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Something wicked. I blink, glance back at the mist, and the feeling goes.
“Must be imagining it,” I mumble, my hand sliding down the pane. But as I turn, something moves at the edge of my sight. I startle and turn back. The lake is the same, still and misty. “I could have sworn I saw?—”
“Move away from the window,” Legion bellows.
An ear-piercing shriek shatters the window, pelting tiny glass fragments like a hailstorm. A rancid, moldy scent. A figure leaps toward me from outside. I glimpse spindly, disjointed limbs and a terrifying face with two holes for eyes, then shadows explode. Darkness consumes the restaurant. Screams unleash chaos and the sounds of destruction. Tables topple. Bodies clash. Electrical sparks flicker in the darkness like twinkling stars, and then I am pulled into a warm, safe embrace that smells faintly of wine and sweet mossy woods.
I am in Fox’s arms.
When the shadows dissipate, his eyes are wholly black and directed at something behind me. Legion and Bodin are on the floor by the broken window, hands pinning a nightmare creature down. It thrashes and bucks, spits in their faces.
“Finish it,” Legion orders.
“I see you, my prince,” the creature cackles.
“I saidfinishit,” Legion barks. I’m not sure who he directs, but then a whoosh of air rushes around me. Flesh-and-blood monsters, I can handle. Invisible nightmares?
I shield my face against Fox’s body. He cups the back of my head, holding me to his chest. I’m not easily frightened. I’ve looked rotten corpses in the face and knew I was connected to them, made of the same stuff. But this... this is something else. When it’s over, I pull away in time to witness Fox’s skull illuminating beneath his skin, and then the black bleeds from his eyes.
All signs of his dark self are gone.
“Are you hurt?” he asks me through clenched teeth.
“I’m fine.”
The creature’s spindly body is a dried husk. Small, liquid blobs of an oily substance ooze from its corpse and drip up. Gravity is in reverse. They fall upward and splash on the ceiling, causing rot to form in the wood. But their path upward is slow. Lazy. Sort of like... I gasp. These aren’t manabeeze. Not wisps.
“What are they?” I step closer for a better look.
Legion glares at Fox, who tugs me back to him.
“Don’t let one touch you,” he says quietly in my ear. “Blots are far worse than wisps if they hit your body.”
Shade, a vampire Guardian in the Twelve has an old-world mate blessed with the power to rot anything she touches. She said it’s a curse, her darkness. Her punishment for helping build the bombs that destroyed the old world. The way this wood rots reminds me of her power. But Shade taught her to see each power can be used in reverse. She eventually learned to help remove the taint on the Well.
While Bodin holds down the corpse, clearly concerned it might not truly be dead, Legion collects the candle from our table and drops it on the nightmare. Fire consumes the shape.
“I never knew shadow was so powerful.” I am in awe of how they dispatched it within seconds.
“It’s not the shadow,” Fox murmurs against my ear. “But what we do inside them that counts.”
Pieces of the puzzle fall into place. That whooshing air on my face—the sparks in the darkness. Fox’s skull illuminating. His wraith form had caused the damage. They use shadows to hide the truth.
“You fed on it,” I note.
“On that?” Fox balks. “It tastes horrid.”
Okay, so maybe it was something else.
“We much prefer the juicy virginal types,” he teases quietly, tightening his grip around my middle.
“You do not,” I scoff, rolling my eyes. Or... wait. “Do you?”
“Hush now,” Legion clips.
Fox’s silent chuckle sends shivers down my spine. I should be afraid, should shove him away, but somehow, I still feel safe within his arms.
Thudding up the staircase announces the druids. Their eyes are visible through the ornate wooden masks. And they arepissed.
