Chapter 16
I gasped for breath as I rushed out of the darkness, my lungs working like bellows. I lost my footing as I came back to reality, stumbling and sprawling face first into the asphalt. The stinging pain in my arms told me I had skinned them. I sputtered out spit and bits of gravel.
Asphalt. Gravel. The street. I forced my eyes open, straining against the light of lampposts. I had made it outside, alive. My heart clenched as I saw a pair of shoes walk towards, then past me.
“Fucking drunk,” the man said. “Pathetic.”
He kept walking. I was no longer so selective about how people were treating me that night, nor did I really have the strength to say or do anything back. My standards and tolerance had plunged. As long as someone wasn’t out to kill me, they were totally okay in my book.
Then I remembered that I still needed to put as much distance as I could between myself and the Lorica. I was still half a block away, as far as I could tell, at the intersection across the street. I pushed myself to my feet, groaning at the heaviness in my limbs. Fuck. I didn’t know that stepping between places I couldn’t see would take so much out of me.
My vision was still blurry, and even making it onto the sidewalk was a struggle. I didn’t relish the idea of stepping through walls again, but neither did I like the idea of being trapped in the Lorica with whatever horrible shenanigans they had planned for me.
I dragged myself across the street, then down one block, then another. My breath was coming back to me in spurts, but it came in shivers. It was far colder in the Dark Room, and that chill hadn’t left my body, haunting my bones with frosted fingers. And in my hurry I’d forgotten to grab a jacket.
No more stepping for a while, that much I knew. I was feeling sick, too, but maybe that was because of the massive dinner I shoveled into my body. But I tried not be so hard on myself. Who knew I was going to be going on the run so soon after anyway?
Yeah, yeah. I know. The entire evening had been a string of terrible decisions, one after the other, but what choice did I really have? I still couldn’t understand why the Lorica would want to hide the dagger’s existence from me. All I could think was that it made them complicit somehow. I didn’t know where else to turn, what else to do, so I made yet another stupid decision for the evening. I went to see my father.
Dad was home. The light in the dining room was on, bright enough for me to see that he was only just picking his way through yet another frozen dinner, far more interested in cracking open the first of the six-pack he’d just pulled out of the fridge.
The tree’s trunk felt cool against my back, and I rubbed my elbows in a desperate bid to find some warmth. It was only just working. It would have been better if I didn’t have my back up against the tree, I suppose, but I just felt a need to hug the shadows. Just in case.
It was comforting, almost, just watching dad from out in the yard. And yeah, maybe Thea tried to tell me that it wasn’t the best thing for me to indulge in, but by that point I wasn’t sure I trusted her to know what was best for me anymore.
The bushes by my feet rustled. I frowned, stamping at the ground. Without even having to check I knew that the rats had reached all the way out here, too. When the hell were they going to stop behaving so erratically? Who even knew there were so many rats in the cit
y?
I gazed back at the window and sighed. Not for the first time I wondered how it might have panned out if I stepped into the living room, or even knocked on the front door. Not for the first time I ran through the many expressions I would see on my father’s face when he saw me. All of them involved some mix of terror and revulsion. The dead don’t just come back.
The bushes rustled much harder this time. I jumped away, startled, my arms still folded across my chest. Out of the foliage stepped evidence that maybe, just maybe, the dead do return.
It was the man from the other night, the one who chased me down. Correction: it was the vampire, and that entire half of his face that had been charred by sunlight was perfect again, healed to be as handsome and pallid as the uninjured half. I stumbled away, deathly afraid of the reality that I didn’t have it in me to escape through the shadows, not so soon after that exertion at the Lorica.
The man raised a hand, almost dismissively, half a greeting, and half reassurance. “Relax. I’m not here to kill you. Not tonight, at least.”
I turned from him to the window, and back. Fuck. Now he knew where dad lived. Great job, Dustin. I’d led the vampire right to him.
“Honestly,” the vampire said. “We couldn’t care less about him. It’s you we want.”
There was a casual tone to his banter that was somehow close enough to convincing me that he was telling the truth. I kept my hands to myself and cautiously leaned back against the tree, but this time I made a mental note of the fact that Bastion’s knife in my pocket could very well be used as a stake, in case of emergency.
I scoffed. “Who is ‘we?’ Don’t tell me you’re working for the Lorica, too.”
As if. The Lorica might have considered itself the authority on the arcane underground and the Valero that lived behind the Veil, but it didn’t seem to have much of an equal opportunity hiring policy when it came to non-humans.
Hell, I didn’t even know they existed until a few days ago. Again I wondered why Thea and the others hadn’t bothered to brief me about something so basic. They didn’t want to overwhelm me with too much information, Prudence said. Hah. A likely story. What else were they hiding from me?
But the vampire scoffed in return. “You and your precious Lorica. No. My boss is different. Better, I’d say, but that’s all subjective. He just wants to have a word with you is all.”
“The Black Hand.”
The vampire cocked an eyebrow. “The black what now? What the hell are you talking about?”
I blinked. It was only natural for him to deny it. “Whoever this is you’re working for. They just want to talk. That’s it?”
“Yup. Says that he needs to meet you for himself. That you’re special.” The vampire said “special” with the kind of sneer reserved for when you discovered a worm in your salad by finding half of it still wriggling on your fork. “Can’t imagine why. Says you have gifts he could find useful.”