Page 1 of Changeling
Chapter 1
NathanGrierwasexhausted,his body drained entirely of energy from his days spent recovering from an unfortunate shotgun blast to the chest. Sleep was a welcome friend as of late—well, some of the time. A part of Nathan feared the drooping of his eyes and what might be waiting for him in the darkness. But he needed rest. Craved it. The comfort and warmth of the bed beneath him. The quiet of a room that wasn’t in the hospital. The gentle touch of Sasha’s fingers trailing up his thigh.
Nathan sighed. His thoughts were vague, hazy. He was definitely in a bed, in a quiet room, but he wasn’t surrounded by the comfort of covers; he was lying naked on top of them, displayed for Sasha to see. Nathan knew the hand caressing up his side belonged to Sasha Kelly—of course it did. He knew the soft skin of the incubus too well after their night together to imagine it was anyone else.
It had been a week since their run-in with Gabriel, the sealgaire who had murdered Nathan’s parents—and who hadturned out, in the end, to be family. Nathan hadn't told his brother, Jim, about Gabriel being their uncle, and he hoped he never had to. Gabriel had set traps for them, using Sasha as bait, bent on ridding the world of anything not human, especially of changelings like Jim. The shotgun hadn’t even been the finale, but it had been enough to put Nathan out of commission. They were all lucky to have gotten out of that warehouse alive, and Nathan couldn’t help being thankful that Gabriel hadn’t.
When Nathan first woke up in the hospital, Sasha had clung to him, overcome with emotion and intent on confiding in Nathan his darkest secret—that he had killed the first girl he ever fed from, something he had never truly gotten over. Sasha had pleaded with Nathan not to leave him, and the words that followed had shaken Nathan more than anything that had happened to them.
I love you, Nathan.
“Nathan…” Sasha’s real voice called to him, warm breath on Nathan’s face. He could feel the heat and presence of Sasha beside him now, not only his delicately trailing hand. Nathan shivered at their closeness.
Sasha's touch, Sasha's affection—Nathan had grown attached to those things. But he wasn't sure if he was ready for Sasha's love.
Turning toward the incubus, Nathan reached for Sasha with an outstretched palm, but his hand sank through the air and landed on a cold mattress. Nathan’s eyes opened immediately, and he found himself staring at an empty bed. Just like that morning after they had first made love, when Sasha was taken by Gabriel.
Nathan sat up quickly, instantly awake. He didn’t recognize the room he was in. It was strangely muted, the colors all dull and without texture. There was only the bed, the walls, and a mirror in the corner. There wasn’t even a door.
“Fuck,” Nathan cursed, running a hand through his short black hair reflexively. He was dreaming again. He was always dreaming. He tried rubbing his eyes, tried willing himself awake, but those simple tricks never worked anymore. Not when his mark was so powerful.
A few months earlier, Jim had been kidnapped and taken into the Veil by dark fae, a passage of time Jim couldn't remember. Nathan had tricked a dark fae Messenger into getting his brother back, but now he was marked for bounty by a yet unknown dark sidhe lord. In their hopes of getting the bounty called off before it consumed and killed Nathan, the most they had learned was that the holder of the bounty was athey, but they didn’t even know what that meant.
Nathan resigned himself to having to play the dream out and rose from the bed. It was the starkest thing in the room besides him, since the sheets were black. He was still naked as he inspected the empty walls and the space around the bed, unable to summon clothing like he might have in a normal lucid dream, which he assumed had some deeper meaning, but he didn’t want to think about it. Instead, he turned for the mirror—his obvious destination.
At first, his reflection looked normal. Just him, clad in only skin, the image enlarging in the glass as he walked closer. But he wasn’t completely bare, he realized. His necklace still hung neatly in place, with his father’s white gold wedding ring and its intricate Celtic knots like a pendant against his chest. Over his heart was the physical manifestation of his mark, a scar made up of three interconnecting lines. Claw marks. He cringed as he recalled the sting of the Messenger’s claws digging in deep—still a vivid, horrible memory.
