Chapter 5

5

MINA

Sylas offered me a gallant elbow. It appeared solid enough, but as much as I wanted to make a show of leaving the room, especially after the bald man had been so condescending, I wasn't ready to touch my newly acquired monster just yet. It was strange enough when he'd touched me, pressing his finger against my lips for silence. The contact had made my heart burst out in a brief staccato, like maybe it'd known that it was his already.

That all of me was; it was the bargain I'd made.

But I just walked beside him instead, out of the room, and into the hall.

"If you come back here, I'll try to save you!" Royce—because I knew who he was now, the great-grandson of the Hourglass Killer's first recorded victim—shouted after me. "Before the sand runs out!"

"Don't look back. It'll only encourage him," Sylas murmured.

I had no intention of it, not when I could only barely believe that this was happening. I'd had hopes of finding out more information when I came here—but I in no way, shape or form had been planning on leaving with the Hourglass Killer in tow, as the gun rattling around in my purse testified.

I'd spent the whole summer in the stacks at the university library, trying to put two and two together, and while Sylas Veil's help was not part of my original equation, I would be an idiot not to take him up on it—because otherwise my grand plan had been hoping that the aiming skills I'd acquired in the archery class I'd taken at summer camp when I was eight would transfer over to the Glock 19 I'd just gotten off the waiting period for.

I knew I was going to get the death penalty for my revenge either way—so why not go with the sure thing?

But just because I already knew about him didn't mean I knew what he was. I wasn't an expert on monster studies by any means, and there were a lot of different kinds out there.

"So...what are you?" I asked, as we waited together for the elevator to arrive.

"Your worst nightmare," he said sarcastically. I wasn't sure if he was being serious or not, after the elevator arrived and he wouldn't join me in it. "Don't worry, I'm not abandoning you."

He began to sink into the ground in front of me, as the doors closed—and when they opened again, several floors down, he'd beaten me there.

"Do you have any other tricks?" I asked him, crossing my arms. My new mark itched, and I really wanted to look more closely at the sand pouring down inside.

"Several," he said, leading the way across the lobby, so quickly I almost needed to jog to catch up. He didn't walk, per se; it was more like he drifted at speed .

"And you can't tell me any of your other names?" Maybe they'd have a clue for me as to what he actually was, other than a death-dealing serial-killing smoke-monster that'd apparently been alive for a century.

"Give it time," he said, moving in front of me to hold open one of the Monster Security Agency's glass doors. I walked out into the cool night air, and spotted the almost full moon hanging in the sky.

"But I only have a week," I pointed out to him as he joined me.

It felt like he was ignoring me—but his head was lifted up to the sky too. He took a slow spin, his dark face illuminated by moonlight and streetlights in turns—which was strange, because their light also flowed through him a little like he wasn't even real all the way—but I could've sworn I saw the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed while he did it.

"You used to be human, didn't you?" I said aloud, and he stilled, his head swiveling down to respond.

"Not in a very long time," he said, before turning my question back on me. "But what do you think you'll be when I am through with you?"

I blinked, unsure how to answer. Surely something awful, if he was asking. "A...ghost?"

That made him laugh. "No, my queen. You will merely be dead. So you may think of me as your Nightmare, for as long as we are bound together—and as for any other names I possess, you will learn them when I make you scream them." He then looked casually around. "Did you have a mode of transportation?"

It took me a moment to switch gears in my head. "Uh, yeah. Over there," I said, and meekly led the way .

I felt faintly ridiculous beeping my little Fiat open for him a few blocks over, where I'd managed to score free parking. "This is it."

I walked around to my door, whereas he just walked through the passenger side and settled himself. He didn't wear a seatbelt, but he also didn't set off the "put your seatbelt on" alarm, and if I thought too long about how he was sitting down while being made of smoke, it'd just give me a headache, so I skipped it.

He waited for me to pull out onto the road and then drive several blocks before speaking.

"There's only one reason one hires a Nightmare," he intoned, saving me from trying to figure out which of my Spotify playlists was the best one to kick off a murder spree. "Who are we killing?"

I shook my head. "Tonight? I'm not sure yet."

I got a sense of vague disapproval from his side of the vehicle. "And why not?"

Because I hadn't been expecting this. "Our plan doesn't officially begin until tomorrow." I watched his dark smoke fingers tap his dark smoke knee in irritation. "But don't worry. I've got something in mind for you tonight. Just so I know, though, do you, uh, always have to kill people?"

It wouldn't make sense if he did—or if he'd just kill me, without doing my bidding first, like an evil genie.

"Preferably," he answered, while looking out the window. "High emotions work just as well. Hate, fear, terror. I can work with what I'm given, but I do have certain things that I prefer. Fear before death tastes sweeter."

"So you're like a ghostly gourmand, eh?"

He didn't dignify my bad joke with a response .

"Was your mother a fog machine?" I pressed, and that earned me his attention again. "Sorry, sorry, I should've known a ‘your momma' joke was a step too far," I said, shirking back against the driver side door. "I've just never been murder-buddies with anyone before. I don't quite know what to do."

"Murder buddies," Sylas repeated, and snorted. "I'm currently trying very hard to ignore your presence, my queen. It's the same reason as why I didn't ride in the elevator with you. I am very, very hungry, and right now all I want to do is surround you in my blackness, make you feel like you're lost and forgotten and have never been loved, and frighten you until you weep so that I can lick the tears from your eyes," he said, before looking back out his window again. "But I currently think it's best that you keep driving the car."

I panicked, then realized that wasn't going to make me any less desirable to him. "Yeah."

"I would like to eat soon, though," he went on, like he was the little kid in a back seat on a road trip, rather than someone that had just very nearly threatened me.

Then again . . . did I have any tears left?

I glanced up at myself in the rearview mirror, trying to remember the last time I'd cried. I'd spent months crying after that party in May it felt like, for myself, for Ella, and because no one believed me, but then eventually the tears had all dried up, replaced by whatever it was that lived inside me now.

I imagined if you cut me open I'd look like a piece of balsa wood, all dry and hollowed out.

"Could I just take you to, I don't know, a funeral parlor?"

"I prefer pain that is sharp and new, and preferably unwilling. That said, I suppose beggars cannot be choosers. I'm not allowed to feed from others without your permission, however. "

"You sure do seem to have a lot of rules."

"Indeed," he agreed, continuing to stare out the window. "Once upon a time I was boundless, feeding whenever I desired."

"And now?" I couldn't help but ask.

He made a dissatisfied noise. "I am bound."

"To . . . the hourglass."

"Or whomever holds its mark. Yes." He craned his neck to look behind us. "Many things have changed since I was last free."

Was the Nightmare making small talk? "When was that?" I asked, although I was fairly certain I already knew.

"The air traffic controller."

The Boeing had gone down when I was starting high school. It'd been all over the news for weeks—so much so that it'd swamped the news of the Hourglass Killer's latest victim three days later off of the newspapers entirely.

What was one miserable death, compared to three hundred?

"What was that even about?" I asked.

"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."