Page 7 of Dare Not
We materialized in a grungy bar—mostly black except for the exposed brick walls, with sad rock songs blaring from a speaker in the corner. Viper sat at the bar in a dark leather jacket and white tee, staring into a glass of amber liquid, the light catching on the two deep scars that bisected one eye.
With his chin-length, slicked-back brown hair, and permanently disdainful expression, I struggled to describe him as ‘handsome’, but he was certainly interesting to look at. Then again, most daimons were. It was part of how they lured humans into their orbit.
“Well, this place is sad,” Bullet announced loudly. Viper didn’t so much as twitch, so I guessed Bullet was keeping us hidden from view. “You should know that Viper isn’t going to be happy to see me in his dreams. He doesn’t explicitly know it was me who haunted his sleep so badly one night that he pissed himself, but he’s probably figured it out.”
My lips twitched in spite of myself. I probably shouldn’t feel as ambivalent about Bullet’s nighttime torturing session as I did. It was very un-agathos of me.
The door to the bar opened and I nearly swallowed my tongue when my cousin walked in. It wasn’tquiteMercy. It was how Viper remembered her, which was probably why she had a far more somber, wide-eyed look on her face than she usually wore in real life. Well, before everything that had happened; maybe this was what she looked like now, how she’d looked to him.
Mercy used to smile a lot back before life had gotten so complicated.
Viper glanced up at her, clearly fighting to keep his eyes on her face. I supposed, to his credit, he hadn’t imagined my eighteen-year-old cousin in lingerie or anything like that. She was wearing fitted jeans with rips at the knees, black converse shoes, and a white V-neck tee, loosely tucked in at the waist.
Not an outfit I’d ever seen her in before, but then maybe she’d worn something like this when he’d driven her out of town? Her thick dark curls bounced around her shoulders with each step, but the most jarring thing was the burn mark on her cheek where the bullet had grazed her at the community center that day.
That scar had never featured in howIremembered Mercy, but it was prominent in Viper’s version of her.
“Viper,” Dream Mercy said, her voice uncannily accurate.
“You’re too young to be in a bar,” he replied, turning his gaze back to his glass.
“Oh shit,” Bullet laughed. “Did we walk in on the beginning of a sex dream with your cousin? I gotta be honest, Amazing Grace, I’m zapping us out of here if either of them start stripping.”
“She’s eighteen,” I hissed, trying to decide if we should unveil ourselves or leave and pretend this never happened. “How old is Viper?”
“Thirty. And feeling some kind of way about it, apparently,” Bullet replied, snorting. I wrinkled my nose as Dream Mercy climbed onto the barstool next to Viper, keeping a notable amount of distance between them.
“Unveil us before this gets even more weird,” I told Bullet, elbowing him lightly in the ribs. I didn’t know how to feel about what I was seeing—it wasn’t sexual, and he’d already informedus in person that they weren’t soul bonds, but there was a strange undercurrent of something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Longing, perhaps?
The explanation that I was most comfortable with was that Viper felt some sense of kinship with Mercy. It was probably wishful thinking.
Viper’s head shot up as Bullet revealed our presence, Dream Mercy flickering into nothingness. The guilty look on his face morphed into a fierce scowl. “Get the fuck out of my brain, Bullet. Take your agathos with you.”
“Jealous?” Bullet taunted. “Looks like you were just dreaming about having an agathos of your own.”
Viper’s knuckles turned white where he was gripping the glass. “And spend my days fucking some pillow princess through a hole in a sheet? Sharing her with a bunch of other dudes? Nah, I’m good.”
I sucked in a shocked, slightly insulted breath, butBullet’s charming smile didn’t falter for a second. “I’m going to trap you in a nightmare so terrible you’ll be too scared to ever fall asleep again. Though I suppose I could go a little easier on you if you tell us something useful about Mercy’s whereabouts—who she’s with, what she’s doing, that sort of thing. Something that’ll ease my sweet, sexy-as-fuck agathos’ mind.”
“I don’t know anything,” Viper gritted out.
“Unfortunate,” Bullet replied, taking a step backward and dragging me along with him. “I wonder if you’re still scared of spiders the size of buses trying to eat you…”
Surely, there wasn’t any being on earth who wasn’t afraid ofthat?
“Don’t be an asshole, Bullet. I already told you that I made a deal with her,” Viper snapped. “I can’t tell you where she’s gone or anything she shared with me.”
“I know how deals work, Viper, though don’t pretend like you have a perfect track record at upholding your end of the agreement. You can’t tell us what you knewthen, but you can tell us what you’ve learnedsince.”
Viper scoffed. “You’re overestimating my abilities. The agathos she’s with runs a tight ship.”
Harbor? That was who Mercy had mentioned being with. Felix Lyon’s brother who’d been sent on an outreach trip to Russia when he’d never found his soul bond, but had somehow ended up in Maine.
“All I can tell you is that she’s still where I left her, and that Dice is still looking for her, but he’s completely off-track. That’s all I know, okay?”
“Boo, you’re no fun,” Bullet sighed. “Enjoy the spiders, fuckface.”
