that I had, I knew there was no taking it back as I continued.

“I don’t know how many other delusional people have hired you over the decades, but I totally get that this is it for me—and I’m a hundred percent okay with that.”

Sylas condensed so tightly his entire outline was crisp. “My queen,” he murmured.

“You can be my king, but only like every other Monday, and every third Tuesday,” I teased, and he broke out into the most frighteningly beautiful grin.

“I wish to enter you again,” he said, and I laughed, but shook my head.

“I want that too—but not in front of him,” I said, jerking my head at Nolan. “He doesn’t deserve to watch.”

“I could pop out his eyes,” Sylas offered.

“Or, maybe you just kill him quickly, and we go back to my apartment and have amazing time-sex?”

“Yes,” Sylas agreed, reaching into another portal to pull skads of chain out from somewhere else.

“Do you have a Home Depot over there or what?” I asked him.

“What is that?” he asked, and I just grinned.

“Never mind.”

Once I’d caughtthe gist of Sylas’s plan, I felt safe enough to wander off—not because I was disgusted, but because I was curious. It was nearing dawn, and I kind of couldn’t believe that no one had noticed the other twenty guys missing yet. But if they’d done whatever they had to cover up Logan’s death—maybe we’d been fucking when the frat’s cleaners had come through?

I took out my phone and used my flashlight, going into the cement tunnels again. This time everything smelled much, much worse, and I only had to walk in forty feet to find the first man.

It looked like something had exploded from his chest—and then I realized something had. His heart. It was six feet away from him on the ground—it’d been ripped out and had apparently rebounded off of the wall, judging from where the blood stain was at my head’s height, and then landed, rolling a little before coming to a stop.

If I hadn’t seen what Sylas had done to the man at the motel I don’t know that I could’ve stomached this entirely, but, while it was disgusting...these guys had been chasing after me. I didn’t need to guess what they would’ve been capable of if they’d found me, either.

If it was a them-or-me situation, I was going to pick me, every time. I might have had a death wish, but I didn’t want to die before all of these fools had to suffer.

I toed the heart with my boot—and noticed other shoe prints, when I flashed around with my phone.

Bloody ones. Leading from corpse to corpse.

I hadn’t walked out of here, and Sylas’s feet didn’t really touch the ground, soooo—I got a creepy feeling, but what the fuck? What would be the point of going from body to body, when all of these men were so clearly dead?

Had it been another student, trying tobe a good Samaritan and taking wallets to get names to give to the cops? Or some opportunistic robber, looting corpses like in a video game?

Then I realized all of the bodies had been desecrated in the exact same fashion.

Sylas had torn open their chests and ripped out their hearts—but someone else had come along to cut all of their shitty matching tattoos off of...all of them. Each of them had a hole over their left pectoral where their wolf tattoos should be.

That was weird—and worth telling to Sylas.

I turned around and exited the tunnels at a jog, and found my Nightmare hoisting Nolan up between the field goals like a sail, surrounded, utterly surrounded, by golden chains width of my fingers, that were beginning to glitter by sunrise’s daylight like a halo, making him somehow both sacred and profane.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Do you like it?” Sylas asked. “I had to be careful when I was attaching them, so he didn’t just fall apart. They’re anchored inside of him. Bones, muscles, that sort of thing. I wove them into his body.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I confessed. “It’s pretty, but it’s also horrifying.”

My Nightmare laughed. “That’s the idea. No one is going to be able to ignore it.”

I shook my head, and pulled my phone out. “I don’t want to take any chances,” I said, taking pictures of Nolan—plus video.

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