Chapter 44

44

MINA

The first thing Sylas did was sew Nolan's mouth shut again, and I was happy about that. I sat down on some rocks outside the cage—the whole place we were in looked a little bit like an old sci-fi movie set, like any minute now lizardmen in shitty latex costumes should come swarming up—and watched him work.

He was doing something above Nolan's chest and head, and while I couldn't figure out what it was, it seemed like it must be important.

"Whatcha' doin'?" I asked, when I couldn't stand not knowing anymore.

"Unlacing him. I didn't want to sever the magic around him directly, but he doesn't deserve for fate to protect him anymore."

"Will that help Ella?" I asked.

"I hope. We should go and check in on her later."

"Maybe protect her, too? What if they retaliate?"

"Their fate is bound with hers somehow— I do not think they'd risk hurting her. You, however," he said, darkly, before giving me a look—and I remembered what he'd said about my rescue.

"Twenty guys, eh? Could you describe any of them? No, wait, let me guess, they were all muscle-y white dudes, wearing expensive athleisure, some had on backwards baseball caps, and others had vape pens?"

Sylas snorted while continuing to work. "One of them was Black."

"Hold the motherfuckin' phone, we've entered the twenty-second century here, ladies and gentlemen, equality is at hand!" I said with a laugh, as Sylas shook his head. "But if the whole frat's involved in things—that's roughly a small army we could be looking at facing."

"So?"

And as he'd apparently managed to kill twenty of them out of hand, he made a good point. I stood up and came nearer—Nolan kept trying to make eye contact with me, but I just ignored it.

"I cannot believe he fell for your subterfuge," Sylas said, appearing to finish whatever it was he was doing.

"Eh. He's been lucky his whole life. He's never had to think like that."

Sylas gave me an irritated look. "Do you not get instructional children's stories in your time, about making deals with dangerous entities?"

"We do—it's just guys like him always think they're smarter than they wind up being," I said, with a shrug, as Sylas gestured, and the cage around us disappeared. Nolan was still alive, but Sylas was busily engulfing him in strands of fog. "What're you going to do next?"

"Of course I am heavily tempted, my queen, to murder him here, for you. But now that I know there are others involved—I want to make his death a warning," he said, while opening up a portal that I could see my college's football field in. "My queen," he said, while offering me a considerate hand to step through.

I went through and he followed, bringing Nolan.

"So I am going to take several miles of chain and string him up someplace quite noticeable," he said, and pointed up, at the field goal above us.

Nolan made a horrified sound inside the smoke-cocoon at hearing that, whereas I was wondering why Sylas was telling me, not showing me...

"And?" I asked, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"I would prefer you not be here for it."

I made a face at him. "Sylas, you think a little blood's going to scare me?"

He squared his shoulders and gave me a disgruntled sigh.

"Come on," I said, sitting down on the ground. "How long will it take?" I asked, and mimed eating popcorn.

"How long would I like it to take is the better question, my queen. And...I would prefer you not see how much I enjoy it."

"Oh," I said quietly, putting all the pieces together at last. "You're worried I'll see you hurt him and think things about when you're going to hurt me, and have you realized you're an idiot?" His head snapped back like I had slapped him. "If you looked around in that drawer back in my room you would've seen enough pills to kill myself ten times over—and do you know why I've got them all and hoarded them so carefully? To give up and fucking do that. But now, I don't have to, Sylas—you'll do it for me—and until then, I am fucking on this ride. You and I, and however many him s it takes," I said, flinging an arm out at the still-hovering Nolan. "But I'm not going anywhere. Not without you. Not from here on out."

I didn't realize it was true until I said it—but now that I had, I knew there was no taking it back as I continued.

"I don't know how many other delusional people have hired you over the decades, but I totally get that this is it for me—and I'm a hundred percent okay with that."

Sylas condensed so tightly his entire outline was crisp. "My queen," he murmured.

"You can be my king, but only like every other Monday, and every third Tuesday," I teased, and he broke out into the most frighteningly beautiful grin.

"I wish to enter you again," he said, and I laughed, but shook my head.

"I want that too—but not in front of him," I said, jerking my head at Nolan. "He doesn't deserve to watch."

"I could pop out his eyes," Sylas offered.

"Or, maybe you just kill him quickly, and we go back to my apartment and have amazing time-sex?"

