Chapter 10

10

SYLAS

Mina fell asleep at once. I watched the wary rigidity she carried herself with wash away, as muscles unknotted and tight tendons released.

And her mind was just as tired as the rest of her. I felt it drift down like a stone in a well, lubricating itself with rest. I could tell it was the first time she'd truly relaxed—in months, possibly—but that wasn't the reason I'd offered the gift to her.

No, I'd wanted her to sleep so that I could read her dreams.

During the day human minds had walls up, but at night all of their resistance fractured like a mirror crazed with cracks, letting their true selves show within.

All I had to do to see it was wait.

I crept over her, straddling her, much the same as I had the man I'd murdered down the hall, although she could not feel me. The tension around her lips, eyes, and nostrils relented at last, and I could feel her dropping into herself. She seemed so peaceful, and I'd forgotten how intimate it was to watch someone else with their guard completely down.

Especially someone who was already marked for me.

Because from so close above her the thread of fate between the two of us was almost blinding—it made me want to crack open her chest to eat it from its source.

She inhaled and exhaled deeply, and her eyes started roving beneath her eyelids, while she made small noises and twitched.

"Oh, yes," I whispered. Watching someone else's dreams uninvited felt like defiling innocence. I brought my forehead near hers and let my own mind go blank, so that I could capture as much of what was happening in hers as possible.

She was in a forest.

She had small, spindly legs—a fawn? No, a lamb. White as snow, just like the old nursery rhyme.

And the forest was dark, just like in innumerable fairytales. The trees were hunched over, with branches that clawed, it was night out—of course—only now there was no moon, though somehow she could see in the way of dreams, that haze of knowledge that one had once inside them, that you were present, and that things were indefinably, indescribably bad, a feeling that would wash away the second your eyes were open, but for as long as they were closed felt as real as your own heart's beating.

Then the forest began to rustle around her.

A howl cut through the night, one, then another, and Mina's lamb quaked. She tried to run, and I got the feeling that she always did, that she'd trod this path at night so often that it ought to carry her footprints—only it was too late. She tumbled into a clearing, and it was filled with wolves .

They were big; she was small.

She begged them for mercy, and they answered her with teeth.

She shouted for help, she screamed, and then she cried as they savaged her, ripping her apart with sharp fangs—and if the pain she was sharing with me now was just a hint of the agony she carried inside her—I rose up and stared down at her, as the beginnings of her tears started seeping down her cheeks, leaving glowing streaks that only I could see.

And while I no longer lusted, if I did, it would've been for them, for tears were fate in its purest form—they were distilled from futures that had already been denied.

But I knew if I started feeding from her now...I wouldn't be able to stop myself.

"Save all of this for me," I commanded her, and when that didn't work, I reached down and stroked her hair back with one hand, then stopped, stunned and somewhat curious to be touching someone without murderous intent. "Mina," I said, more loudly, and she woke up with a shake.

She sat upright in bed, but I'd already flowed away from her, to sit back in the chair. "Sylas?" she asked the dark.

"Mister Smoke," I corrected her, with the name she'd given me.

I heard her swallow and felt her relax. "I was having a bad dream," she murmured.

"You were," I agreed, as though I hadn't seen a thing. "What was it about?"

She made a sound. "I don't know." And that was a lie for certain. "Having a nightmare in front of a Nightmare. How ironic," she said, slowly lowering herself back into her bedding.