Chapter 8

8

SYLAS

I'd almost killed the man in the hall.

I stepped through the door, after Mina had given me permission. The man's fear of me was instantaneous, as was my desire to feed from him.

And he couldn't see it, but in that moment, we were bound by hundreds of incandescent threads, as I took over his fate completely and started eating his future—and his horror at losing it—at once.

I wanted all of his light for my own, and I would crawl into his skin to scoop it out of him if I had to, sinking my shadows into his mouth and eyes and ears and anus.

His panic was immediate, and I shook him like a dog, hitting him against the wall so that I could finish overwhelming him.

A small voice of reason said that I should make it last longer, to sip on him more slowly, to enjoy this first small burst of my freedom, but then the rest of me longed to ravage him, to place one finger in his mouth and another just behind his balls, and slice him lengthwise with my claws until they met, making everything inside of him spill out like he was an overstuffed couch cushion.

Breaking his chest open and showing him his entrails was a distant third option, a combination of the prior two, an effort to keep him alive slightly longer, because his rich desire to live was so much more pungent and enjoyable as he was on the cusp of death itself—and then Mina arrived.

I'd heard her coming down the hall, of course, and I could've stopped or hidden what I was doing more quickly, but I honestly didn't want to. Just because I wasn't going to kill her right away didn't mean that I didn't want to feed on her, too. I'd been starved for a decade, I wasn't going to pass by a meal or a dessert.

But when she started throwing up, I decided to rethink my plan—it wouldn't do me any good if the terror I could cause rendered her insane.

I surrounded the foul man—foul indeed, because now that he was on death's door, some of his thoughts were open to me, and he had done many awful things—with my smoke, and then disappeared him, along with everything else that might show that either of us had been here. All of his blood, the little sliced bits I'd sliced off of his organs, and the entirety of Mina's puke.

She blinked several times, trying to understand what she'd just seen, probably wondering if it had been real—and when I would be doing that to her.

"Where did he go?" she asked me, rather than breaking down or running away screaming.

That was good. I could work with that.

I gave her a simple shrug. "Into one of the places I can send people." There were entire dimensions that were empty except for bodies I'd deposited inside them .

She looked past me. And then through me, the parts of me where my smoke was not so thick. "But—but," she stuttered.

"But?" I mocked her, and then wished I hadn't, because it was like I'd flipped a switch inside her.

Her jaw shut with a click, and she turned on her heel, stalking back down the hallway to her room, more pissed at me than frightened.

What a strange girl, I thought, trailing after her.

When I reached her room again, I closed the door behind myself. I chose not to lock it, hoping that other men would make bad decisions tonight. Mina was inside the bathroom—throwing up again? No, brushing her teeth assiduously.

Like someone who wasn't going to die in a handful of days.

I'd seen a lot of humans process a lot of changes, once fate bound them to me. Almost all of them came to regret it by the end, and there was usually a fair amount of begging or pleading to spare their life, seeing as it was singular and special to them, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.

I found the begging boring, as I had no heart for it to work on, but I did find myself intrigued about the thought of a frightened Mina on her knees.

Right now, though, that was a distraction. I settled myself into an upholstered chair that might have been as old as I was, and played with the threads that dangled from its arm as I waited for her to emerge.

When she did, she stared at me with eyes that burned. "You murdered him."

"Yes."

"And you'll murder me, too. "

There was no point in lying—one only lied when one experienced shame, and that was an emotion I had not possessed for millennia. "Yes."

She bit her lips and nodded. "In that case, can I make a request?"

I tilted my head. This entire moment was becoming droll. "You can do anything you'd like, my queen, and as for me, we'll see."

I watched her inhale and set her shoulders. "When the time comes, do it quickly. Please."

"So polite."

"That's not a promise."

"You didn't ask for one."

She put her hands to her face and her body started shuddering. I thought that I had lost her to sorrow or madness—but then she made a braying sound and blinked up at the ceiling, like she was talking to God. "All the murder monsters in the world, and I get the pedantic one." Her lips were curved up and she was shaking her head while laughing, like she couldn't believe her bad luck.

