Chapter Twenty-Six Evelyn
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
EVELYN
I’m Evelyn Kendricks… Evelyn…” She had to keep on saying the words.
Her name, an anchor that would bring her back to the present.
How many times had she blanked out as she walked down Sixteenth to get to Linda’s agency?
She’d made a wrong turn somewhere, unable to make heads or tails of her location, and somehow ended up three blocks away from the road that would take her to the town house.
Within minutes of getting back on the right track, she found herself perplexed by the menagerie of people running toward her. Practically a stampede.
A man knocked her shoulder, momentarily took her in, and then stumbled over himself as he cried out.
She’d just walked by two cars, saw the reflection of her burning gaze in the glass.
Yes, she’d become a demon eye. She remembered that.
Didn’t matter. She pressed on. She had to make her way to Linda, the person who could fix this, even as the sky grew darker the closer she got to the agency. As a strange buzz filled the air.
My name is Evelyn…
It was when she was three blocks away from Nueva Investigations, saw the carnage that surrounded her on the ground, saw some sort of massive shadow cloud in the sky with arms like tentacles writhing away, piercing and swatting and smashing, that Evelyn had her aha moment.
Knew that the darkness she was witnessing in the sky was the same thing eating away at her soul.
The shadow, real and menacing, fully in the world, out of control.
Evelyn now understood what she’d been hearing in the distance. A wall of pain made up of screams and moans. Unrelenting. Smashing into her body.
She began to shiver though she was very hot.
She looked at the undulating mass of darkness in the sky, an externalization of what had been devouring her heart.
She sat down and rested her head against the tires of a parked SUV.
The shadow was relentless in taking what she treasured.
Her memories of Grandmama, vanishing. The bits of time she’d had with Trevor, fractured and murky, didn’t matter how tight she held on.
Still, she’d tried her best to keep her dancing blue hidden from the shadow.
Evelyn’s sweet soul self, what she cherished above all.
But it was hard to hide something that had become so central to her life.
She screamed as the thing bit into her silhouette with obsidian fangs. Her agony blended into the wall of terror that consumed her neighborhood, lost in the chaos.
Evelyn suddenly heard Linda’s voice, a faint echo, like when she was first summoned to the agency.
Felt Linda asking for help, touching her soul with her mind.
The spooky investigator who’d shown Evelyn who she was, who she could be in the future.
Who’d revealed her dancing blue in the first place and asked for nothing in return.
“Sis, everything for you…” Evelyn murmured as she closed her eyes and drifted away and sent the last part of herself that truly mattered to Linda Villanueva before it was devoured.