Page 77 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“I am,” I said. My smoke was still obscuring the space between us. “In a manner of speaking, I did feed him his ears.” They were at the top of his throat now, at least. And if you counted having shoved and compacted most of his organs into the vicinity of his stomach, while I’d been wreaking havoc on him, he’d eaten his penis, upper thighs, and lower ribcage, too.

“I’m glad, baby, but can you come back out? I want to see you.”

I disappeared everything to do with the man, after harvesting his mark from him, and putting it with the others.

“I have returned,” I said, making myself as solid as possible, pulling back all my smoke to reveal her standing there, holding something in a frame with a worried expression. “Were you scared?” I asked, and she nodded. “I did read his mind, Mina. And somehow now I love you even more, which I did not think was possible,” I promised, sinking to be precisely on her level. One beautiful tear quaked on the outer corner of her eye, and I reached out to draw a line down its most probable path with a claw tip. “May I?”

Mina nodded, and I leaned in to kiss it, pulling it into my mouth, far sweeter and more valuable than all the rest of the death and fear I had just eaten, because it had come from her. She sighed and fell into me, where I caught her, running my face into her hair, and we stayed that way for a long moment, me holding her, until I was certain she could stand on her own.

“What do I taste like?” she asked.

Like someone worth keeping alive.

“Perfection,” I said.

The corners of her lips pulled up slowly. “And what’d you find out?”

“That your classmates were the same assholes you knew them to be. But we need to get into that cellar where they were performing their rites.” I stroked a lock of hair out of her face.

“I found this,” she said, holding the frame she held up. There were two men shaking hands in it, and I recognized one of them.

“That’s—” I began.

“Royce Bannerman’s great-granddad. I know. I recognized him from my research.”

“And who is the other man?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”

I took a moment to close my eyes and sift through the last of Garrett’s impermanent ingested memory. “He’s related to the boy we just killed.”

“I kind of figured,” she said, staring into the photo again, before looking at me. “I’d rather talk to Royce again than visit the cellar.”

I considered the man in the photo, the first man to have trapped me—all I remembered of him was a sodden, bloody mess, one I couldn’t ask any questions of.

“I think I would, too.” I could see police on the monitors over her shoulder, swarming the elderly woman’s corpse like ants. “My queen,” I said, offering her my hand, and creating a portal back to the Monster Security Agency.

She hesitated, looking around the room quickly. “Can you make sure no one else ever finds allthis?”

“Absolutely,” I said, before setting the place on fire behind me.

I broughtus into the reception room where we’d first met, which felt like a lifetime ago. It was currently empty, but then the door swung open as Royce arrived, with a possible client of some sort following, an angry looking man in a suit.

“Excuse me”—he turned to tell them with a smile—“I’ll be meeting you in the next room over. Give me a second?” I heard him say, before he burst back into the room with us to hiss, “What the fuck? You are not killing her here. Not inside the building!” he growled, like I was a bad dog.

“Cancel your other meeting. We need to talk.”

Royce looked up at the ceiling. “Security!” he shouted, up to someone else.

I moved myself to block Mina. I’d seen most of Royce’s other agents through my hourglass, and while many of them were dangerous...they weren’t me.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, Royce—but I would prefer not to hurt people.”

Royce’s head snapped back. “What is that, some kind of shitty joke?”

And then Mina stepped in front of me, because of course she would. “Don’t hurt him!” she shouted.

“My queen,” I said with a dark laugh. “Your lack of confidence pains me.”

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