Chapter 21
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.
Where was she? Turning around, she couldn’t see anyone—or any lights in the distance.
Just the moon casting a pale white-blue glow on the snow and the headstones arranged haphazardly through the yard at odd angles wherever they could fit.
Wherever and whenever she 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 it off!”
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 was driving the 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 a church?” Rolling her eyes, she sighed. “If you’re trying to scare me—”
“Scare you?” He laughed. Whoever he was playing, she couldn’t quite 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 procuring privacy.” 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 after you 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 right before I 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 can speak.” 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 she doing? What had she done? Looking down at her palms, her eyes began to blur as the familiar sting of tears returned to her eyes.
This thing was trying to kill her.
And she’d—and she thought she could fight it? She thought she could outsmart it? Worse than that, she’d been attracted to it? And she’d had sex with it? What was wrong with her?
“No. None of that. Absolutely none of that!” A hand grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her into the center aisle of the church. Suddenly, she saw a flash of an angry mob around her, and she was the witch—the heathen—the villain.
For a split second, Sasha was the accused. Devil-worshipping bride of Lucifer! Never mind that she was as God-fearing as any other villager, she—she could feel the rope around her neck as it pulled taut, the chair disappearing from underneath her toes.
And just as quickly, the vision was gone as Vile, or whatever character he was playing, threw her toward the altar of the church, sending her staggering toward it.
The low wooden table impacted her hard as she slammed into it.
The jars of incense and a few books rolled to the floor on the other side.
She spun to face him, gripping the table with one hand to steady herself, the other grasping a large silver candlestick and holding it in front of her like a weapon. Like it’d do any fucking good. But in stories, Vile seemed to have to play by the rules. Even in the halfway spaces like this one.
He kept just out of swinging distance. “I underestimated you when we first met. And for that, I apologize.” The eyes of the priest were fully glinting purple in the candlelight.
It was still a stranger’s voice—but it was Vile speaking to Sasha, that was painfully clear.
“So many crumple under the weight of my little diversions. So few seize the opportunity to play in my…sandbox, as it were—as you saw fit to do.”
Gritting her teeth, she bit out the words. “It was a—”
“Do not lie. To yourself, or to me. What you did was not a mistake. It was not shameful. Why would it be?”
“You’re—you’re trying to kill us both. You’re the enemy. My enemy.”
“Perhaps. But you feel the pull of the fiction when you’re in it, I know you do—I see it.
You can feel the call of it, you understand.
You sink into it in a way most others do not.
Yet you are still aware of it.” He grinned.
“You let it in. Like you let me in. Like you’re going to let me in again, now. ”
“What?” She shifted to grip the candlestick with both hands in front of her. “No!”
The laugh that left him bounced off the walls, dark and resonant, seemingly surrounding her. “We shall see. And no, dear—I am not your enemy. I am not trying to kill you. I very much wish for you to survive my games, especially now. No, I only wish for your sister to die.”
“That’s not any better!”
“And I understand why you view it that way.” He shrugged, as if it were a simple agree-to-disagree problem and not a he-wanted-to-murder-her-sister-because-he-was-bored problem. “I am what I am.”
“Let her go.” She felt her heart lodge in her throat. “Let her go, and I’ll—I’ll stay here, just, just spare her life, please.”
“Oh, what’s this?” He laughed, brighter that time. The sharp features of the older priest creased in amusement. Vile might change faces, but all of them seemed handsome. Just in different ways. “We’ve passed through anger and reached bargaining already?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“And we’re back to anger.” He tutted. “I think I prefer bargaining.”
“I mean it. Let her go. I’ll stay, and you can play these—stupid twisted games with me. Just let her go.”
“But then there are no stakes. No urgency. It’s just this.
Which, my dear, to be blunt, would be grand for a half dozen books but…
then what?” He tilted his head to the other side, as though thinking it over.
“We’re liable to get into strange territory where one jumps the shark by having coitus with it. ”
Shutting her eyes, she wanted to scream. Taking a slow, deep breath, she opened them again and fixed her gaze on the very serious looking priest, who was smirking at her with an expression that was just a little too snarky for him. It was like an actor playing a part.
“Having sex with you was a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the enemy.”
“No. I am playing a part. Same as you. We are the ‘bad guys’ and therefore, do ‘bad things.’” He lifted his fingers and did air quotes along with the words.
“As for Vile? As for that which I am in truth? I am as the lightning storm, as you so rightly observed. I can no more control what I must do than nature itself, I fear.” He let out a small, half-laugh.
“I am one of the few people in the universe for whom therapy would actually solve nothing.”
Luckily, she wasn’t in the mood to laugh. “Having sex with you was still wrong.”