“Z,” I answered.
“Z.” The way he said my name...it was almost a physical caress. “Can I
see your face?”
I almost agreed to him. All logical reasoning had left my mind. All I
could focus on was him, and my need to please him. My hand moved towards
the necklace.
One push…
All it would take was one push…
I scrambled to my feet, away from him. He made me feel too much, too
deeply, too quickly.
It suddenly occurred to me the reason why I was feeling like that. A spell.
He had used his powers on me, made me trust him. It was the only
explanation that made logical sense.
What type of assassin was I to have fallen for such a ruse? A pretty damn
stupid one that was for sure.
Despite my mind demanding me to kill him, my body prohibited it.
“I um…”
Self-consciousness flickered across his handsome face followed quickly
by despair. I knew it was an act, I knew it, but I wasn’t able think straight.
There couldn’t possibly be any sincerity in his expression. I had to remember
what he was and what he had obviously done to me.
Monster.
They were all monsters.
And this one in particular had used his allure to make me trust him. What
had he planned to do with me? Torture me? Kill me? Rape me?
“I need to leave,” I said. “I need to…”
And then I did the thing he expected me to do - the one thing that made
me hate myself a little more.
I ran.
TWELVE
Z
Cursing beneath my breath, I entered through the back door of the
Capital building. My wet shoes sloshed against the linoleum
flooring.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange Mermaid I had met. Dair.
Where had I heard that name before?
The realization came to me only seconds later, my hand tightening on the
golden rail of the staircase.
Dair Mermaid.
The prince.
The damn prince.
The strength of my epiphany nearly made me stumble. I took a calming
breath in an attempt to slow my racing heart. So far, I had met three princes.
Three men that I had been tasked to kill. Was it fate? Something else
entirely? I was suddenly rethinking everything I knew about Nightmares and
life itself.
I couldn’t kill them. Not Dair, who had saved my life. Not Lin, who had
held my heart in his hands before crushing it. Not even the Shifter, Lupe, who
both terrified and entranced me.
Had they put a spell on me? Was that why I was suddenly feeling
empathy for such monsters? I didn’t know how to answer those questions,
nor did I want to. Anger rushed through me when I considered how easily I
had trusted Dair with my life. The only explanation was that he had used his
siren allure on me, had broken down my defenses through his magic. And I
had been dumb enough to fall for it. Never again, though. Never again.
Maybe a good night of sleep would clear the incoherent mess that was my
brain.
Sleep. I needed sleep.
My thoughts were interrupted by a wave of unquenchable lust. My
nipples hardened beneath my shirt, and my pussy clenched with need.
Damn it.
An Incubus.
This was only reaffirmed when a striking figure descended the staircase
above me. He had dark skin and even darker hair. He emitted a type of
confidence that one could only dream of having. The smirk on his lips hinted
that he knew what he was doing to me and enjoyed it. His power rolled off of
him in waves.
I wanted nothing more than to tear off all of my clothes and…
No!
I saw the dagger in his hand a second before he lunged. I rolled out of the
way, the keen tip slicing through my mask and grazing my cheek. I winced at
the pain, but kept my attention on the grinning, seductive assassin before me.
“Not much is known about you Z,” he said, voice like honey. “No one
female.”
He swung the dagger again, a large arc, and I jumped out of the way.
“I don’t like mysteries,” he hissed. The need to touch myself was almost
excruciating. Damn Incubus and damn Incubus powers. Instead of giving into
my desires, I balled my hands into fists.
The Incubus charged, just as I knew he would.
My first order of business was ridding him of his weapon. This was
surprisingly easy given his clumsy, lumbering frame. From the way he
moved, I reasoned that he wasn’t the type to use stealth as a tool.
I ducked beneath his arm, using my own to wrap around his throat. His
movements became erratic as he scrambled for air, his knife swinging wildly
in front of him. I used my freehand to knock the dagger to the ground.
He grunted, pushing backwards. My arm lost purchase where it gripped
his meaty neck, and he stumbled away from me, gasping for air. Before he
could catch his bearings, I grabbed the weapon from the floor and shoved it
into his neck.
Blood immediately sputtered, drenching my already soaked clothes. The
Incubus desperately grabbed at his throat as if he could somehow hold the
skin together. He dropped to his knees, blood still dripping from the wound,
before he fell face first into a pool of his own blood.
Dead.
He was dead.
He was the second man I had killed in only a matter of hours. Did it make
me a psychopath that I couldn’t conjure up any pity for these kills? If
anything, I felt relief that there was one less Nightmare in the world.
