Chapter 70

70

SYLAS

I found out on the ride home that I'd lost the ability to control time.

Mina was sleeping with her head on my shoulder, on a bench in the back of one of the Monster Security Agency vans. She smelled appetizingly of decay and when the light coming through the tinted window hit her face once we were past the forest's tree line, I wanted to slow time to appreciate her perfection—but I couldn't.

It made sense—I'd never had the ability to control time before being trapped in the hourglass, so it was understandable that I'd lost it, now that the hourglass was gone.

I'd kept hold of that final grain of sand, however, depositing it into a dimension only I could get to, which is where it would safely stay.

Royce and his family were sitting in the bench across from us, and he was apparently processing. "So my great-grandfather was not insane?" he asked.

"It seems so," I said. After all, he'd been the one to write the inscription on the band in front of the hourglass—and the one on the inside, where only I could see. "And for what it's worth now, I'm sorry for killing him."

Royce snorted heavily. "Well, you didn't know any better, at the time."

"True."

"But—how are you going to continue on?" he asked, his gaze flickering between Mina and me.

"I believe I'm just back to being a Nightmare."

"What does that even mean?" Sirena asked, with her feet kicked up onto the empty space across from her.

"I still feed off of fear," I said, before searching inside of myself for answers. "But I believe I no longer need to eat fate." Now that neither of the stones were active in the world, I suspected things had balanced out. "I don't hunger like I used to."

"Well, you're in luck," Omara said, giving me a sly grin and a snort. Her leg with its sprained ankle was tossed up onto Royce's lap—one of the MSA agents had wrapped it for her before we'd started our drive home.

"How so?"

She and Royce shared a knowing look. "Because you've never known true fear till you've had a child," she said.

I tilted my head. "I find that hard to believe."

"Just wait a little," Royce said, with a low chuckle, as he pulled out his phone and began typing. "You'll see."

I was surprised when the van drove past the exit it would've needed to go to Monster Security Agency headquarters and took us toward Mina's apartment instead.

"Do we not need a debriefing?" I asked Royce—I'd seen a thousand of them before, while trapped in the hourglass.

"Nah," he said, waving a hand. "We've got things."

Somehow, I doubted that. "There were easily a hundred deaths out there."

"Those were just the ones you saw," he said, shaking his phone at me. "Members of that fraternity died on planes, and in cars, causing accidents—deaths that we clearly were not responsible for—and you're forgetting there was a pit full of corpses on the site. The second after my people had taken down all of their security cameras and traced their servers to wipe them clean, I called reporters to come in and investigate. You saw that place, it looked plenty evil. I've already spun it that they were performing human sacrifices, and their magic backfired on them, which isn't that far from the truth. It'll be on the front page of every newspaper in America tomorrow, and no one's going to give a shit about things actually went down."

"Tell your reporter friends to hit that cellar with luminol and a black light," Mina said, as the van pulled into a parking spot, wiping her face with a hand. She looked tired and I felt a spike of fear, for her sake, and the baby's.

Maybe Royce was right.

Not that I would ever tell him.

"So what are you going to do after this?" Sirena asked, sitting up.

I wasn't entirely sure. Stay with Mina, for certain. But past that?

Somehow live a life ?

"I'm asking because we try to avoid wet work, whenever possible. That said...the need for it does come up, from time to time, and we pay very competitive rates," she went on, pulling a business card out of her pocket.

"Give me that," Royce said, intercepting it to read. "Co-owner of my branch of Monster Security Agency?"

"I didn't come out of the ocean to sit behind a desk all day, Dad," she said, and rolled her eyes—missing his prideful smile.

"Well, I suppose someone has to take over the family business," he said, turning her business card over to me, and I took it from him. "So if you're looking for some work in the future, call us."

"He won't be, for a little while," Mina said, unbuckling her seat belt. "But—thank you all. A lot. You can't even believe how much," she said, beaming all around. I phased outside, opening up the van door to give her my hand, as she stepped out.

"Good luck with everything!" Omara called out to us, and as I made to close the door, I heard Sirena again.

"Thanks, Daddy."

"You're welcome, sweetheart."