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I’m not here all the time. I have things to do, people to see, but I’m with you far more often than you realize. Most of the time, I simply choose not to be seen.
I walked beside you through the forest. I stood beside you in the doctor’s office. I watched you eat. I watched you daydream.
I watch you.
And today, I heard you say that you were going home tomorrow.
That changes things. I had intended to give you longer, to let you grow more accustomed to my presence.
But tomorrow will be too late, which means our first proper meeting must happen tonight.
I hope you’re ready to meet me, my pretty Rowan.
Because I’m ready to meet you.
I’ve waited long enough.
Chapter Eight
Rowan
“Rowan?”
At the sound of my name, I rolled over and reached instinctively for Tyler, only for my hands to encounter an empty stretch of mattress. It had to be him calling me, because if it wasn’t, there was only one other possibility.
My eyes snapped open.
It was at the foot of the bed.
I scrambled back against the wall, trying to put as much distance between us as possible, although the extra foot or two felt pitifully inadequate. “Don’t fucking tell me you can talk.”
He remained silent for so long that my nerves stretched close to breaking point. Then he answered, the words not what I expected.
“My pretty Rowan.”
His voice settled over me like warm smoke—deep, calm, and unreasonably intimate. It might have been comforting if not for the strange resonance beneath it, a second note that didn’t belong to any human throat.
“I’m dreaming,” I said. “I must be dreaming, because it’s one thing for me to see you, but it’s another thing entirely for you to speak. You haven’t even got a mouth.”
His head tilted slightly to one side, as though considering the problem. “Would you like me to have one?”
I almost laughed. “What? I just request a body part, and you grow it.”
“Not grow it,” he said. “But I can change my form, yes. Would you feel better if I looked more human?”
“I’d feel better if you…” I’d been about to say went away, but now that he’d spoken without threatening to devour my soul, some of my terror had receded enough to make room for curiosity. “Yes,” I said. “Call me old-fashioned, but I’d feel better if you looked more human.”
The darkness that made up his body rippled.
At first, I thought the lamp was playing tricks on me, making the edge of his body shimmer like a heat haze. Then the shadows began to move with purpose, flowing over one another in slow, silent currents. The sharp outline of his horns softened first, the points bending and shrinking as though melting back into his head before disappearing altogether. His long tail unraveled into strands of darkness that curled lazily through the air, dissolving into the rest of his body until there was no sign it had ever existed.
His eyes lingered.
Twin crimson embers continued to burn within the featureless black for another heartbeat. Then their glow dulled and winked out, leaving behind a smooth expanse of shadow where his face should have been.
The darkness shifted. Shallow depressions formed and gradually deepened into eye sockets. Within them, pupils and irises separated from the surrounding shadow—not colored, but visible nonetheless, like polished obsidian catching the light.
A ridge rose from the blank surface of his face, gradually sharpening into the bridge of a nose. Beneath it, a mouth emerged—not opening so much as separating from the shadow itself, his lips taking shape as though sculpted from smoke.
