Prologue
Brom
One year ago
The creature stalks toward me.
Darkness coming out from darkness.
He’s inside my head, inside my nightmare.
He’s stepping out of my mind and into the hall.
The hall outside the room.
Malevolence pours under the doorway, flowing toward me like oil.
The creature forms here.
Tall, broad-shouldered, cloaked in night.
Missing a head.
He’s holding something in his hand behind his back.
Something that drips onto the floor.
I see a hint of long blond hair hanging.
The color of cornsilk.
I know what it is.
I open my mouth to scream.
The headless man brings the object forward.
It’s Kat’s severed head, her blue eyes frozen in terror.
“Let me inside,” the man says in a deeply inhuman voice that sinks into the marrow of my bones.“Let me inside and I’ll put her head back on.”
I sit straight up and scream.It echoes in the room and for a moment I don’t remember where I am.
Then someone sits up next to me.A man.
He puts his arm around me, his skin cool against my burning body, and gives me a squeeze.
“It’s a nightmare, Abe,” he says in his low, rich voice.“You’re all right.”
I try to breathe, my lungs aching, and he runs his palm up and down my arm, soothing me.
“It’s all right,” he says again, resting his chin on my shoulder.“There’s nothing to fear.”
But there’s so much to fear.
All I feel is fear.
I can’t stop running from it and it can’t stop coming for me.
