Where Monsters Hide (The Monster Within 1)

I do as I’m told, but as soon as my palms hit the stone floor, I shake out the object I’ve been hiding in my sleeve. The box of iratxoak lands on the floor and springs open alongside the forgotten sword.

Waldman, startled, stumbles back a step as the creatures crawl out of the box and spill onto the floor.

“What to do? What to do?” shriek the little voices.

I take the opportunity to kick out with my leg. I catch Waldman in the stomach and knock her to the ground.

I roll over onto my backside and point at her prostrate form.

“Stop her!” I shout at the imps, and they gleefully leap up and onto her.

“You bitch!” Waldman yells shrilly as they swarm up her body. She struggles to her feet, but as she does, one of the imps manages to knock the vial of Piers’ blood from her hands and onto the floor. It shatters, spilling the dark liquid.

The imps swarm up and over her face, attacking and temporarily blinding her. With a desperate cry, Waldman swings out her arms to grab the phylactery. Before I can get to her, she throws it down at the pool of blood congealing at our feet in some desperate attempt to escape.

“NO!” I dive for it. It can’t touch the blood. The djinn can’t be released. It would mean the death of me and everyone in the school, and that’s just the beginning.

I stretch my

fingers, reaching for the phylactery until my injured hand closes around it.

Overbalanced, I fall, skidding through Piers’ blood and the shards of glass.

The iratxoak continue to claw and bite at Waldman, who continues to scream as they attack her. I roll over, clutching my ribs and breathing a sigh of relief.

I look down at the object in my hands.

I might be covered in Piers’ blood, but the phylactery is not. The djinn will not be released into the school along with the rest of the monsters this night.

Such a small prison for a monster of such cataclysmic proportions. I brush one thumb along the carved surface. As I’m looking, mesmerized, blood drips from a cut on my face and lands on that same thumb.

For a moment, nothing happens.

But then the carved eye on the phylactery opens and everything goes dark.

There’s no sound, no light. I don’t feel the pain in my ribs or the throbbing in my hand—in fact, I feel nothing at all. I’m floating in some sort of void, and in front of me is the phylactery, its eye staring at me. Or what I assume to be me. I can’t feel my limbs, and I can’t look away from the eye to see if they’re still there.

A deep voice rumbles, seeming to come from inside my head and all around me, all at once. “Ah,” it sighs. “To be awake again.”

I’m trembling. The voice resonates through my whole body.

“Avery Black,” it says thoughtfully. “Oh, I see—daughter of Samson and Riley Black.”

“What’s happening?” My voice floats out of me, thin and frail in the thick void.

The voice chuckles. “You’ve awakened me. You’re the daughter of the humans who put me in this prison.”

I try to move my hands, my feet, anything … but I feel nothing. “Mason Dagher captured you.”

“False,” the voice booms. “It was Samson and Riley Black. Only their blood could awaken me from my imprisoned slumber.”

My mind is reeling. Mason Dagher lied. No wonder he wasn’t keen to talk about it. This means he was the person who was following them. The person my mother wrote about in her last journal entry.

“I exacted my revenge upon them, however. I killed them.”

This is it. The creature that killed my parents.

I still have a heart—I know because it begins hammering away. The voice laughs at me again.