Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
VALE
Iknew him. How did I know him?
I observed a familiar, stupid young man from my perch on a tree branch several yards away.
The “new place” Wraith dragged me to wasn’t new at all, so I’d ditched him the second his back was turned and roamed around to hunt on my own until I came across a lonely figure sitting at the edge of a cliff.
It wasn’t his face I recognized. No, I couldn’t even see it from my vantage point. It was the set of his shoulders. The world-weary way he held himself. The way he breathed. All of it tickled my brain in a way that left me no doubt that I’d encountered him before.
The wind changed course, and it brought to me the crisp bite of early winter and something warm and soothing, like French vanilla. The last part came from the young man.
A flash of memory came to me as his scent hit me. The last time I’d come to the reservoir. It had to be him.
I never saw him clearly, but the build and smell were the same. It was the little idiot I’d saved from being chopped up and sacrificed to some bullshit god that didn’t exist.
The man I’d eaten had been delicious. I’d even shared him with Wraith, so he’d forget about our snack’s little sacrifice.
Malice and insanity are a heady concoction to drink, and the man had been stuffed with both.
Wraith and I were well satisfied with my haul, so there had been no need to hunt again that day.
The little man before me had been safe to go about his life, shaken but unscathed. A smart person would have never come to the spot again, so I clearly wasn’t dealing with one of those. And since I despised stupidity, I had the undeniable urge to go and educate the fool.
I didn’t try to disguise my approach, but the fool didn’t stir from his reverie.
I’d originally planned to scare the shit out of him from a nice, safe distance so as not to rouse the monster, but once again, the wind blew his scent to me, and I found myself momentarily entranced.
I didn’t realize I was almost on top of him until I was sniffing his neck and ready to strike.
I broke from my trance and forced myself to speak, “Little idiot. Why would you come here again?” Maybe if he responded, if he begged for his life, it would humanize him enough for me to break free of the hold my hunger had on my body.
No, it was better for him not to beg. That would only make the hunger worse.
Instead of responding like any sane person would, the small man fell bonelessly against me and bared his neck. The moon was bright enough to show off a streak of blue in the dark hair covering his forehead.
The monster in me was so startled that it gave me a chance to break free from its hold long enough to shove the man away and retreat to the tree line.
My hunger kept me from leaving entirely, so I watched as the young man pulled himself up from the sprawl I’d left him in. He was on his knees, showcasing luminous green eyes and calling softly, hesitantly. “Please…don’t go. Won’t…talk…” He choked like each word was painful to get out.
I didn’t respond, but my throat ached, and my stomach growled, both demanding I drain the absolute moron dry. The bells had made everything so much harder. My control was almost nonexistent.
“Please… I want this.”
The pain in his voice was a punch to my gut, temporarily silencing the gnawing hunger. I recognized the emotion in the man’s voice all too well. It had been my good companion for nearly two centuries.
The idiot didn’t want to be on the planet any more than I did, and he’d chosen me as his exit plan.
“Fuck you, you little bastard,” I hissed.
The hunger had already begun to ramp up once more, but I slammed it to a halt. Irrationally, the fact that he was willing to be my victim had given me all the incentive I’d needed to drag my self-control out from where it was hiding.
I stormed back out of the trees. “You think you can just come here and expect someone to take all your problems away? To take responsibility for your death? Do it yourself if you want to die so badly.” I gestured to the ledge behind him.
“I want to die so badly,” the man sighed, nearly echoing what I’d said. “Why can’t you take responsibility for one more person?”
I scowled and tried to storm away, but my hunger wouldn’t allow it. “The man I killed was trying to kill you. I came away from that with a clean conscience.”
Lyle had deserved what I gave him. I’d swallowed all of his sins and given them to my bloodlust. The information I’d gotten from the transfer had been enough to make Gareth drop his current project and start a new one.
“Clean conscience… What about Bethany?”
“Who’s Bethany?”
The last Bethany I’d known had died in 1942 while driving a med truck filled with injured soldiers. No, I didn’t eat her or them. I’d only learned about the bombing after the fact. The idiot probably wasn’t referring to her.
“Bethany is Bethany. You killed her…no one…remembers.”
“No one remembers? What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, starting to get truly annoyed, until I finally put the pieces together.
