Page 71 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“I was a cute college-aged girl in a Fiat. They weren’t super worried about me. Plus, I knew everybody’s names.” I got to the last photo in my phone. “Does anything about these pics say ‘ancient bad magic,’ to you?”

“No,” Sylas said, with a frown, sounding gravely concerned. “What of Nolan?”

“I can’t believe I forgot!” I took my phoneback to frantically search.

My original account on my college’s forum had been deleted, but I quickly made another—and while there were several comments under the post I’d made—the image itself had been moderated from the boards, for being “too graphic.”

“Oh, come on!” I muttered, and hit up all the news sites—and saw a headline about a report of a “mass hallucination on campus” related to undiluted pesticide exposure at the football field’s end. My eyes about fell out of my head. “You’vegotto be kidding me,” I snarled—but all the reports were the same—kids were hysterical, thought they saw something awful, but it was definitelynotsupernatural, and they were all being given treatment.

“They’re covering it up, Sylas,” I said, holding my phone out to him. He read the article quickly.

“All twenty-one murders?”

“They’ve been practicing for years.” I pushed the end of my ramen bowl aside. “No one ever found any of the other girls, before Ella.”

Sylas reached into our table, and brought out Nolan’s piece of skin.

“Oh, Sylas, Ijustate,” I said, putting a hand over my stomach.

“Hear me out,” he said. “What if, in addition to having some rudimentary ability to control fate, they can use dimensions? Like I can?”

I did quick math in my head. If the RRP had been going strong since their founding, sometime in the late 1800s—hell, maybe they’d beencreatedfor this awful, magical reason—a girl every four years, for a hundred and fifty years? Then there’d had been at least thirty deaths, counting the ones that’d happened before newspapers were kept for historical purposes and the internet.

Suddenly I was queasy for a deeply different reason.

“But why take the tattoos from them, if they were going to hide thebodies anyhow?” I asked. “They took those tattoos off of all of the men in the stadium tunnels.”

Sylas ran his fingers over the skin again—and quickly disappeared it when our server neared to take my bowl away.

“I think there’s somethinginthe mark,” he said, when she was out of hearing range, then pierced me with a look. “Where do they keep the dye they make it with?”

I grimaced. “I don’t know. Trent already had his when we hooked up. I know there’s a big annual ceremony when the new members get theirs, but as a lady I wasn’t invited.”

He made a thoughtful sound. “Perhaps we can discover that before we murder this man tonight.”

53

SYLAS

Mina excusedherself from the table after that, and I sent an innocuous amount of myself with her to the bathroom, extending it in a long unseen tendril to follow her like an obedient dog.

I had no prurient interest in seeing her excretions, but I would never make an assumption about her safety ever again, not after finding her in the tunnels. I licked the old blood and scabs from the boy off of my fingers, to try to place the magic, but it melted away too readily to be tasted properly.

And then, since I knew Mina was still in a stall—I pulled the skin out from the place where I’d hidden it, and ate it up entirely.

I didn’t have a digestive system in the common sense, but I could destroy things from inside of myself just as well as without. I felt the structures inside of me pull apart the scrap of the other man’s being, shredding skin cells, collagen, and hairs, until there was nothing left, and I still had no answers.

“I’m back,” Mina announced, threading her way through the large tables to rejoin me. “Are you ready?” she asked, offering me a hand.

“Yes,” I said, bringing it up to kiss before walking beside her outside again.

We duckedinto an alley to portal to our new target’s home, finding ourselves in the rose bushes in front of the mansion that Mina had warned me about. All the windows were dark, and the curtains were drawn.

“I think they’re expecting company,” she whispered.

“Should I blow a hole in their wall?”

She considered this. “As tempting as it would be to watch them run around like ants, no. Let’s just knock on the door.”

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