Page 47 of Aberrant Monsters
The cyclist flipped him the bird.
“Wanker,” Archie muttered before crossing the road.
We followed him past a chip shop and then down an alley that led onto an abandoned industrial estate. The fencing was battered, and it wasn’t hard to find a gap to get onto the grounds.
Archie shrugged through the gap first. “It should be somewhere here.”
But I’d already spotted it.
Someone, probably the Order, had piled barrels in front of it, along with rubble and stuff to deter a norm from accidentally falling in, but I could see the ripple in the air. Several barrels were toppled over and smeared with green residue.
The same hue as the stuff I’d spotted on the way here.
“Do you see anything?” Nandi asked.
“Yeah, I do. I see it.” Now it was time to track the echo. I crouched by the barrel and swept a finger through the residue. It clung to my skin for a moment before seeping into it.
My vision dimmed and I saw the spectral image of a bulky shape leap from the barrel and run across the ground.
I followed it.
This wasn’t real. It wasn’t happening now. It had already happened. It was an echo of events, and touching the residue was allowing me to see it. But the effects were temporary, a one-off for each eldritch. I needed to keep up. I needed to follow it.
“What’s happening?” Archie called from behind me.
“She has an echo,” Nandi said. “Come on.”
But I was already ducking under a gap in the east side of the fence and running back onto Crow’s Path.
* * *
I trackedthe echo back onto the streets, watching it skid to a stop on the pavement, bounce off the lamppost, and then head across the street to the pawn shop next to Real Deal. It pressed itself to the window. Was it studying its own reflection? It reared back and scrambled away toward the Underbelly gates.
Shit, shit, shit.
I ran after it, not wanting to lose it. If I lost it, finding it would become ten times harder. I needed to complete this task to get the location to the rift where my mother was killed. I couldn’t let this fucker slip away.
I picked up speed, singularly focused on the echo.
The blare of a horn followed by a scream registered like distant warnings.
Stop!Telarion’s voice filled my head, the command locking my knees and bringing me to a halt in time to avoid stepping into the path of a car.
The vehicle whizzed past, leaving me frozen, heart slamming against my ribs like a prisoner desperate to escape.
“What the fuck?” Nandi grabbed my arm. “Are you trying to get yourself squished.”
Where was it? Where the fuck did it go? “Dammit!” I turned away, hands on my hips. “I lost it.” I wanted to scream.
“You almost lost your life,” Nandi yelled.
I pulled my arm free of her grip. “Telarion would have healed me.”
“If you haven’t noticed, we’re several hours from sundown,” Nandi said. “You would have died first.” She turned me to face her. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
What was wrong with me? I had less than three months before I turned into a monster and there was nothing I could do about that but hope and pray the Order could help me. In the meantime, I desperately needed to solve my mother’s murder. I wanted to end the fucker who’d taken her from me before…before I lost myself to the changes happening to me.
But all those words, all those emotions remained trapped in my head, swirling like a vortex, so when I opened my mouth to respond to Nandi, all that came out was “Are you fucking serious right now?”
