Page 62 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“You are commemorating the occasion?”

“Better than that. I’m putting it online.” I didn’t even bother logging into an anonymous account for my college’s forums. There was noway I could’ve done what Sylas had, the police would be idiots to arrest me for it. I just titled it the image, “Holy shit, you guys!” and hit send.

Half a second later it was up on the internet, and anyone else who was looking for campus gossip after they went on their morning run or finally got to bed after a bender was going to see it.

Half a second after that, someone posted a puking emoji below the image, whose name I didn’t recognize, but their response was one-hundred-percent appropriate.

RRP could suck it—the internet was going to do its thing.

“Okay, baby—now take his tattoo off of him.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be cops here in about thirty seconds—so let’s go find my car?”

“All right,” he agreed, floating to be level with Nolan, before swiping across his chest with a claw, and returning with a palm sized scrap of skin for me. “You should get to keep a souvenir. It is traditional.”

I bit my lips. I didn’t have anywhere to put it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch it anyhow. “Can you keep it for me?”

“Of course,” Sylas said, depositing it into another hole in reality.

And then I heard the last thing I ever expected to.

Nolan groaned.

“He’s . . . still alive?”

“The thought of eating his memories disgusted me.”

Because of what’d happened to me.Knowing that he hadn’t fully fed on Nolan out of whatever strange emotion he possessed for me just about my heart explode.

“Also, I am very talented,” he went on.

“You are. You so, so, are,” I said, bouncing up on my toes to kiss him, then grabbing his free hand to drag him to the parking lot.

45

SYLAS

I lether drive us home, but it was stupid; I should’ve opened a portal and taken her and her car back to her apartment parking lot at once, and thus not wasted any of the remaining time I had with her. As it was, I had to be patient, sitting in the other chair, keeping my hands to myself, while my thoughts and feelings—yes, somehow, I had them—run wild over me.

I was scared to look at myself with my other vision now, knowing that decisions opening and closing would be the only thing I’d see. I feared I would look like a creature made of winking eyes, as too many possibilities to count came into existence around me and then disappeared.

But in all of them, I wanted her the way it seemed she wanted me, which was a thing I could not fully understand, but would not question.

Mina’d pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt when we’d gotten into the car, and it allowed me to see the bottom of her hourglass mark again, counting down the life she had left. I didn’t like that. I wished that I could rip the mark from her—or that there was a way for me togo back in time, as I was now, knowing her, and resist her temptation in Royce’s offices, sending her safely back home.

But home to what?

The pills in her nightstand and the memories that made her cry?

It was hard to believe that death with me was better, as she proclaimed, but yet maybe she was right and it would be.

Somehow I would make sure that it was so.

When she pulled into her apartment’s parking lot, there was a suspiciously large vehicle next to her regular parking space.

She noted it too. “They’re going to come for us, Sylas,” she said, driving around and parking far away.

---