His chest was free of bandages, though Nathan knew his wounds were still healing in the real world. Here they displayed as a spattering of new scars, the marks from the shotgun pelletsmixing with the scratches from Sasha’s claws when he’d been set on a rampage by the powerful influence ofDesire, one of the Muses—a Weird Sister. Nathan could still hardly believe they had survived that encounter, let alone so many others afterward, but the scars from Sasha didn’t bother him. Frightening as Sasha’s true form could be, Nathan found it beautiful.
Slowly, he reached out to touch the mirror, filling the entire surface now as he stood directly in front of it. He touched the glass with his left palm, the one carved with a divided circle from when he’d summoned the Messenger, still clear on his skin as another scar. The glass was cool, solid. Nathan wondered if he’d rather die from these nightmares, from his mark, than the other option—if a dark fae claimed his bounty and turned him over to whoever owned it. Of course, if that happened, he wouldn’t die, no matter how much he wanted to. Nathan would be cursed with immortality as a Shadow Immortal, a servant to his dark sidhe master until the end of time.
Nathan took a deep breath and turned his eyes away. He wanted door number three. He wanted to find the bounty holder, kill whoever it was, and go on living, protecting his brother and Sasha from whatever might come their way. He didn’t ask for much from life. He didn’t expect luxury or happily ever after. He just wanted tobe—to remain himself,Nathan, and be there for those who needed him. The alternative was too terrifying to imagine.
Nathan looked up, straight into his own reflected eyes, and froze. They weren’t what he expected. He expected slit. He’d seen that before. But even when his eyes were slit in his dreams, they were always still green. This time they were red. Red on black.
Red on black…
Nathan could see flashes of brilliant color and beautiful scenery that he had heard about of the more lush places in theVeil, but had never seen. There were flashes of the fae markets, all metal and exhaust. Caves tunneling to underground cities. Endless trees dividing light from darkness, leading deeper and deeper into the black. And, at the heart of it all, a tower, a castle, and a flash of slit eyes, only they weren't blue or green, they were red on black.
The other dream rushed forward through Nathan’s mind, like it was replaying in the glass—maybe it was—and he remembered where he had first seen those eyes. He knew instantly then that those eyes, those slit red on black eyes from the center of the darkest part of the Veil, belonged to his keeper—the holder of the bounty.
Nathan’s reflected lips pulled back into a smirk.
Outside of the mirror, Nathan tried to pull his hand away. He couldn’t. The once cool glass was growing colder, so cold it burned, like his skin was frozen in place. Pain seared through his palm and he screamed.
The reflection laughed with Nathan’s voice, but the sound seemed far away, contained within the glass. Nathan looked into those eyes again, trying to keep himself upright through the pain that was slowly creeping from his palm up his arm.
Two new figures appeared in the reflection behind Nathan’s double—Sasha and Jim. But it wasn’t Nathan’s sensitive and urgent brother, or the kind-hearted incubus he had grown so close to. Jim’s eyes were slit andamber. Amber like the Messenger’s. Amber like they had been in Nathan’s hospital room.
Nathan hadn’t told any of the others about Jim’s moment of Awakening in the hospital, his eyes like that, his expression blank, his movements so intent as he approached Nathan without answering a single plea. It was only Sasha’s interruption that had brought Jim back to his senses. What Jim might have done otherwise…Nathan didn’t want to speculate.
In the mirror, Sasha was not himself either, but transformed into a larger, more monstrous version of his incubus form. His horns seemed longer and more dangerous at their points, more of his teeth were sharpened rather than just his eyeteeth baring fangs, his wings were massive, and his claws appeared nearly twice as long. Both Sasha and Jim were smirking just as Nathan’s reflection was smirking, like they were ready to devour him.
Nathan risked a glance behind him, if only to see how much truth the mirror held, but there was no sign of Jim or Sasha in the room. They existed only in the mirror, as their terrible, dark selves.
Nathan jerked forward, forced to face the mirror again as something tugged on his hand. His reflection had curled its fingers over Nathan’s frozen hand on the glass and was pulling him in. The surface of the glass didn’t ripple or change, Nathan was simply being pulled through like nothing was there. Nathan planted his feet and resisted as best he could. Somehow he knew that if he allowed himself to be pulled inside, he’d never come back. This nightmare would become a reality, and he’d lose everything he knew and cared about.
Sasha and Jim were laughing. Nathan’s reflection was laughing as he pulled with impossible strength until Nathan’s entire arm was through to the other side.
