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I turn to Loki. Though I’m sure he’d much rather abandon me at the shadows and return to his pretty mate and that weird shadow cat, he stays on the outside of the shadows, waiting for me to make up my mind.
I nod, psyching myself up. “Okay. I’m going to go get the flower now.” Then, because you think it would’ve hit me before now, but it didn’t because I’m letting my impulsive side take over, I ask, “Um… do you have any idea how I’m supposed to find it? Or what it looks like?”
The shadows are black. Odds are I’ll be walking around blind once I pass through them. It’s bad enough I’m looking for a flower I’ve never seen before, but what I can’t see at all?
Loki has an answer for that.
“Follow your nose.” Using the tip of his claw, Loki taps his. “You’ll know where to find the ashbalm flower when it calls to you.”
Right. Because that helps. “And you’re sure you can’t come in with me?”
“Duke Haures insists that you go alone,” he rumbles.
Yeah. I figured. “But you’ll be here when I’m done? So I can bring him the flower and get my mate back?”
Loki lifts his hand, patting his inky black pec with the flat of his hand. It’s so weird. As a walking, talking shadow creature, you’d expect his hand to either pass right through or, I don’t know, meld into the mass of shadows that is Loki right now. It doesn’t. He raps it, the sound echoing before being swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness ahead of me, then says in a solemn tone, “I vow it.”
Instead of hovering off of the ground, his bare feet dig into the piles of ash that cover the reddish ground as though to prove he means it.
That’s the best I’m going to get.
Okay. I suck in a breath, choking when Sombra’s heat all but scorches my lungs. I wave him off when he leans toward me, though the mated demon is careful not to touch me. I have to remember that Sombra is nothing like New Jersey in October. The lingering stink of rotten eggs might not be too far off from some of the aromas you catch driving down the Turnpike, but even in the dog days of summer, the Jersey shore ain’t nothing like this.
I want to go home. But since I want to go home with my new mate, I can’t do that if I don’t walk into the dark shadows first.
Good thing I brought my phone. I obviously don’t get service here, but so long as my flashlight app works, I’m not too worried about the shadows.
Oh, no. It’s just what might be lurking in there that has me feeling like I’m going to piss myself…
Buck up, Hope. Get in, get the flower, get out. No biggie.
You can do this.
Unless you want to leave Sammael in the demon duke’s dungeons, you have no choice.
Guilt’s a big kick in the ass for me. So is my loyalty. If you’re one of my people—whether that’s my closest friends, my sister, my niblings—and you need me, that’s one of the only times I can force myself out of my comfort zone.
Sammael is my mate, right? And I’m his. The only one he’ll ever have, and the one he’s waited centuries—centuries!—for. I might have only just met him, but he’s my people now.
With a decisive jab of my thumb, I turn on my flashlight. Then, giving Loki a smile that’s admittedly wavering a bit, I tell him, “I’ll be right back.”
And I only hope that I’m not full of shit.
* * *
I makeit about ten steps into the shadows before I lose my nerve and turn the brightness on my flashlight down to about twenty percent.
It’s not as dark as I thought it would be. It’s cooler, too; I swear, the temp’s gone down about thirty degrees between one step and the next, cooling me off as soon as the shadows swallowed me whole. The moon overhead went from having a reddish hue to being a foreboding dark color that still somehow glows in the pitch-black of the sky.
There are no stars here, just that full, round moon and a sliver of the gold moon I’ve heard that belongs only in Sombra. And, yet, if I squint, I might actually be able to see without my flashlight.
But that’s the thing. I don’twantto. I already saw enough within those first few steps before I dimmed the light.
Inside of the shadows, appearing almost immediately, I can’t avoid the piercing white eyes that are looking at me from all directions, starting with the ground up. Since all of the creatures that lurk here are made of shadows first and foremost, I can just about make out their shapes—and that’s more than enough for me.
I swear, I even saw one that was big and bulky, almost like the black bear from the Turtleback Zoo, and when it got caught in my flashlight, it snarled so loudly that I whimpered and had to stop myself from fleeing.
Luckily, the faint stream of my flashlight keeps them all away from me; if I’m scared of them, they’re definitely apprehensive when it comes to my phone. I hear some scurrying, some thudding, but with the light on full blast before, I got a much better idea of howwrongthese shadow monsters are. Plus, there are bones. So many freaking bones inside the shadows. I thought the skulls lined up on the outskirts of the shadows were bad, but it looks like the predators just booted the skulls out into the ash. The rest of their poor victims are scattered around in here.