Oh.
Lyle’s cult had been killing people to sacrifice to their fake god in the hopes of making it real. They’d been using a stolen fae artifact to cover up the disappearances, and it was possible that Bethany was a name on one of Gareth’s many lists in his growing file on the cultists.
“Did Bethany vanish?”
“Bethany vanished.”
“And everyone forgot about her?”
“Everyone forgot about her.” The man nodded eagerly, showing genuine engagement in the conversation for the first time.
“Why didn’t you forget about her?”
The man shrugged. “I just didn’t forget about her.”
At first, I thought he was mocking me by copying my words, but his guileless expression told me otherwise.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The man gave me a dark laugh. “So many things are wrong with me.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“My name is Echo.”
“Of course it is,” I muttered.
He narrowed his eyes at me but didn’t respond.
“Okay, little Echo, I’m not going to kill you, but I am going to bring you to my boss.”
“Your boss is going to kill me?” Echo’s eyes brightened with hope.
“No, my boss isn’t going to kill you. He’s going to ask you some questions and then send you on your way. After that, you and I will part ways, and you can go find some other dumbass to murder you.”
“Why can’t you be the dumbass to murder me?”
I’d walked right into that one, hadn’t I? Baz would love Echo. He’d probably also get Echo killed by accident five minutes after meeting him, so Echo would probably love Baz too.
I made a mental note to keep Baz and Echo from meeting.
“What do we have here?” Wraith’s unwelcome voice made my shoulders tighten. “Did you find something for us to share?”
Echo perked right up at the appearance of Wraith. “Yes! Please share me.” He skipped toward Wraith like an eager puppy.
My resulting snarl startled hibernating animals from their burrows, and I was distantly aware of a colony of bats stirring restlessly in their cave.
Wraith’s eyebrows went up.
So did mine.
What the hell had that been about?
“The kid’s mine. Go find your own meal,” I said in an icy tone. Before Wraith could try to talk his way into a bloody threesome, I took Echo by the upper arm and dragged him away.
“I would be a good meal!” Echo called to Wraith as he stumbled along behind me. “C-call me!” He held a hand up to his ear to mime a cell phone.
“Don’t you dare call him,” I growled.
“I don’t have his number…” said a hopelessly confused Wraith with a barely-there expression.
Why does everyone I know have to be like this?
When I’m the normal one in a group, you know it’s bad.
“Where’s your car?” I asked, continuing to drag Echo’s resisting form through the woods, far away from Wraith.
“Ow! I-ouch! It’s-that hurts!”
I stopped and turned to see what the problem was.
There were scratches on Echo’s face, and he hung limply in my grasp.
I knew he’d been trying to pry my hand from his arm, but I’d ignored him and continued to drag him.
Now that I was finally paying attention, I could see I’d had him in a bone-crushing grip.
I relaxed my hold immediately upon realizing my mistake.
Echo was roughly Baz-sized, if a bit bigger, and Baz was a sturdy, annoying little fuck, so I’d automatically treated Echo like I would Baz.
Which meant that instead of pulling Echo down a path at a reasonable speed, I’d dragged the man through the undergrowth at a quick pace.
Now he was scratched, bruised, and scared. It was good that he was scared, because it showed he wasn’t hopelessly stupid, but I hadn’t meant to injure him.
I touched the blood on his cheek and tasted it without thinking.
Shit.
I’d been planning to present Echo to Gareth for questioning, but after a mistake like that, my monster would drain him dry in seconds regardless of what I wanted.
Echo’s eyes tracked my motions as I tasted his blood. His eyes became heavy-lidded, and his breathing sped up. It wasn’t from fear. There was a spark of excitement in his eyes and something akin to hope.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as the frenzy swept over me. I pulled him to me with a hand on the back of his neck and braced his body against mine with a hand on his low back.
My monster buried our fangs into Echo’s neck, and I resigned myself to losing myself and coming to, covered in the remains of a poor, stupid college kid who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At least I’d have a chance at getting the info dump from my monster once I’d come to my senses.
Oddly, I stayed present as my monster fed. I enjoyed the delicate flavor of Echo’s blood, and I was completely submerged in a sea of memories from Echo’s life when they flooded in.