“You’re not as a strong as the others. But you have speed. I would
recommend using that to your advantage,” a silky smooth voice said. I
grabbed the dagger out of the dead Incubus’s neck, ignoring the blood
cascading off of the blade in red rivulets, and aimed it in the direction of the
intruder’s voice.
All I saw was a dark silhouette.
A Shadow.
“Are you here to kill me?” I asked tersely, lowering my voice in a poor
impersonation of a man.
“Why would I kill you?” The man sounded honestly curious, if not
amused, by my question. I watched the Shadow move from one wall to the
next.
“Because this is a game. It’s kill or be killed.”
I repeated my life motto as if I wasn’t scared, as if my heart wasn’t
beating rapidly at death being so close to me.
“It may be a game, but…” Warm breath tickled my ear, and I spun to the
side expectantly. “I’m not playing.”
Nobody was there.
“Who are you?” I asked, spinning in a circle. I kept my dagger raised in
preparation.
A chuckle emitted from above me, near the rail of the staircase, and I
glanced up. All I saw was the flash of black before the Shadow moved once
again.
“I’m a Shadow,” he answered.
“I asked who you are, not what you are,” I snapped. What I really wanted
to know, however, was whether he was friend or foe.
“They call me Ryland,” he said, voice coming from a windowsill five
levels above. It echoed throughout the room.
“But is that your name?” I pressed.
“What even is a name?” he mused. “It’s just a title, is it not?”
“But…”
His chuckle receded as he moved further and further away.
A Shadow.
I had met a Shadow, and he hadn’t killed me. I had met a Mermaid, and
he hadn’t killed me.
I rubbed at my forehead, ignoring the blood that smeared across my skin,
before lowering both hands back to my sides. I needed sleep.
I needed sleep, and, more importantly, I needed clarity.
Without bothering to turn back towards the dead Incubus, I walked
upstairs.
Everything would make sense with sleep.
“LIN?” I asked, pushing open the door to the hotel room. How many times
have I came here? One-hundred? One-thousand? “Lin? Baby?”
My eyes searched the room expectantly. The bed, freshly made. The lack
of clothes that usually loitered across the floor. The closed suitcase on the
small table.
My frown deepened when I noticed Lin standing beside the suitcase. His
expression was carefully blanked, almost impassive, but his eyes were
anguished.
“Lin, what’s wrong?” I asked, running towards him, hands outstretched.
He stepped away from me as if my touch was toxic. The feeling that
something was wrong only amplified at his rejection. At his dismissal of me.
Lin was a shell of the man I remembered and loved.
“What’s wrong?” I repeated, chewing on my nail anxiously. It was a
horrible habit that I was determined to break.
“I need to leave,” he whispered. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Okay?” I couldn’t understand why he was behaving so strangely. He
had left numerous times before, but he had always found his way back to me.
He told me that I was a magnet he couldn’t ignore. He told me that we would
always find our way back to each other, no matter the time or distance.
“When are you coming back?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. He still refused to meet my
questioning gaze.
“Lin?” I said slowly. “When are you coming back?”
“I’m not coming back.”
I frowned, sure I had heard him wrong. We belonged together, two
broken souls that had miraculously found each other in the unpredictable
chaos of life.
“What do you mean?”
“This…” He gestured between the two of us. “It isn’t working.”
My world stopped. My blood turned to ice.
That was the moment when he destroyed me. When he took what little
heart I had left after my parents’ and A’s deaths and trampled it.
“You don’t mean that,” I whispered. He was wrong. He wasn’t thinking
clearly. We were meant to be together, that was what he had always told me.
“I do. We’re not…” His face pinched as if he had swallowed something
sour. “We’re not good together.”
A part of me wanted to beg. I wanted him to fight for me. For us. Why
wasn’t he fighting? Had he ever loved me the way I had loved him? It had
never occurred to me before that our love had been one-sided, but I couldn’t
help but replay every conversation we ever had and every touch.
I had been so stupid.
“Walk away,” I said. “Walk away and don’t look back.”
“Susan…” he trailed off helplessly.
My voice rose to a scream.
“Walk away! Walk away!”
And he did.
I WOKE up to somebody shaking my shoulder. In my dazed, sleepy state, I
assumed I was still dreaming. What else could possibly explain the figure
standing beside my bed?
A Vampire.
“Whatyadoing?” I muttered. I knew I should’ve been frightened by the
strange man towering over me, but I couldn’t muster an ounce of fear or
terror. There was so much vulnerability in his unguarded expression. So
much tenderness.
I wondered, briefly, if my fight or flight response was broken again.
What a strange, realistic dream.