Was she . . . mocking . . . me? I couldn't remember the last time I'd been insulted. "There's a difference between pedantry and precision."

"Oh, did I hurt your feelings?" She moved to stand in front of me, entirely— irritatingly —fearless. "Please, Mister Smoke, don't eviscerate me," she said in a sing-song voice, with her hands clasped under her chin like a silent movie actress. "Is that better?"

I let myself diffuse out, occupying more of the space around us. "I do not have feelings for you to harm."

"You're the poster child for toxic masculinity, I'm getting that." She squinted up at me. "But let's get one thing straight—you can't hurt me, either."

"Because of our pact?" I said, letting my laughter echo from all around. "My queen, I will be killing you."

She stepped forward aggressively. "Yeah, I know. But not for a while yet, if you're not a liar. And until then? I'm not afraid of you."

"The scent of your puke says differently."

"That was just surprise." Her chin rose in defiance, her gaze held mine, and while I may not have wanted to kill her just yet, it was time to put her in her place.

I enveloped her in darkness, letting my smoke touch any part of her it could reach, pressing against her with a multitude of horrors—pinpricks of a thousand cold, insectile claws, the sound of wet and heavy breathing in her ears, and I enshrouded her vision with absolute nothingness, unchangeable, and unrelenting.

She gave a yelp, but then quieted almost instantly, her heart rate spiking like a firework, then plummeting just as fast, as she went someplace quiet and hidden inside herself, and I retreated quickly.

As upset as I was not to frighten her more—to get the chance to sip on her like a nightcap—her control boded well.

She just might have the wherewithal to use my skills properly, with some guidance and imagination.

And when I'd finished coalescing back into my form, I found her frowning. "Did you enjoy that, you sick fuck?"

"Not as much as I had hoped."

"Yeah, well, you're not the only one who doesn't have feelings anymore," she said with a snort. "Why do you think I hired you? "

"I don't know. Why don't you tell me?" I asked, as I sat back down in the chair opposite her bed.

She frowned and kept frowning. She did have feelings, after all; they just weren't related to me.

"In all truthfulness, it would be best if you told me what my feeding schedule will be from here on out, so I'll know if I need to supplement it or not. I assume there's a man involved?"

That, she deigned to answer. "Men. Five of them."

"Six kills then, in under a week," I said with a nod. "I can manage."

"Counting that one?" she asked, glancing over my shoulder toward the now empty room down the hall.

"No, counting you. Who I will kill in front of the Monster Security Agency building where Royce can see."

That pulled her short for a moment, but then she shook her head, turning back to her bedding. It took me a moment to realize she'd spread a sleeping bag out atop the mattress. "Are we going camping, later?" I had had some enjoyable moments in my past, walking into campsites full of teens on full moon nights, if so.

"No," she said, taking a careful seat on the bed and kicking off her shoes. "I just didn't want bedbugs."

I still had some few human gestures and mannerisms that it amused me to possess, and this elicited one of those, making my eyebrows—such as they were—rise upon my forehead. "Oh."

Mina put a hand out to stop my most obvious response. "I know I'm going to die soon. But I don't want to die itchy."

I bit my lips—another distant, for me, gesture—to hide a laugh. "Fair. "

She crossed her arms. "You don't get to judge me, just because you haven't had to itch in a century."

"Try several millennia."

It was her turn to be surprised. Her jaw dropped. "And you've just been...you? That whole time?"

"If by me, you mean an insatiable vortex for pain and suffering, then yes."

Her full lips fell into a frown. "Which means you're on the bedbugs' side, aren't you."

That, I could answer her truthfully. "Oh, no, dearest Mina. All of your future pain is mine. From here on out, anything that wants to hurt you will have to come through me, and I promise they won't survive it. Even bedbugs."

I could tell she didn't believe me, but she wriggled into her sleeping bag regardless, leaving all of her clothing on.

"Please don't be joking about the protecting-me-from-bedbugs thing," she said, then reached over to turn off the light.