Anxiety, bad food choices—you name it, everyone had nightmares about nasty doors and the bad things that happened when you opened them.Everyone got déjà vu from nighttime brain-walks; Liv’s vivid, quasi-lucid ones were just a sign she had an active imagination and a good memory.
Most days, she had herself convinced there was nothing wrong with her sanity or her sleep.But kidnapping had a way of making you doubt things, or so she’d discovered.
If she just ran fast enough, she’d escape this nightmare too.It was uncannily like one which had tormented her ever since college—a black night, her feet sodden-slapping, her breath tearing in her throat…
…and a sudden looming bulk of something utterlywrongexploding from the ground like a mushroom after hard rain.
Liv skidded, saved from falling onto her ass only by a wrenching sideways leap nearly throwing her into tangled, thorny vines alongside the single-lane road.The thing hulked its shoulders and thrust its ungainly head forward, crimson eyes dripping with nasty rheum.
A pointless gurgling scream burst from her throat as the wind of the thing’s claws passing over her head ruffled tangled, dirty hair.That faint breeze convinced her the thing was real, not just a fevered hallucination.She scrabbled back crabwise, erasing skin on her palms, her heels thumping uselessly as the thing loomed over her.Its next strike wouldn’t miss; she knew it as surely as she knew her own name and her own teeth as her tongue was caught between them.
Liv dropped flat on her back.A metallic tang of blood coated her abused tongue, filled her throat; the attacking thing was darkness itself, its stench burrowing into her nose.
“Stay down!” An indistinct shape hurtled past, twin bright metal gleams disappearing as they were driven into the monster’s hide.It roared, the blast stripping her hair back and slathering her bare skin with a reek so foul she knew, miserably, she wouldn’t feel clean again for a long, long while.
Maybe forever.
A pale, leprous light bloomed, running wetly along the beast’s every muscled curve.Its chest was too big for its tiny back legs, but the thing still drew itself up, and up, andupin a horribly liquid movement.One ungainly arm flashed out, but the dark-haired guy dropped under the strike with quick blurring grace.He uncoiled, driving forward, and the metal glitters were curved, wicked-looking knives.They slashed, and the thing howled, striking out again.
Get up.Run, while it’s occupied.Come on, Liv.You know how this goes.
And that was the whole problem, wasn’t it?She did indeed know how it went, because she’d dreamed this same thing over and over.The thing would come for her, batting a dancing, spinning gleam out of the way, and its maw would yawn wide, inward-pointing rows of sharp serrated teeth dripping with that sticky red fluid, then the jaws would snap shut with her in them, and?—
“Stay down!” he yelled again, as if he could hear her thinking about moving, and one of his knives sank to the crossguard in the thing’s side.It threw its head back and howled, its hide running with that pale diseased light; Erik yanked the blade free and coiled himself.He leapt, and there must have been a trampoline or some Superman-powered muscles in his legs because he went higher than he had any right to, twisting to avoid another swipe of those terrible glassy claws.
The thing howled once more, but one boot hit its shoulder, his other knee jammed under its chin, and he drove both daggers into its glowing, murderous eyes with a short, grunting sound of effort.
Liv gulped back another scream, scrambling again with stinging hands and scooting back on her bottom.Cold dampness worked through her jeans; she was going to have a huge soaked patch on her ass but that was unimportant.
The monster dropped like a pile of insensate meat, with a cartoonishthudthat might have been funny if it hadn’t smelled so ungodly awful.Liv’s mouth worked aimlessly as she kept scrambling, trying desperately to retreat and not managing it very well.
Erik turned, and that pale light was all over him.His eyes were dark but still burned with starlike blue glitters, live coals set in a thin-lipped face, as he launched himself straight at her.
Good Prey
Of courseit couldn’t be simple, or easy.She was doing great, she was staying down just like he told her instead of rabbit-running, but now it was apparent Father’s whittling down of the shadowbeasts drawn to the small flame of a potential-triggered Dreamer hadn’t been quite as successful as any of them hoped.
The big beast was bad enough, but it was the mass of slithering to the left which concerned Erik most.
He unfolded over her in a leap, gaining what speed he could, and hit the nest of writhing, rearing tentacles with a crunch that would have snapped every bone in a normal man’s body.Seeing thecthulhuth’s heart was easy—all the rubbery lines led back to a common point.
Stabbing said nexus, however, was another story.It was a mercy the thing quickly lost interest in a Dreamer when a bigger threat appeared, and that it was already wounded.
It was a further mercy that a powerful, invisible pulse from their potential dizzied it, and Erik was able to slide both knives in to their hilts, one foot flicking up to knock a tentacle aside that might otherwise curl too close to her further down the line.Tearing the creature’s heartknot free with a half-grunting sound of effort, he landed, deceleration slamming through every bone, and whirled to check.
Nothing.Just trees, thorny vines laced with invisible protections and all-too-visible, smoking ichor drenching the broad grey back of the driveway.
Andher, half-sprawled on cold concrete, her hair a wild mass and her eyes big as a frightened child’s.Deadly pale, fever spots high on her cheeks, their newliraivibrated with terror, a heady exhalation of musk and copper scraping pleasantly across his nerves.The mark in his wrist burned, gulping at fresh fuel, sensing the fragility of good prey.
Just like the things that still lurked in the dark, ready and waiting.He was one of them, even if the Flame had freed him of the Mad God’s service, and it wouldn’t do to forget the fact.
So he just stood, boots solidly placed, ready for the next attack.The remainder of the beasts would be cautious now, circling.
And the girl, her potential awake and much more active even if she hadn’t yet been been scoured clean by the Flame, would feel them.
A normal person’s habit of rationalization was strong enough to overcome even direct proof, and even though potentials could sense far more than the average headblind nine-to-fiver, they still had the very human habit of ignoring what they didn’t want to see.Something unignorable was called for, just to drive home the fact that outside was dangerous and the Sons meant protection.
She made a tiny, sobbing noise.Ichor dripped from Erik’s blades.He hadn’t needed anything other than the knives, thank the Dreamers, and the more evidence he left right in front of her face, clearly visible in the corpselight he held steady, the better.