"Yes," Sylas agreed, reaching into another portal to pull skads of chain out from somewhere else.

"Do you have a Home Depot over there or what?" I asked him.

"What is that?" he asked, and I just grinned.

"Never mind."

Once I'd caught the gist of Sylas's plan, I felt safe enough to wander off—not because I was disgusted, but because I was curious. It was nearing dawn, and I kind of couldn't believe that no one had noticed the other twenty guys missing yet. But if they'd done whatever they had to cover up Logan's death—maybe we'd been fucking when the frat's cleaners had come through?

I took out my phone and used my flashlight, going into the cement tunnels again. This time everything smelled much, much worse, and I only had to walk in forty feet to find the first man.

It looked like something had exploded from his chest—and then I realized something had. His heart. It was six feet away from him on the ground—it'd been ripped out and had apparently rebounded off of the wall, judging from where the blood stain was at my head's height, and then landed, rolling a little before coming to a stop.

If I hadn't seen what Sylas had done to the man at the motel I don't know that I could've stomached this entirely, but, while it was disgusting...these guys had been chasing after me. I didn't need to guess what they would've been capable of if they'd found me, either.

If it was a them-or-me situation, I was going to pick me, every time. I might have had a death wish, but I didn't want to die before all of these fools had to suffer.

I toed the heart with my boot—and noticed other shoe prints, when I flashed around with my phone.

Bloody ones. Leading from corpse to corpse.

I hadn't walked out of here, and Sylas's feet didn't really touch the ground, soooo—I got a creepy feeling, but what the fuck? What would be the point of going from body to body, when all of these men were so clearly dead?

Had it been another student, trying to be a good Samaritan and taking wallets to get names to give to the cops? Or some opportunistic robber, looting corpses like in a video game?

Then I realized all of the bodies had been desecrated in the exact same fashion.

Sylas had torn open their chests and ripped out their hearts—but someone else had come along to cut all of their shitty matching tattoos off of...all of them. Each of them had a hole over their left pectoral where their wolf tattoos should be.

That was weird—and worth telling to Sylas.

I turned around and exited the tunnels at a jog, and found my Nightmare hoisting Nolan up between the field goals like a sail, surrounded, utterly surrounded, by golden chains width of my fingers, that were beginning to glitter by sunrise's daylight like a halo, making him somehow both sacred and profane.

"Oh my God," I whispered.

"Do you like it?" Sylas asked. "I had to be careful when I was attaching them, so he didn't just fall apart. They're anchored inside of him. Bones, muscles, that sort of thing. I wove them into his body."

"I don't know what to say," I confessed. "It's pretty, but it's also horrifying."

My Nightmare laughed. "That's the idea. No one is going to be able to ignore it."

I shook my head, and pulled my phone out. "I don't want to take any chances," I said, taking pictures of Nolan—plus video.

"You are commemorating the occasion?"

"Better than that. I'm putting it online." I didn't even bother logging into an anonymous account for my college's forums. There was no way I could've done what Sylas had, the police would be idiots to arrest me for it. I just titled it the image, "Holy shit, you guys!" and hit send.

Half a second later it was up on the internet, and anyone else who was looking for campus gossip after they went on their morning run or finally got to bed after a bender was going to see it.

Half a second after that, someone posted a puking emoji below the image, whose name I didn't recognize, but their response was one-hundred-percent appropriate.

RRP could suck it—the internet was going to do its thing.

"Okay, baby—now take his tattoo off of him."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you, but I'm pretty sure there's going to be cops here in about thirty seconds—so let's go find my car?"

"All right," he agreed, floating to be level with Nolan, before swiping across his chest with a claw, and returning with a palm sized scrap of skin for me. "You should get to keep a souvenir. It is traditional."

I bit my lips. I didn't have anywhere to put it, and I wasn't sure I wanted to touch it anyhow. "Can you keep it for me?"

"Of course," Sylas said, depositing it into another hole in reality.

And then I heard the last thing I ever expected to.

Nolan groaned.

"He's . . . still alive?"

"The thought of eating his memories disgusted me."

Because of what'd happened to me. Knowing that he hadn't fully fed on Nolan out of whatever strange emotion he possessed for me just about my heart explode .

"Also, I am very talented," he went on.

"You are. You so, so, are," I said, bouncing up on my toes to kiss him, then grabbing his free hand to drag him to the parking lot.