Page 7 of Guarded By the Nightmare

“His wife cheated on him with a pilot. He needed my help to take down the plane.”

Sylas said it as though he were ordering fast food at a drive-through. No emotion, no sorrow, no...nothing.

It was one thing to be confronted with the knowledge of death in the abstract—and another for him to be sitting beside you personified, as you drove him to your fleabag hotel.

“And you...just...did that?” I asked, my voice rising slightly in horror. “You crashed an entire plane full of people for him?”

“Morals are for creatures that have consciences.” He held up his hand between us, and made the smoke it was comprised of dissipate and then reform again. “What about my current appearance makes you think I am possessed of one?”

“But you were human,” I said, frowning and confused. “Once.”

He shrugged. “You said it yourself. My mother could’ve been a fog machine,” he said, and his intonation was as dry as toast, except for the way he lifted the edge of his lips and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Was he teasing me?

Or mocking me?

“Besides—the very thing you fault me for is the very reason you’ve hired me. Even if you won’t tell me why yet,” he said. “Even if, perhaps, you cannot admit it to yourself.”

I shook my head. I had no problem with that at all. Because I could remember Ella sitting exactly where he was the summer below last, with our windows down, and both of us howling along with the radio, her feet on the dashboard while I drove too fast, both of us laughing in between songs.

“No, I know exactly why I hired you.”

“In that case then, where are we headed?”

My hands wrung the steering wheel. “To the bad side of town.”

“Oh, good,” Sylas said, sounding legitimately excited as he looked back out the passenger window again. “I’m sure I’ll fit right in there.”

6

SYLAS

Mina parkedher ridiculously small vehicle in a decrepit hotel’s parking lot, but when she exited, she didn’t go to a room—she walked down the street to a convenience store that was missing half the lights in its sign, and whose sole employee had a fly swatter out.

I followed her without question, flowing unseen beside her, seeping into the shadows she cast, watching her buy two tiny brown bottles of liquor, quiet until she returned to the pavement outside.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said, erupting out of the ground beside her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

A killer, she was not.

Then I watched her resolve flash across her face, making her look wild and determined, and a spark of black flame lit inside my dark heart.

“Can you hide, or something?” she asked, looking up at me.

“You don’t wish for me to be seen?”

“Not if you want to feed, no.”

“Well, then,” I said in mock obedience, thinning myself again out to disappear into all of the nearest shadows once more, and we returned to the hotel together, her walking with resolve, and me lapping at her heels.

A scantily clad woman ran out of one of the hotel rooms, with a black eye and a pair of shoes clasped against her chest. I was very surprised to find us going toward the room she’d left, and even more so when Mina uncapped one of the bottles of liquor, gargled it, and spit the contents out, tossing the now-empty bottle into her purse. She stopped in front of the door and mussed her hair with both hands, then looked around—presumably for me—before announcing “No interrupting” quietly, then knocked rudely on the door. No one answered, so she knocked louder, until a disgruntled man appeared.

He was slovenly, wearing a half-open robe that showed how skinny he was. He smelled like sweat and sex and tar, and he looked Mina up and down in a way that made me want to pop out both his eyes.

“What the fuck do you want?” he growled at her.

She weaved her head back and forth, miming being drunk so well I thought she might be, especially with the alcohol on her breath. “For you to keep the fuck down! I couldn’t sleep at all last night! Some of us have to work in the morning!”

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