When the Cult of Moloch killed a precious member of my family all those years ago, it was Hunter who had saved me from becoming another death in a long history of sacrifices. Swooping in like a bat out of hell and chopping the bird-bastard’s head clean off. I’d been stunned, amazed, and grateful. He saved my life, and I vowed to serve him. In turn, he taught me everything he knew.
Thank goodness he wasn’t alive to see the utter disappointment his son had become. It was a scandal beyond rationality.
And the wayshehad reacted at the mention of it…
The youngest Ashcroft obviously resented her father, his affair, and the very public nature of it. She almost seemed resigned to mockery on her father’s behalf, though hoping to avoid it. Diverting the topic to her grandfather had caught her interest, and I’d nearly said too much if only to selfishly keep her full and undivided attention.
An irrational anger swept in, sparking my restlessness into a blooming anxiety. Nothing could explain my current predicament.
I kicked the chair across from my desk, sending it flying to the ground with a loud crash. My chest heaved, and my jaw ached from grinding my teeth as an abhorrent sense of yearning plagued me. Images of that brief encounter danced behind my eyes, teasing me. I wanted to touch, to feel, to taste. Not even the enormity of my mission helped me escape those urges.
One encounter.
One.
And already a strange fixation had imprinted itself on my flesh and bones. It was disgraceful, and I tried to refuse theAshcroft girl the space her phantom was taking up in my mind. I sat at my desk and pretended to read my work.
I located my spare bottle of whiskey and drained two glasses. It only turned my anxiety into full-blown panic.
Where was she? Was she safe? Was she home? Had the apostles already gotten to her?
And when my paltry distractions failed me and the pent-up stress boiled over, I donned my hunting gear and stole into the night. Perhaps killing demons would ease the pressure building in the back of my skull and help me forget the charming brown eyes of a wickedly clever brat.
I told myself many things that night: that I was hunting, that I was only ensuring her safety, and that I wasn’t hopelessly deluded in my morals.
They were all lies.
It wasn’tfollowingif I already knew the way there.
It didn’t take me long to reach the Ashcroft family house. The place was virtually unchanged since Hunter’s passing aside from the few upgrades the man’s son and daughter-in-law made during their visits, using it as a holiday home the past several years. But in the darkness, it was the same house I’d visited hundreds of times as a young man eager for knowledge and hungry for revenge.
Up until this point, I hadn’t returned to the Ashcroft family home since Hunter’s funeral. Even then I attended at a distance, ensuring no one saw me. I could have attended as a colleague,earning my position as a professor by then, but preferred to keep our connection off the radar entirely.
His loss had been a detrimental blow. Almost a decade of learning under his tutelage, fighting side by side, and endeavoring to take down the cult had forged a kinship between us. Old Ashcroft had been the closest thing to family I had left.
Now, I stood at a safe distance from his family home, watching for signs of life in the windows. His granddaughter was in there, walking the same halls I’d traversed before she was even born. The thought should have made me turn back, but a nagging sense of protectiveness kept me rooted at the edge of the tree line.
There.
A flicker of movement behind a gap in the curtains of a room at the back of the house. The thought of her slender frame, inviting mouth, and golden blonde hair had me gripping the hilt of the dagger on my hip. Blood coursed hot and fast under my skin, making me burn, and burn, andburn.
I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to.
So, I stayed and watched her. And watched.
Andwatched.
8
Days trickled by, blurring together with the same miserable fog clinging to the shadows. A gray veil worn over campus as if even the school mourned the end of summer. The weather only got worse as we trudged through the second week, with vicious sheets of rain pummeling the stone walls, muddied tracks scouring the tile floors, and an incessant drip drip drip echoing somewhere within the walls of the History Hall that no one could find the source of. Lights in the older buildings flickered during classes, blinking in tandem with a hair-raising electrical hum.
The worst of the maelstrom barreled in on the following Thursday morning. A day when nightmares rolled in on the wings of the storm, yowling outside my windows and rattling the glass with the tenacity of a devil fighting for entrance into a holy sanctum. And I woke in the gloom-drenched, moonlit dark with a nauseating panic clawing up the back of my throat.
The particles of the atmosphere vibrated, rousing goosebumps down my arms. Lightning struck outside, too close for comfort, casting the room in an electric glow and highlighting the sharp angles of the furniture lurking in the corners.
A dark figure loomed at the foot of my bed.
Thunder boomed, shaking the very foundation of the house and dampening the raw scream ripping up my throat. Vaulted out of the comfort of sleep and into the waiting claws of terror,I scrambled across the bed, legs tangled in the sheets and failing to drag myself to safety. Heart hammering in my chest, whooping gasps punching through my lips, I slithered free of the twisted blankets until I fell from the bed and landed with a rough thud. Shivering, cold and clammy, my back pressed to the wall as my drowsy eyes struggled to find the threat in the darkness.