He had light brown hair, cut short. Even in the darkness, I could see that
his handsome face looked as if it was carved from marble.
“My blood tingles. But it stops when I’m with you. The voices stop.”
Fucking hell.
I have had my fair share of weird dreams in my twenty-years of life, but
this one took the cake.
“Can I sleep with you? I want - no, I need - the voices to stop.”
“Only if you shut the fuck up and let me sleep,” I murmured drowsily. I
lifted the quilt back from the bed and patted the spot beside me.
The smile that lit up his face was brilliant. He eagerly climbed into my
bed and rubbed his nose against my neck. His hand pushed up my shirt,
touching the bare skin of my stomach as if he couldn’t bear to have that layer
of clothing separating us. I smiled in contentment.
“The voices are finally quiet,” he murmured.
“Let’s get to bed,” I replied, sleep already beginning to claim me.
And we slept.
THIRTEEN
JAX
Ihad watched her with the Incubus, her lithe and graceful body easily
able to overtake the assassin.
The voices had finally stopped when I laid eyes upon her. They no
longer screamed at me or reminded me of what I had done.
I just needed silence.
Because I knew I was mad, but madness was only in the eye of the
beholder. Mad. What was mad? Was it the implication that the mind wasn’t
able? And how did mad differ from disabled under this notion of abled?
I brushed her hair behind her ear. She had allowed me to stay, allowed me
to satiate the strident voices inside of me.
Silence.
The voices had nothing more to say.
FOURTEEN
DAIR
“Get up you fat bastard. I need to talk to you.” I shoved at Lupe’s
arm. My brother let out a loud grunt, a combination between a
snore and a yell, before bolting straight upright in bed, eyes
flashing with a predator-like intensity as they flew to my face. “Easy there,” I
murmured, attempting to placate his Bear.
“What are you doing here? It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning.”
Closing his eyes yet again, he settled back into the bed. It only took a
second before his loud snores filled the room.
I shoved him again.
“I need to ask you something.”
“And it couldn’t wait?” he murmured sleepily.
My fingers anxiously fiddled with the edge of his quilt. I focused on the
repetitive movement, on the soft material sliding between my thumb and
pointer finger like silk.
“How do Mermaids know when they find their mate?” I whispered. The
words tasted funny in my mouth. Never before have I believed that the word
“mate” would leave my mouth.
“Mermaid? Mate?” the giant mumbled again. It was obvious from his
heavily lidded eyes that he was still half asleep. It was a wonder he could
even speak coherently at all. “From what I read, the water will tell you. I
don’t know for certain, though.” As if he had just comprehended what I had
a
sked, he sat straight upright in bed. His sleepy eyes widened as they rested
on my face.
“Mate?” he asked, stunned.
I shrugged sheepishly, but my mouth curved up instinctively.
Z.
What an odd name for an even odder female.
I knew next to nothing about her. Where did she come from? What did
she look like?
My heart clenched painfully when I thought about how I had found her.
She had been falling to her death. And death would’ve claimed her, too, if I
hadn’t interfered. It became apparent the second I laid eyes on her that she
was a competitor for The Damning. My mate, the assassin. A part of me felt
proud. I had never wanted a damsel-in-distress type of mate. Another part of
me was utterly terrified. There were one-hundred competitors in The
Damning and only one winner. What were the chances that she would be it?
That she would survive?
After I had came to that conclusion, I immediately began running through
every scenario in my mind. We could leave, the two of us, but that would
mean forsaking both of our duties. Not that I would mind leaving behind my
depressive life…
My eyes flickered to my legs...or, what was left of them. Pathetic. Utterly
pathetic. No wonder she ran from me. Her mate, the male who was supposed
to be the other half of her, was nothing but a broken man. How could she
expect me to make her whole when I had yet to find my own missing pieces?
I couldn’t protect her.
Failure.
I was a failure, just as my father and blood brothers had told me time and
time again. I could smile flirtatiously, charm however many women I wanted,
but I would never find true love. Nobody was capable of looking past my
deformities.
My father told me a story once of a Mermaid who had met his mate, a girl
who would eventually become the first Shadow. She was the sweetest, most
vibrant, person anyone had ever met, and she seemed to shine brightly, as if
wreathed in light. For all her inward beauty, her face was marred by a
hideous scar.
The Mermaid, insanely jealous of the perfection around him, grew
increasingly disgusted with his fate. Although his mate was beloved by all for
the kindness she radiated, he became more and more enraged by what he
thought she lacked – outward beauty. One night, as his mate slept heavily
drugged, the Mermaid took his knife and skinned her. In his mind, having no