CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was nothing quite like being unexpectedly thrown face-first into a pile of snow.
Sasha couldn’t say she’d experienced anything like it in her life. One minute she’d been falling through darkness.
The next? A cold blast to the face.
Coughing, she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. The frozen substance beneath her compacted beneath her palms, crushing down underneath her weight. Wherever she was, it wasn’t much brighter than where she’d just been.
Sitting back on her heels, she wiped the snow from her face. Was she back in London? It’d been May. Or at least, she thought it had been.
Shivering against the cold that washed over her, she looked down at herself. She was still Sasha—still in her own clothes. A shadow caught her eye. The telltale silhouette of a gravestone against the glow of the snowy surface beside her.
She was in a cemetery late at night. Struggling to her feet, she wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. Her breath turned to mist in the winter air. Wherewasshe? Turning around, she couldn’t see anyone—or any lights in the distance. Just the mooncasting a pale white-blue glow on the snow and the headstones arranged haphazardly through the yard at odd angles wherever they could fit.
Wherever andwhenevershe was, it was old. Europe. The headstones were too tightly packed for even the oldest American graveyards. “Vile, I don’t know what the point is you’re trying to make, but knock itoff!”
He’d interrupted their fight. To bring them here. And why, she couldn’t say. To scare her? To freeze her to death? When no one answered, she turned to try to find a path out of the headstone.
And reeled back in horror.
Rising up from the ground was something that she first thought was a tattered bedsheet caught in the wind. But it took the shape of a figure, hunched and broken, its head hanging loose from its shoulders in its hood. Its limbs moved in a jerking, unpredictable fashion, like a puppet on strings that she couldn’t see—and ones being pulled by a madman.
The broken thing was some ten feet tall, and inside the empty spaces of its black and ratted robe, she could see that it was made of nothing at all.
But when it lifted its arm to point her way through the stones, she knew precisely what it was doing all the same.
Staggering, she half-ran, half-jogged away from the monster, afraid to turn her back on it and also afraid to look at it in equal measure. Where it was sending her became clear a moment later. A church. Small—but with lights flickering from within.
When she approached the door, it opened. A figure, cut starkly in silhouette, was a stranger to her. Though she knew by the flicker of glowing purple in his left eye precisely who wasdrivingthe stranger.
The figure turned inside and let her show herself in.
“A Christmas Carol,the Ghost of Christmas Future?” She walked into the church and shut the door behind her. “And achurch?”Rolling her eyes, she sighed. “If you’re trying to scare me?—”
“Scare you?” He laughed. Whoever he was playing, she couldn’tquite tell. Maybe it didn’t matter who he was in specific. He was a taller, older, austere looking man with a white square at his throat, labeling him as a priest. “No, my dear. I am simply procuringprivacy.”He went back to lighting candles at the altar.
“Last we left off, I kicked you in the balls and you dropped me into a pit.” She paused. “Which was right afteryou insinuated I was a slut for sleeping with you.”
“No.” He lifted a finger in the air but didn’t face her. “You mistook my words and inferred that I called you a slut for sleeping with me. Which was rightbeforeI told you I believed you were a weak-willed idiot when we first met.” He lit another candle with the long match. “Which I believe, if I am not mistaken, were the words that led directly to the aforementioned nut-punting.”
Folding her arms across her chest, she stared at him. At least it was warm in the ancient little church. “Sounds like a good summary.”
“Fantastic!” He spun on his heels so abruptly it actually startled her. “Now we canspeak.”He took one long stride toward her. “As we have much to settle.”
Scrambling backwards to get away from him, she nearly tripped over her own feet. Again. It was only grabbing onto a pew that kept her from crashing to the floor.
“Will you stop that?” He laughed, shaking his head in dismay. “You’re liable to break something.”
“Then stop being so fucking abrupt, will you?” She half stepped into the pew to put more distance between them.
“But it’s fun.”Someone whispered into her ear.
Screaming, she whirled, smacking at whatever was behind her. There was no one there. Her hands passed through empty space.
Vile—or whoever he was playing—merely laughed from where he stood in the center aisle, his hands clasped behind his back.
That was it. Something in her snapped. She sat down on the wooden bench pew and felt everything cave out underneath her. What was shedoing?What had shedone?Looking down at her palms,her eyes began to blur as the familiar sting of tears returned to her eyes.
