“I’m so scared I’ll never be able to control this,” I whisper in defeat.
The muscles in Niklaus’s jaw tighten, but he doesn’t turn around to look at me. It’s as if he’s searching the land he will own one day for answers. Wondering how he could have been so wrong about Aurick Demechnef.
“You know, Uncle Niles was only the way he was because of the Mind Phantom experiments your birth father issued on—”
“Stop. Talking.”
Niklaus turns his head slowly to peer down at me with bloodshot eyes.
I avert my gaze back down to my hands, nodding at his request.
“Just work harder on getting us out of…” Niklaus trails off, cranking his neck forward to look out of the window, narrowing his eyes in small slits to get a better look.
“What is it?”
Niklaus shushes me with a hand in the air. He tilts his head and glances down at me in surprise.
“There’s no fucking way,” he utters.
Before I can respond, the shift in the air is faint. So faint in fact, I almost miss it. The minuscule added pressure behind my eyes. My fingertips are numb. And there is a weight leaning on my lungs, like breathing in old dust from another century.
“What?!” I groan and huff through the sharp bursts of pain, pulling myself up to face the window with him. “Oh.”
I instantly shudder at the man standing in the center of the garden, boots sinking in mud, and hands clasped together below his waist.
It takes me a heartbeat to connect this figure with the one who stood among the carnage in our ambush with the Vexamen Breed back in the woods.
Dressed in a funeral’s finest—coal pinstripes, polished shoes, and a bowler hat shadowing that terrifying display of paint on his face. It’s a dirty, off-white, gray, and yellow painted into a skeletal face. And how could I forget those eyes? Black and precise, stretching out to haunt me, like relics behind a protective sheet of glass.
“That’s the man behind the last attack,” I say quietly.
Niklaus doesn’t respond.
“How could he have possibly followed us here? We traveled through time…” I add.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s not like we moved from one forest to another on foot. We were yanked through the fabric of time and thrown into another year altogether.
The man whistles a tune that sounds like an old nursery rhyme, and he just…stares at us.
“I’m going to talk to him,” Niklaus finally says.
“Wait.” I tug at his wrist. “Let’s think about this for a second.”
“Mmm, yes, okay. Let’s think. This disturbing skinny man dressed like a gravedigger or dead funeral director might have been following us through time.Time. But maybe we should try and sneak out and hope he isn’t capable of following us from this greenhouse to the main street. Have we thought it through?”
I drop my head. “Proceed.”
Niklaus studies my beaten, swollen, and bruised face once before offering a curt nod. He steps around me, brushing his shoulder against mine as his determined footsteps stomp through the greenhouse gravel.
The stranger is hard to look at in the glow of the sunrise. The paint crusted around the edges of his chin and jaw. The stringy mousy-brown hair hanging from around his bowler hat. The way his coat flutters though there isn’t any wind.
He’s an eerie painting no one remembers hanging.
“Why’re you following us?” Niklaus asks calmly, though his stomping footsteps through the wet grass say otherwise. They begin to drag the closer we get.
And I see why. There’s a faint warmth building at the base of my throat now, the kind that precedes a fever. Does he feel that too? It’s aberrant. Invasive. A slow creeping, foreign germ clawing into my pores.
The man tilts his head, blinking quickly, studying us like an equation gone wrong. Like our very existence disturbs the rules he lives by.
