Victor Mortis.Conqueror of death.
But then, there was nothing euphoric mirrored in her stare.
Instead, her gaze was unfocused, her pupils flat circles of black. Blown wide the way they’d been that night in the hotel, when the sting of a guitar screamed through the room. She’d told him the alarm must have been preset, but he’d been lying awake just before it happened. He’d seen her sit up and reach for the radio.
“Wednesday,” he said. “Delaney, look at me.”
She blinked, her eyes refocusing. Her hand went limp in his grasp. She didn’t look elated. She only looked afraid.
“It’s like it’s fighting for space inside my head.” Her whisper came out strained, as though she was afraid it might hear her. “You have to help me. You have to help me get it out.”
Colton woke to hands around his throat. At first—caught in the delirium between sleep and wake—he thought it was Meeker, come back to finish the job.
But then the hands were too small, the fingers too slender, one palm roughened with gauze. He woke slowly and then all at once, awareness rushing over him in pinpricks. Lane’s legs over his middle. Lane’s hair tickling his cheek.
Lane’s hands around his throat.
He reached for her, cuffing her wrists. Her bones bit into his palm. “Lane,” he said. “Lane.”
The lines of her were starlit and feral. Her mouth hung slack. She looked markedly inhuman, though he could smell the faint lavender of her shampoo, the spearmint kiss of her breath.
Lane, he thought, unnerved by the alien pall of her stare.This is Lane. Lane.
“Lane,” he said a third time. He barked it like a command. He barked it like,wake up.On his bedside table, the clock clicked from 11:57 to 11:58.
At his throat, Lane’s grip turned raptorial.
“Halfling,” she whispered, her voice arachnoid. He went still beneath her. Still as stone. Still as death. Still as a boy sinking much too low beneath sweating sheets of ice. Above him, Lane was haloed in moonglow. Her hair was spangled silver. “Oh yes. I know what you are. And I know what you’ll become. I know you’ll carry the shroud of death all your life.”
His heartbeat was a violent thing. “Lane,” he urged. “Look at me. Wakeup.”
“You wake up.” The words came out of her in a hiss. Low and mocking. “C.J.”
His breath stuttered to a stop and he thrust her off him, flipped her so their positions were reversed. Pinned to the mattress, she writhed like some starveling thing. The sound that came out of her was half laugh, half whine.
“Little C.J. killed his brother,” she sang. “Yes, he did; yes, he did. Let him sink beneath the ice, yes he did.”
“Stop it.” The command came out garroted. “Enough.”
Those black eyes bored into him. Her lips stretched into a wide, beatific smile. Against his chest, her heart beat with the slowness of someone dead asleep. Desperate, he reached for the only words he knew, buried deep in the back of his subconscious. The words he’d learned in the Priory, words that had been drilled into his brain. He’d never expected to need them with her.
“Astra inclinant,” he whispered. His voice shook. “Sed non obligant.”
The void of Lane’s stare didn’t abate. “This is what you wanted,” she said, and a chill settled along his spine.
“You can’t have this one,” he said, firm and solid and more afraid than he’d been in his life. “She wasn’t what was offered.Astra inclinant.”
The thing inside Lane let out a high, clear laugh.
“Sed non obligant,” he commanded.
Lane let out a gasp, keening up and into him until they were pressed together, her back arching off the mattress in a startling locus of energy. He felt it like a shifting wind—the exact moment she woke. Her pulse turned rabbit quick beneath his thumb. She fell flush against the mattress, her limbs gone limp. Moonlight flooded her irises, silvering the sea glass of her stare.
“Colton?” It was her voice, her surprise, her confusion. He wanted to bottle it up, small as it was. A laugh of relief hiccuped out of him. He sank lower, pressing his forehead to hers.
“We’re okay,” he said.
“Oh,” she breathed, taking stock of their positioning. “Did I do something? Did I hurt you?”
