Page 102 of Bent Out of Shade
Lost to fury and heartbreak, he slammed his hands against my chest and I stumbled backward, cold heaviness blossoming over my sternum, then my ribs, and then out through my limbs. It was like frost carried via arteries, blood vessels, and capillaries, and I gradually numbed out, white snow eating at the edge of my vision until everything telescoped to a single figure amid the white.
And the last thing I saw was a man or a monster, hunched over himself in grief, rage, or some other emotion too vast and horrible for a body to hold.
* * *
The only good thing about nightmares was that they ended. Eventually. Sometimes, though, I’d get trapped in this in-between space I couldn’t wake from. The problem had started after my parents’ murders, yet I hadn’t suffered from it in years.
Here’s how it happened. I’d wake up from a terrible dream and see my room, just like I’d left it. Except I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get out of bed. At some point, I’d realize I was still asleep and would tell myself to wake up. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes it wouldn’t, and I’d be stuck just as paralyzed and unable to do anything as I had been before, repeating the cycle over and over and screaming silently at myself to just wake up. When I did finally come to, it was always with a hard jolt. And when I finally pressed my bare feet against the ground, everything was real.
I couldn’t tell what this was.
The sandstone tile in this room was cold and hard under my back, and when I moved my arm, pain blazed down from my shoulder. It wasn’t broken but the vampire had pulled something.
Those clear sensations should have indicated I was awake, but that was impossible because the Undertaker lay crumpled a few feet away, his lifeless eyes devoid of their usual intelligence and his stupid gold braided chauffeur cap nowhere in sight.
Oh please. He loved that hat like Linus loved his security blanket. Can’t trick me, dream.
Wake up. I scrunched my eyes closed, then snapped them open again when someone nudged my leg. Sitting up with a flinch, I smiled because it was Emmett, and I was so happy to see his friendly faaaa— My breath stuttered.
Wake up. I dug my nails into my sides.
One of the golem’s arms had been snapped off above the elbow, and part of his neck up to his left ear was gone, his face misshapen.
I smacked my head. Wake up. Wake up.
“Mir.” He scrabbled at my sleeve, my name almost too garbled to understand.
“Wake up!” I screamed.
Emmett hid his head.
“No, buddy. I’m sorry.” I wrapped my arms around him, holding him tight.
He squeezed me back so fiercely that a hot blaze rumbled through my shoulders, but I didn’t pull away.
“Who did this to you?” I said. “Are you in a lot of pain?”
He buried his face in my neck like Sadie used to as a baby and said something that sounded like “Vincenzo.”
“Hold on a bit longer, I’ll get you out of here. I promise.” I released him and swallowed a couple of times past the thickness clogging my throat. “Where’s Laurent?”
Emmett gave a helpless shrug.
The wolf was a crafty fighter who could take care of himself. Emmett and I were getting out of here and we’d all find each other. I fixed that thought in my brain like a commandment etched into one of Moses’s tablets.
“Are we at the place in Southlands where the vamps were hiding?” It made sense given the blackout fabric duct taped over the windows.
Emmett nodded.
Juliette didn’t live far from here. I pulled out my cell, but there was no reception.
“Did Vincenzo kill the Under…” I swallowed.
The deceased hadn’t exactly been a saint in real life. I’d wished him dead on more than one occasion and working for a vampire had more than its share of risk, but his death, like the tragedy of this entire case, felt…
Sighing, I crouched down next to him and closed the man’s lids. Rest in peace. “Did he kill Rodrigo?”
This time Emmett shook his head.
