Chapter XIX #3
Claws sliced the flesh of Vic’s calf as the creature wrenched her toward it. Vic’s hand shot out to grab the wall, grab the bookcase, grab anything. But her fingers closed around empty air, and the beast started to drag itself upward along her body, toward her face.
Vic screamed.
Two lungfuls of air tore their way out of her body with force.
It was a sound Vic had never heard before. Primal, trapped deep inside on the off chance it might one day become necessary. In the back of her muddled brain, Vic realized she had never needed that scream before.
Behind her, something hit the outside of the door like a battering ram.
Vic thrashed around, trying to push the thing off her, trying to pull herself out from under it. She kicked out blindly, hitting nothing.
Writhing on the floor, Vic looked around her mother’s home in a desperate hunt for something that could save her. She thought of the bind, tried to pull on it, tried to force magic out of it and into the monster, but no relief came.
She pushed both her hands into the creature’s face. Keep its mouth away from hers, that was the last defense, the animal impulse. Don’t let it get its tongue inside.
But it was stronger than Vic, and her arms wobbled against the pressure of its body bearing down on her.
Vic locked her elbows, but it would break her arms before it gave up.
It gnashed thick teeth at her, and Vic held tight to the bottom of its jaw.
Saliva, slimy and putrescent, fell onto her hand as she shoved its face away from hers.
Behind her, BANG BANG, as something heavy hit the door.
Someone was trying to get inside. Someone who could help her.
If only she could open the door.
Keeping her arms locked tight, Vic twisted her head back until she could see the door, and she was begging her mind to focus, to clear enough for her to see the threads again.
And by some miracle she made them out, first thin in the darkness, then clear as day.
And with her mind she reached out and pulled one away, just as the creature managed to shove one of her arms to the side.
Her eyes were on the monster again as it bent toward her face.
Vic almost didn’t notice the change in the air.
But she heard the door slam open behind her.
On the edge of her vision, a shadow shot into the apartment. It pitched forward in a blink, gathering energy as it hurtled across the room on a silent wind.
The beast noticed the movement an instant after Vic did. It reared back, but not fast enough.
The shadow was upon it.
Vic pulled her legs away as the darkness landed in front of her and began to change.
First, the shadows coalesced into the form it wore last time she’d seen it, brutal and menacing, a predator carved out of darkness.
But once there, it continued to clarify and combine.
The shape re-formed and refined until it resembled something vaguely human.
Except it was much too large to be human.
Shadows danced around a core of solid flesh that took the rigid shape of a man in black, darkness clinging to his body like clouds around an angry planet.
The shadows took the unmistakable form of the Chief Sentinel.
Xan did not look back at Vic as he advanced on the legless creature. The beast on the floor scanned the room the way Vic had, frantic for an escape. But it, too, found no refuge in the long-abandoned apartment.
As Xan stalked toward it, the creature decided to go on the offensive.
With strong hands on the floor, it propelled itself toward Xan’s face, and Vic gasped. It was going to do to Xan what it had tried to do to her.
But Xan murmured in the Universal Language, and a wooden staff materialized in his hands. Not a staff, Vic realized. A stake the length of a spear. And Vic remembered what she had forgotten in her panic. The only way to kill this creature: an ash-dipped stake crafted from the wood of a casket.
As the Orcan leaped at him, Xan thrust forward with practiced precision.
The spear pierced the creature’s body, entering the base of its sternum and tearing through the exposed innards there.
The beast shrieked. The sound, high and loud, drilled into Vic’s brain.
Her head throbbed. The thing’s flesh withered.
The gray skin pulled in on itself and convulsed.
For a moment, the body twitched, until it collapsed.
It hung limp from the spear still clutched in Xan’s hands.
He threw it aside with a grunt of disgust. The body smacked the wall and slid to the floor.
With his back to Vic, Xan lowered his head as if in prayer, and his shoulders rose with long, slow breaths. His hands compressed into fists before splaying out, like he was fighting the urge to hit something.
Finally, he faced Vic. He crouched in front of her, and their eyes locked.
Pale blue eyes like shards of broken glass, Vic remembered. Though now she imagined them as mirrors. She could see herself as Xan saw her. Bloody, broken, and scared. Curled on the floor like a frightened kid.
Xan had saved her life.
Her pulse beat fast beneath her ragged breathing, and Vic gave up hope of controlling it.
She didn’t want Xan to see her panicked and taken apart.
But she couldn’t tell him to leave, or send for someone else to help her, or get up of her own power.
She was paralyzed by fear and still breathing heavily.
Vic couldn’t fix any of it, so she stared into those cold blue mirrors and hoped he didn’t see how frightened she was—of him, of this world, of the corpse a hair’s breadth from her feet.
Vic realized that the face around those eyes was angry.
His brows met firm around a frown. His skin was speckled with the creature’s blood.
Fitting that he should be covered in gore again, when Vic had first met him in the same state.
