Chapter Twenty-six
Helena was alone in the hallway. At least, she seemed to be alone. For all that was normal, for all that was natural, she would have been standing solitary in a long, dark hallway of cold, damp cement that stretched several hundred feet and ended in unknown black.
But this was not normal, nor was it natural, and she knew she was far from alone. She could feel him there in the shadows. Watching her.
They really have no idea, do they? he asked her.
Helena spun. The voice sounded everywhere, all around her. She could almost feel it, a brush against her skin, a whisper through her hair.
“Idea about what?” she asked aloud.
Laughter, low and long and wrong. But… there was something familiar to it too, something Helena almost identified with at this point. It was something a part of her recognized in a close and personal way, and she had no idea why.
They have no clue they’ve left the door wide open.
“What door would that be?” she asked.
“The door, Helena,” the voice said aloud. This time it was much, much closer. “Your door. The very same door you came through when you slipped into this world. The same door I’m using even now, as we speak.”
Helena slowly turned. A boot touched down on the hard concrete, the sound echoing with menace. Helena swallowed hard. Her gut clenched with renewed fear. Her heart pounded.
This was the worst.
She mentally mourned the outrageous turn her life had taken not only now, but thirty years ago. The moment her father had shoved that bloody gun into her small and shaking hand, the moment his eyes had stopped seeing her even though they were still open. That had been the moment that forever marked her as a freak and had written the unhappy synopsis of the rest of her existence.
She watched a boot emerge from the shadows. It was a black engineering boot, a little scuffed, a little worn. Her eyes followed the long line up as he continued toward her. Blue jeans, also worn. Gray T-shirt filled with hard muscle. Blond hair. Piercing blue eyes.
Helena stepped back. She always wanted to sprout wings and fly away, but she couldn’t fly. Unlike vampires.
“I can change that,” he told her intimately.
Helena felt the stirrings of panic in her core. To go from the best kiss she’d ever experienced to standing in a long, dark hallway with her worst nightmare not a full minute later was wretched.
“Something for you to wrap your head around. Because it will happen,” he informed her. Then he looked down and said, “The Slate cousins really are oblivious. They’ve done everything wrong.” He grinned as if the thought gave him schoolboy joy. “They never should have put you under, am I right?” He looked back up and laughed again, but the laughter faded, and he cocked his head to the side to study her with that keen interest he always saved for her. “They’re scrambling to protect you from me even as we speak,” he told her, smiling that friendly smile of his. “And they have no idea we’ve already met. Much less that I’m here with you now.”
Helena took another step back. All this time. All this time, she’d come face to face with the same man. Every time she’d fallen into this world, he’d been there. At first he’d only been in the background. She would catch glimpses of him in the shadows as she ran or fought. He would watch her in silence, but with keen and frightening interest, and each time he came closer.
Until finally one night, he’d appeared to her, beautiful and charming. He’d spoken to her. He’d offered to save her from the Night Terrors. He’d offered to call them all off, pull them all in, even destroy every last one of them if that was what she desired. He only wanted one thing from her in return. Rather than pulling the Night Terrors out of this shadowy world and into her realm with her when she awoke – she would take him. She would let him out.
But with each passing visit to what she’d come to call the Dark World, she saw him more and more for what he truly was. Not a man, but a monster. Something about him scared her more than all the monsters in the Dark World put together. So she always said no.
The Night Terrors grew worse. They grew stronger and faster and more plentiful. Then they became smarter and more powerful, taking on abilities she didn’t know how to fight alone. They assumed human forms. They slipped through the cracks in her consciousness and entered the mortal world, but would lay low, forcing her to hunt them down. They sabotaged her, took hostages.
Killed innocents.
And the charming blue-eyed monster would wait in the Night Terror world, patiently passing the hours until she had no choice but to manipulate time once again. Then he would make his usual offer. And she would again turn him down. He always smiled when she did. His eyes would glitter with forbidden knowledge, and his easy-going stance would never change.
He scared the hell out of her.
Now she knew. Now she knew why the other side effects of her bending time had become less and less frequent, and the Night Terrors had taken over as default. Now she understood why he’d been there in the shadows at first and had only come close recently. He hadn’t been able to get close before. He’d needed the time to grow stronger. He’d also needed her to become what and who she was. The Storyteller’s gift. His fucking present.
Now even from his prison realm, he was able to enter this dark domain of her fear, just enough to control its monsters and lay down his ultimatum. Each time he did, it grew more difficult for her to say no. She’d almost given in last time, in fact. But somehow she’d refused.
He’d smiled as usual, but he’d made her regret her decision. The monsters he’d released into her waking world had taken the forms of other monsters and worked an evil treachery within their factions, causing good werewolves to go rogue. She’d had to stop the spread of it before it reached Ethan and his pack. She almost hadn’t made it. Even now she was bleeding somewhere in the waking world, marked by her battle.
Now she had a name for the blue-eyed monster.
“You’re Cain,” she said softly. Here, in the hallway that led to her nightmares, her voice echoed with shadowy magic, whispering into corners and crevasses before disappearing. “You’re the First Vampire.”
Cain smiled warmly. “Of course I am.” His boots paced slowly across the ground, drawing ever nearer, even while his hands were in his jeans pockets, and his stance was easy. Non-threatening. He was very good at that, at appearing to be something he wasn’t.
When he reached her, he slowly walked around her, casual to his evil core. “Who else would be this patient with you, Helena? Who else would care this much but the man you’ve been promised to?”
She could think of a few people, actually. He was psychopathically confusing patience and care with a lack of a choice and a deep-seeded drive for freedom and power. But he wasn’t really looking for an answer anyway. So she just turned in place and kept her eyes on him. Whoever had said, “Get behind me Satan” had been beyond stupid.
