“Hello, my pretty one!” The Nightmare King’s voice boomed and echoed, triumphing over all other noise. “I will find you tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow!” I glimpsed his opening arms, as he gestured like some Shakespearean actor on stage. “Soon, I will take what is mine!”
I slunk back into the crowd.
Cops spilled from the cars and arrowed toward where the King and his men stood, except he had vanished. A few of his men remained, apparently determined to slow down the cops.
An alley lay a few yards behind me. I used it to run.
When I stopped to check, maybe five minutes later, nothing was pursuing me—human or otherwise.
Gulping much-needed air, I leaned back onto a brick wall. A small yellow light, two stories above, illuminated an alley strewn with garbage. A homeless man crawled from a corner cardboard shelter. He watched me, wary, and still on his knees. Theoretically, being female, I should be afraid.
Theory be damned. I straightened from the wall, raised my lip, and fucking growled. He sneaked backward into the shadows.
That last confrontation with the King. What had I been thinking? My plans were shit.
If I died, and no one else opposed him, the King would conquer this world and flood it with nightmares. Already, he had a small army.
Creating a few Stitched would be wise. It would, yes, and I’d feel dirty. I stuck a finger in my mouth and chewed the corner of the nail. It would be morally wrong. And somehow also morally right.
The King wanted something from me, and it was not just my life. Was it the knife? He’d discarded the musket ball and dropped the knife. I pushed my hand under my jacket and caressed the rounded end of the hilt. The buzz of ownership that created only reinforced my notion that the knife was his true prey.
So, what had stopped him from taking it, previously? If he had picked it up and then dropped it, was the knife hostile to him? A whispered yes, and the faintest of memories agreed with that.
Wait… That was also why Val had followed me the first day we met.
The King had made him want the knife.
And tonight, the cops had been targeting Val, aka the King. Escaping from hospital wasn’t a hanging offence. Being a victim of a bombing might be, if they had linked the two of them to Chester’s apartment explosion?
Val had hinted at a past in the CIA or a similar secret intelligence agency. They might also be chasing him for reasons to do with that.
If the law sought him, that could frustrate the King. Facial recognition would still work on evil shits like him.
My head thudded into the wall as I slumped and tried to think.
That was Val in there too. What would I do if I had the King at my mercy? Pin him down, with a knife or gun at his throat? What would I fucking do? Order him to leave Val?
He’d laugh at me.
Keep trying and keep thinking. Everything has a solution, doesn’t it?
Nope. The sun is going to die, no matter how many wishes we make, and pigs are never going to fly.
I would do what I had sworn I would not.
Two weeks later, he found me again.
I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t fucking ready and hadn’t even been looking for him.
Horrified and trapped in the lobby of an apartment building that overlooked a park, I watched a swarm of his Possessed men flood up the steps and bang on the door. Under their boots were the Stitched I had created, lifeless and trampled. Cold ran up my arms and lodged in my guts. Those had been people.
My heart thudded urgently, reminding me of my own mortality.
The resident who’d let me inside after I’d begged, stood beside me with his mouth hanging open while he frantically connected an emergency call.
The Possessed hammered the glass hard enough to make the lobby echo. Cracks appeared and snaked over the doors, as well as the panes to either side.
At the rear of the mob, I glimpsed the King’s smiling face.
Bloody handprints smeared the panes. They began to ram the lobby doors with their shoulders.
“We should go!” I hitched my small backpack onto my shoulder and walked backward, plucking at helpful guy’s shirt. I jerked my head to show the petrified man what to do.
By the time weapons were drawn and fired, I wasn’t there. I dashed out the rear exit accompanied by the grating music of gunshots, smashing glass, and sirens. A police helicopter swooped in from the north. The King wouldn’t be caught, I was sure of that.
He had, somehow, intuitively found me—or maybe it was half my fault. Maybe I’d fallen into his hands because we were like magnets in this city. Proximity might set off some subconscious alert inside immortals. The cops had saved me again.
From a second vantage point, high on another building, I pressed my knuckles into the concrete parapet as a SWAT team disembarked from a black van. The police had already set up barricades and cordoned off the street. They’d shot some of the Possessed and they’d perished, after being headshot. That was new to me. Harry, the pickup driver, had refused to die until Val used the Cucitrice’s knife on him.
Some of my fuzzier memories suggested not all Possessed were created equal. Good to know. If only they came with labels hanging off their wrists.
But the way these Possessed had battered the glass, with no care for the smashing of their own flesh…scary. It wasn’t their flesh, though, not really. Sweat dribbled down my temples. Zombies had nothing on the King’s henchmen. But there was an anomaly. Where were the nightmares?
The carnage of the battle of 1862 had etched itself on my brain cells, courtesy of the Cucitrice. The King had faced an army of immortals and dream creatures with his army of nightmares, and the Cucitrice had fired the ensorcelled musket ball into him, forcing death on the body he then occupied. From then on, he had been imprisoned and powerless, in all the bodies to which his soul traveled.
That day he had aimed to eliminate immortals.
Had he not learned that everything had changed since then? Technology had risen and stretched its creepy digital umbrella to encompass all of humanity and every place on the planet, excluding maybe some internet unfriendly hut in the Andes and the burrows of wombats.
If the law wanted him, the law would find him…unless he changed bodies.
What was he aiming to achieve by hounding me? He clearly did not fear me doing him any harm. He wanted the knife, yet he’d left it behind at the port? If it was just me, he could have taken me or killed me then also.
It was a puzzle. Today was a disaster. It had made me into a mass murderer. Four of the dead had been my people.
I was beginning to realize I would never solve this by myself.
I crouched behind the parapet then folded into a sitting position, shading my eyes with my cupped hands. The trembling was back. This was far enough away from the debacle below to be safe.
Think. Stop shaking. I am alive. Think.
He wanted me. I wanted him…sort of.
Could I make him change bodies because staying in Val was a fucking disaster area?
I had few memories about what happened to people who lost the creature possessing them. From what I had seen, and remembered, it had not been good.
I needed to go elsewhere to get help.
Shelve killing the King. Get him to leave Val, full stop.
I needed help from someone who knew more. And that meant only one sort of person. Immortals. I’d murdered the last one—the Soldier. Wherever they were now, they were probably pissed as hell at me after that. They had wanted me to let Val die in the thermobaric bomb, to eliminate the Nightmare King.