Same as he had that first night, Xan watched Vic like he wanted to kill her himself.
At the end of an evening such as this, Vic would not have been terribly shocked if he tried.
It rattled Vic that he could be angry with her for getting attacked.
She was a liability, after all. He’d said so himself.
A bomb set off inside the careful walls of his castle.
Any disruption, especially a disruption involving Vic, must be her fault.
The thought angered her, and anger pulled her through fear.
The adrenaline faded from her limbs and left a chill behind.
In its absence came pain. Her arm hurt, her head hurt, her ass hurt, her shoulder, her calf—everything hurt.
“It’s not my fault,” Vic said in a shaking voice. “You can’t be mad at me for this. It’s not fair.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped, but Xan said nothing.
“You don’t get to be angry.”
“Oh, I’m angry,” Xan said. He shot a hostile look at the dead Orcan on the floor, and its lifeless body twitched like he’d smacked it. “I’m fucking furious.”
“You’re the Chief goddamn Sentinel,” Vic said, biting out her words. “It’s your job to guard the castle, to stop shit like this from happening.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Shadows jumped around him like cast-off candlelight. Vic wondered if he did it on purpose, or if the shadows danced in an unconscious display of agitation.
Vic leaned away from him.
“Why the fuck would you—” Xan cut himself off and rubbed his temple. “Where are you hurt?”
Vic narrowed her eyes at him. Xan was so far beyond losing his cool; she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
The shadows roamed over Vic like they were looking for injuries.
She couldn’t feel them as they grazed her skin, but it felt intimate all the same. Vic assumed, after what she’d seen tonight, that they were a part of him. Xan’s gaze lingered on the wounds on her upper arm, the worst of her injuries.
“Let me see.” He reached for her arm, and Vic forced herself to relax as he held her left arm aloft and peeled her sweater back. Xan inhaled through his teeth as he examined the torn flesh there.
Four claw marks were deep, almost to the bone and bleeding heavily. Her muscles and nerves must have been torn, too, because Vic couldn’t make a fist with her left hand. That was bad.
Vic looked away as she caught a glimpse of yellow she knew was fat. She refused to pass out.
Xan pulled a short knife from his waist and, fast as a flash, sliced the outside of his right forearm. Vic gasped. She stared in horror at the swell of bright blood that flowed from Xan’s arm into the carpet below, droplets loud enough to hear.
But he wasn’t paying attention to her. His eyes were on Vic’s arm with such intense focus that Vic couldn’t help following his gaze, though she didn’t want to see the wounds again.
But the flesh was knitting itself together, an unseen force pulling skin and muscle back into place like invisible stitches.
Vic stared, agog, as she realized what Xan was doing.
It took only a few seconds, and it wasn’t perfect, healed skin that replaced the deep cuts. Rather, it looked as though she’d suffered a much less severe wound, more a scratch than a gouge.
“What the—”
Xan plucked her off the floor, and she groaned as the room swirled around her. He carried her to the exit.
It took a second for Vic to register her irritation at being jostled and at just how easy it seemed for him to lift her. Vic was by no means a small woman, and she had never before had this particular experience.
She made a weak attempt to free herself, and Xan clutched her tighter against his body.
Vic adjusted herself so the wound on her hip wasn’t bouncing off of Xan’s stomach. She thought she heard him grunt.
The door slammed behind them with enough force to knock a painting off the wall.
The clamor of the aged frame breaking against the floor echoed through the empty hallway as Xan stalked away from it and up a staircase.
Vic bobbed with each step, but she did not put her arms around his neck to steady herself.
She crossed them in front of her chest and ignored how this irritated the partially healed lacerations on her arm.
Vic stared at the hard set of Xan’s face as he marched down another hallway. Deep purple hollows had bloomed under his eyes. He looked exhausted, more worn out than she would have thought possible.
“It was you this whole time,” Vic said. “I saw you. In the hallways at night, on the grounds coming toward the castle.” She ran through all her memories of the shadowed thing she now knew was a human man. She’d seen Xan, again and again, beginning her first night here.
Her mouth fell open at an appalling realization.
“You were in my room!” Vic cried. The night she’d dreamed of Aren Mann, she’d known there was someone in her room. Someone in the corner, hidden in the shadows. “Were you watching me sleep?”
Vic would have sworn he looked sheepish, but it was gone in a flash, and he returned his gaze forward. Xan said nothing, and Vic stewed.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered, her anger coming to the fore. “You were spying on me. You’ve been watching me for weeks.”
Then Vic recognized a set of double doors right as Xan hammered a kick against them, jostling her.
The doors swung inward of their own volition, and Max stood up from behind his desk at Xan’s unceremonious entrance to his office.
Surprise turned to concern when Max saw Vic bloodied and clutching her arm.
Without a word, Xan dropped Vic onto the couch in a pile. Vic shot Xan an indignant look as she righted herself, but he had already turned away from her.
Xan marched back out the doors, and they slammed behind him.