“They’re coming again Helena,” he told her. “The Night Terrors. I’m making sure of it. Only this time, there won’t be a handful.” He shook his head. “No, this time an army of monsters is heading out through that wide-open door.”
Helena wished she would wake up. If the door was open anyway, then she didn’t want to be here with him, facing his offer once more. Frankly, she was afraid that she’d make a different choice this time.
Just to be certain nothing else had changed, she attempted to use her powers on him. As she stood there in the middle of the hallway and he circled her like a shark, she tried to blast him telekinetically. She attempted to lift him up and throw him down the hall. But as usual, it didn’t work. It never worked, not on him.
He stopped and tilted his head, his expression one of mock sympathy. “You’re feeling frustrated. I understand. But you really should save your strength.” He closed the distance between them, and Helena found herself backing into the hallway wall. She reached for the gun at her back and remembered it wasn’t there. In the waking world, Liam Slate had taken it from her. The way things worked with the Night Terror world, that meant Helena was unarmed here as well. She gritted her teeth and vowed to punch Liam in the face too – if she ever made it back alive.
“You’ll need it soon enough,” Cain told her frankly and with a whole lot of innuendo.
Helena turned and ran.
It was her only option. He wasn’t going to chase after her. He never did. It wasn’t his style. If she could make it to the end of the hall where the darkness was deepest, she could make it back through the door herself.
Yes, things would follow her back through. They always did. And something about this particular trip felt different, more potent. But the sooner she made it back through to the other side, the sooner she could get help closing that door again. Then she would track down and destroy whatever had come through.
One step at a time. First things first.
Item one on the agenda: Escape Cain.
Helena’s boots echoed loudly on the damp cement as she pounded it out beneath her. She didn’t hold back, sprinting at full speed. For a split second, it occurred to her that something else might have changed this time around. What if the door wasn’t there? What if when she reached the end, instead of going right back through, she hit a brick wall?
Willing to take that chance.
She put her head down, raised her arms, and plowed through the shadows. But she came to a full, scraping, jarring halt when Cain stepped out of those shadows, blocking her path.
Okay, I was wrong, she thought with burgeoning panic. Apparently he would chase after her. There was a first for everything.
“You really shouldn’t be in such a hurry to wake up, Helena,” he told her seriously. “For a couple of reasons.”
Helena’s heart felt as though it would rip right out of her chest Meatloaf style. It hurt. This kind of fear hurt physically.
“For one, things work different between us in your world. You won’t be protected against me the way you are here. You were made for me, Helena. You won’t be able to deny me the way you are now.” He moved toward her. As usual, she moved back. And he grinned at the fact that she was proving his point. “You sure you want that? That lack of freedom?” He shook his head and looked her slowly up and down. “Doesn’t seem like your thing.”
Freedom? Was that what his twisted mind thought this was? “I wasn’t made for anyone,” she told him, though she barely heard her own words over the roar of blood in her ears. “Well, except maybe Richard Armitage or Michael Fassbender, but barring that rather exclusive group, nope.” She shook her head, exceedingly proud of herself for once again acting through the fear and anger and managing a flippant if utterly pointless façade. “There’s just me. And you aren’t on the list.”
Cain raised his head, his blue eyes flashing with illuminating power. But the light was gone as quickly as it had come, and he smiled again, just a slow curl of his lips. She had yet to see him sport fangs. She had a feeling he was keeping them at bay for her benefit.
He said, “Okay, then there’s reason number two. Those boys out there?” He turned and gestured with a nod to the darkness behind him before turning back around to pin her with his blue eyes. “They haven’t finished their spell on you, Helena. There’s a reason you were put to sleep for the last part. Believe me,” he came forward. Again she stepped back. This time, he seemed slightly annoyed, as if it had scraped the bottom of his store of patience. But he shook his head and took it in stride. “You don’t want to wake up right now.”
Helena considered his words. Will had said something very similar. Now she wanted to damn well know why. “Okay, what the hell is the last part of the spell? Do they have to chop off a finger or something?”
“They’re going to brand you,” he told her plainly. His tone was cold. There was emotion in it, held in check, but it was so restrained Helena couldn’t even tell what that emotion was. His eyes flashed like blue flame again. There one second, and gone so fast. “They’re going to bathe metal in fire until it’s red hot and press it into your flesh until the air smells like cooked meat.” His brow arched, and his face remained neutral. “Call me crazy, but that doesn’t seem like it would be your thing either.”
Silence. It stretched in the hallway, like a mirrored reflection of the hallway itself.
Helena’s skin began to hurt. She looked down at her arm and pushed up her sleeve. There was nothing there. As soon as she saw that, the pain left.
He was toying with her.
“Some friends, huh?” Cain asked softly.
She looked back up at him. But again, she couldn’t decipher his emotions. He seemed to look upon her with concern and sympathy and kindness, but she knew it was all fake. His true thoughts were actually unreadable. So rather than try, she allowed her instinct to take over.
He was still trapped somewhere in a prison realm by the Storyteller. So he wasn’t at full strength. Vampires were so strong, they could lift semis and so fast, they blurred. But he was only partly here. He wasn’t at full speed. He wouldn’t be himself until he managed to make his way through that door he said was still open.
She was counting on that.
Helena lunged to the right, knowing he would try to stop her. He did. And just as he did, she spun, ducking down to the left to elbow him hard in the kidney. He made a pain-filled sound and stumbled just enough for her to get by. She took her opening and sped full-tilt toward the shadowed darkness ahead of her.
As she reached it, she felt the familiar pull of the waking world. It slowed her progress, warped time around her the way she sometimes warped it, and made her body feel heavy. She closed her eyes; she was sleeping, after all.
And when she opened them again, she was sitting up on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room, alone.