A voice saying no like it was being ripped out of a very large, very distressed man.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
My pulse spikes hard enough to make my arm throb in protest.
That wasn’t a hallucination.
I know it wasn’t, in the same way you know when you’ve been in a car accident versus when you’ve had a bad dream about one. My body remembers the heat of him, the solidity of his chest, the way the floor dropped away when he picked me up like I weighed nothing at all.
The pressure in my chest flares faintly at the memory, low and strange and deeply unwelcome.
“Nope,” I tell my own rib cage. “Absolutely not. We are not doing mystical soul bullshit right now.”
I draw in a careful breath and open my eyes again.
And then I see him.
He stands near the door on the far side of the room, tall enough that his head nearly brushes the exposed piping overhead, his broad shoulders making the already narrow space feel even smaller. He is perfectly still, hands loose at his sides, posture alert without being aggressive, like a very large, very dangerous statue someone forgot to finish animating.
He does not move when I gasp.
He does not raise his hands.
He does not step back or forward or make any sudden noises meant to reassure me.
He just watches me.
The utility light catches in his eyes and throws back a faint, metallic gleam that makes my stomach drop through the floor.
Not bright.
Not glowing.
Just… wrong.
Like reflections that don’t belong there.
My heart slams so hard against my ribs it actually hurts.
“Oh,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens.
Just a fraction.
It is somehow the most human thing about him.
Up close like this, without smoke and strobe lights and fire trying to kill both of us, he is even more unreal.
He is enormous, first of all, in the way that makes your brain stutter for a second while it recalibrates what it thinks a human male body is supposed to look like. He’s easily a foot taller than me, probably more, with a chest and shoulders built like someone took a normal man and then kept scaling him up until physics started filing objections.
His skin is dark, not in a human way, but in a metallic, almost burnished way that catches the dim light and throws it back in subtle bronze and gunmetal highlights. Faint ridges run along his forearms and up the sides of his neck, and even at rest I can see the outlines of bone spurs beneath his skin, tracing pale, unnatural arcs that look like the skeleton of some prehistoric predator trying to grow its way out of him.
He’s wearing a black shirt that’s torn and scorched in several places, the fabric stiff with dried blood.
My blood.
The sight of it makes my stomach lurch.
