“What do you know about any of it?”
“I know a great deal, Colton James Price.” It sounded gleeful. Happy to share. Happy to talk, to be rendered able to communicate. “I have ripped apart so many of your peers. Sucked the marrow from their bones. Split their ribs and eaten their dreams. Pitiable, gamey things. None of them sweet as she. None of them as strong.”
He met those strange, dreamless eyes. His heart beat like it was afraid to make sound. “Et disperdam te.”
A laugh followed, cold as the dead of winter. “I will not be banished by a mere halfling.” The rictus of its smile put a shiver in his bones. “But if it’s Latin you like,auribus teneo lupum.”
Colton frowned, mulling it over, and said, “You hold a wolf by the ears.”
It made a low, pleased sort of sound. Like a purring cat. “For a boy only half-alive, you are twice as bright as most.”
“What does it mean?”
“The others he sent,” the creature said. “They were, all of them, fawns.”
“You’re saying Lane is a wolf?”
The smile stretched, turning to a grin that was nearly feral. “You know precisely what the girl is. It’s why you sit here. It’s why the dead gather. Night after night. Death after death.” Her head canted to the side. Again, it asked, “Why won’t you tell her? What she is? What you are?”
The October wind picked up outside, setting the trees to rattling. Whistling through the rafters. The shadows danced across the floor in streaks of wild, wavering dark.
Lane’s eyes went wide. “Can you feel them? The shades? They’re gathered all around.” That eldritch voice dropped to a whisper. “They do not like me here.”
“I don’t like you here, either,” Colton said.
Another laugh cracked out of her, high and strange. “They want me to leave.”
“We have that in common.” He swallowed, tired, wishing for sleep, and jabbed two fingers to his temple. Slowly, Lane rose from the bed. The shadows shivered, retracting. Skittering away from the places where she stepped. He remained perfectly still and watched her approach.
Gingerly, she slid into his lap. Her knees dug into the leather on either side of his hips. His flannel pants hung loose around her waist. He held his breath as she took his pencil from his desk and slid it behind his ear.
Slowly, slowly, she leaned in and brushed her lips along the broken corner of his mouth. “I don’t much like you, either,” it whispered into his skin. “But you invited me. You and your companions. And now I have something to take care of, here on this infernal plane.”
“And what’s that?” His voice was a crack, barely sound.
In lieu of an answer, the creature said, “I’m going to help you tell her the truth. You’ll see. I can be benevolent. I can make it so you get everything you want from pretty little Wednesday.”
Without warning, she sucked his lower lip between her teeth. He jolted beneath her, his hands flying to her hips. Revulsion curled through him as she rutted against him. A game. This was all a game to the thing in her skin.
He thrust her off him with a snarl, hard enough to send her sprawling to the floor. Her tailbone cracked audibly against the hardwood. She’d have a bruise there tomorrow, angry and dark, but for now the creature at his feet seemed wholly unfazed. Her beetle-dark stare flashed with amusement. Her smile was a cruel, jagged thing.
“It’s so easy to pull your strings, puppet.”
“Tell me why you’re here,” he demanded.
“Because,” it said, “much like you, I am searching for my brother.”
Laughing, she began to scrabble upright, her limbs at odd angles, her hair falling around her in pale cobwebs. His heart rammed so high in his throat he thought he’d choke on it.
“Enough,” he said. “Affatim.”
Her blinks were entirely for show. “Do you grow tired of sparring with me, C.J.?”
“Sed non obligant.” A nightly goodbye, not a permanent one. He said it again, for good measure, clearer this time than before. “Sed non obligant.”
A gasp followed. A shudder. Her eyes rolled back in her head. This time, when she fell, she fell with grace. Like a storybook maiden, spelled by poison. Finger pricked. So very small. Her eyes fluttered, heavy with sleep.
“Colton?”
