Page 68 of Villains Never Die

“Come in,” Rook said. “Fuck, you look terrible. What happened?”

I dropped into the first chair I saw and rubbed my eyes. “Nasty killing spell. Effective, but exhausting.”

“Do you want to explain why you’re murdering people in my back alley?” He passed me a bottle of water and peered out the window on one wall that overlooked the cage. His eyes snapped back to me.

“He suspected you were a ‘faggot,’ and slurs are so uncouth.”

Rook scrubbed both hands over his face. “People love me. People hate me. People want me dead. You know how this works. You can’t just kill everyone who suspects I’m gay or talks shit about me.”

“Do you want to test that theory?”

I realized my fists were clenched in my lap, and my fingers tingled when I released them.

“You look half dead yourself. Can you make it downstairs?”

“I’ll call my driver to come get me.” I stood and swayed.

“Don’t worry about it.” He took a key off a nail on the wall and pressed it into my palm. “To the left of the room I took you to before, there is a black door. This will unlock it. There’s a bed inside. Sometimes fights run late and I don’t make it home after work. Go lie down and I’ll be in after we wrap up for the night.”

My stomach turned like I might vomit, and I nodded, clutching the key.

***

The room was exactly as Rook had described it and nothing more—four white walls and a queen-sized bed. I melted intothe mattress without even climbing under the sheets, completely spent.

It might have been an hour or the whole night before I woke to Rook crawling into bed with me and curling himself around my back.

“How are you feeling?” he murmured against my shoulder.

“Like that corpse I left in the alley.”

“What the hell did you do to him? He looked like you drained the life out of him.”

“Other way around,” I said. “I pushed death into him.”

“That sounds like some dark shit,” he said on an enormous exhale.

“It’s not mine,” I mumbled. “That’s why it takes so much energy to use it. I don’t think I’m supposed to have it.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but whatever this is with you, you can’t keep carrying it alone.” His hand slid past my ribs to my stomach, where his fingers stretched and pulled me closer. “What is the point of all this if you won’t let me get close to you?”

What was the point? We still hadn’t named the thing between us. Rook described it as an addiction—he couldn’t quit me—and I thought that might be something much more dangerous than dark magic. But Rook’s hold over me was an invasion, a conquering, an epic defeat of my attempts to keep him at a distance.

So I let him destroy the last wall I had standing.

“My mother was human. My father used to say she was the loveliest human in London. He adored her.

“She was murdered in front of me when I was ten. It was completely mundane—a burglary gone wrong. My father wasn’t home, and I wasn’t strong enough to save her. She bled out before the ambulance even arrived, and when she took her last breath, a woman appeared.”

A shiver ran through Rook, like he already felt the ominous part coming.

“She was beautiful—every part of her was the color of night. Her skin. Her hair. Her clothes. She was like a shadow come to life, except her eyes that burned like two flames. I wasn’t frightened of her. If anything, her presence was soothing, but there was something final about her, like a door closing.”

“Death?” Rook asked.

“Yes, and I begged her for my mother’s life, but she said it was too late. I was a weeping child covered in my mother’s blood. She took pity on me and gave me a gift—thirteen lives for the one she wouldn’t spare. She never gave me the chance to refuse it. She was gone, and so was my mum. The voices—the spirits trapped on this side—started soon after that. I learned later that I could touch others with death.

“But I never forgave her for what she took from me. I want revenge. That’s what I’ve traveled the world looking for since I was eighteen. I’m going to kill her, and I’m close.”