CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Myra
I stumbled back from whatever Yael had become as he fought to control himself, and then I did as he said; I ran through the streets, headed for my apartment.
The exterior door nearly ripped from the hinges as I threw it open and stormed up the steps.
My foot fell through the wood of the last riser, and I crashed down on the landing at an awkward angle.
After I fought to get my leg free, I dragged myself into my apartment, slammed the door, and locked myself in.
Staring at the peeling black paint of the door, I crab-walked across the room until the mattress bumped my back, and I crawled up onto it, not stopping until I hit the headboard.
Then I waited, terror coursing through my veins.
I’d witnessed violence in my lifetime—the bulk of it since I’d arrived in the Devil’s Playground—but what I’d just seen?
The surgical evisceration of three other beings without so much as blinking? That was something else entirely.
Footfalls sounded in the stairway beyond the wall, and I held my breath as they grew louder, until the steady, melodic rhythm stopped just outside my door.
I didn’t understand what that shadowy being was, but I was certain it wasn’t Yael—not wholly, at least—and I cursed myself for not having had Ravi put additional wards on the place after Yael’s suggestion.
I had to hope that whatever had been put in place the day I moved in could keep him at bay.
But no sooner had I thought that than wisps of black coiled under the door, reaching into the room like outstretched hands, headed directly for me.
I pressed flat against the wall, fear snaking its way up my throat and rendering me silent as the door flew open and night engulfed my apartment.
One look at that menacing stare had me jumping off the bed just in time to avoid the smoky tendrils reaching for me. Careful to keep my eyes trained on him, I sidestepped toward the windows, unsure what my next move would be.
“What do you want?” I managed to ask as I continued through the darkness swallowing the periphery of the room.
His black eyes raked over my body from head to toe and back again.
“I haven’t decided yet.” He drifted through the door, and I hopped onto the windowsill, lifting the only functional pane.
“You’re afraid of me…” he said, cocking his head in a movement that seemed alien as he floated deeper into the room.
“Who are you?” I asked, the question lodging in my throat.
Something like a smile spread across his face. “Who do you think I am?”
“Not Yael,” I said with a measure of confidence I didn't feel. “Where is he? What did you do to him?”
The terror I’d barely swallowed down came flying back the moment he really smiled. “‘Do to him’?”
“I want to talk to Yael.”
Hands clasped behind his back, he leaned toward me.
“You are… in a sense.” His eerie words echoed through my mind, and I crouched in the open window, wondering if I could survive the multi-story fall to escape him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he gazed out the dirty pane to the street below before returning that intense stare to me. “That seems ill advised.”
“It feels like a pretty solid plan at the moment.”
“I’m sure it does,” he said as he lingered in the air a few feet away. “You really would risk everything to get away from me…even after I saved you?”
“Why did you?” I asked, gripping the sill to keep my balance while I awaited his answer.
Those piercing, jet-black eyes narrowed as his brow furrowed. “I thought that was rather self-evident.”
“Because Yael needs me alive so I can find his sister—”
“My sister,” he said as he floated closer still. “Yes, that is technically true, and yes, that may be the primary reason. But I think we both know my efforts have gone far beyond that, haven’t they, Myra?”
I opened my mouth to argue, then realized there was truth to what he’d said.
Somewhere in the midst of disdaining Yael for abandoning the crew at the bar, despising how he’d leveraged me into a deal, and generally distrusting him from the day we met, I hadn’t seen that he really had done far more than just keep me alive.
He’d helped me, healed me—even protected me.
And when I’d exploded on him in the kitchen of The Riff Raff, there had been a devastation in his eyes that I couldn’t deny.
He’d looked genuinely wounded; not like someone merely inconvenienced by the temporary loss of his magical divining rod.
A revelation I had no intention of sharing with this twisted version of Yael lingering before me. “You mean his efforts,” I said, shifting my weight as I squatted in the window.
Out of the darkness obscuring the perimeter of the room shot a black appendage that looked like one of Finn’s tentacles, and I recoiled reflexively.
My torso fell through the open window to escape it, but the shadows controlled by the thing-parading-around-as-Yael wrapped around me and hauled me back inside.
Holding me captive, he leaned in close with that midnight stare as his finger grazed my cheek.
“You truly are a reckless thing,” he muttered under his breath as his sharp eyes wandered over my face.
With him so close, I placed my hand on his arm gently and took a deep breath to steady my nerves and my magic.
“Give me Yael back,” I whispered, careful to control how much power I put into that command.
Given how pushing my glitchy magic too hard had backfired, I didn’t want to harm Yael by being overzealous.
But I also didn’t want to spend one more minute with this being that Yael himself had told me to run from.
His eyes went wide for a moment as though it were working, but then narrowed as his head snapped toward the street below.
“This place is no longer safe,” he said, pulling me close against his body.
“Save your childish demands for when we are.” Before I could ask any questions, the exterior door to the building crashed open and angry voices carried up the stairwell to my apartment; voices of others coming for me, no doubt.
“Better the devil you know,” he whispered in my ear as he called his shadows in around us like a black abyss.
They grew and wound around us until they choked off everything in sight.
There was no sound, no sense of where I was, but somehow, I knew we were moving.
That time and space were not as they should be.
And when we stopped, and the cyclone of shadow dissipated, I found myself standing face to face with the black-eyed assassin in a clinically white living room I did not recognize.
“You were saying?”
Anger trumping caution, I channeled every ounce of my magic into my voice as my fingertips dug into his arm, hoping upon hope that the Siren’s Song would work on him, though it had failed on Yael before. “Give. Him. Back!”
Again, he looked at me with keen curiosity, but this time it didn’t just fade away.
Instead, it slowly morphed to disbelief, then anger all his own as his obsidian irises gave way to forest green under the weight of my magic.
His body went limp, and my arms caught him around his torso, sending us to the floor in a twisted pile.
I pushed up so I could see his face—see if Yael really was back—and found sleepy eyes looking up at me.
“There are easier ways to get a guy to take you to his apartment, little mermaid.”
“Believe me,” I said as I climbed off him as elegantly as possible, “that wasn’t by choice.”
Whatever amusement he’d mustered in his exhausted state soon disappeared. With more effort than it should have taken, he sat up and looped his arms around his bent knees, letting his head rest against them. “I know. I’m sorry about that.” Silence. “Are you all right?”
My hand drifted to my throat where the druid’s whip had bitten into my skin. “A little bloody, but it could have been worse.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He lifted his head enough to look me in the eyes, and what I saw staring back at me sent a stabbing sensation through my chest. Pain… so much pain in their endless depths. Pain I didn’t understand but suddenly wanted to erase with every fiber of my being.
“I’m fine, I promise… nothing happened.” Though I’d told him what he needed to hear, there was no relief to be found in his forlorn expression. “Yael,” I said softly, inching nearer, “what was that?”
He turned away from me, unable to hold my beseeching gaze, and worked hard to get himself to his feet.
“A mistake, love. One I never should have made...” With no further explanation, he got up and walked away, headed for a door on the far side of the room.
He disappeared inside and closed it, shutting me out as questions and uncertainties swirled through my mind like the dark shadows that had just consumed him.