I rubbed my forehead on my shoulder when another bead of sweat trickled into my eyes. Noah finally looked up and acknowledged the horde of shadow demons inching closer. Slipping across the slick red floor. The big black one that looked as close to a man as one of them could get broke away from the crowd and stared down at us both. It growled something I didn’t understand to Noah.
“What’s it going to be, Cash?” He cocked his head to the side to look at me, giving me a glimpse of the black vein etched into his neck. “Are you the pizza? Or are you the delivery boy?”
“What if I don’t want to be either?”
Noah laughed and combed his fingers through his hair. “Then they’ll choose for you.”
I looked past Noah, at the deceiving soft blue light rippling through the cave. The room was packed with shadow demons, their darkness dueling for dominance. They hissed and snapped at the blooderflies that fluttered around in a circle, creating a bloody cyclone before being siphoned out into the hazy twilight beyond the cave opening. Fear closed up my throat when they turned their attention back to me. Howling and writhing with the need to feed. My legs tingled and I managed to pull them up to my chest, pressing as close to the rock behind me as I could get. None of this sounded appealing.
But the thought of letting these things devour me made me want to vomit. And Anaya…what would they do to her if she came down after me? Did she even know I was gone yet? I couldn’t imagine her in a place like this. I didn’t want to.
“She’ll come after me,” I said. “You know she will.”
Noah stepped in front of me and lowered himself until his face was level with mine. “Is that supposed to scare me? Do you have any idea how many shadows are outside this cave?”
Fear crept up my throat and I jerked on my restraints. There were more? This cave was packed.
“One little reaper would be nothing for them. A snack,” he said. “They’d shred her piece by piece.
Devour her. But first…” He grinned. “I think first they’d play with her. Is that what you want?”
No. The fear in my throat was everywhere now. In my chest, making it even harder to breathe. Not
Anaya. What was my plan here? To just sit around playing nice with these things, waiting for her to walk into a trap? No freaking way. I couldn’t let her do that. I wouldn’t. Even if that meant being like
Noah. Maybe if she believed there wasn’t anything good left inside me, she’d leave it alone. Forget about me. It was a chance I was going to have to take.
I closed my eyes and took as deep a breath as my lungs would allow. “Teach me how to be a delivery boy.”
“I hope you have a strong stomach,” Noah said as he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me up out of the bubbling black puddle in the ground that looked like an oil spill. I couldn’t stop shaking.
Convulsing. What the hell had I just seen? If that place wasn’t Hell, then I didn’t want to know what
Hell was.
“Strong stomach? Are you saying it gets worse than that?” I looked over my shoulder where the pit had been. All I saw now was wet, glistening pavement.
Noah snorted. “You have no idea.”
Around us, abandoned buildings with windowless faces stared back us. They lined the desolate street. The only things that looked alive were the streetlamps buzzing overhead. There wasn’t so much as a rat. But a city wasn’t far off. Even from here, you could smell the smog, hear the sirens and signs of a bursting metropolis. I wondered if I yelled for help if anyone would hear. I doubted it.
“Where are we going?” I stumbled behind Noah, grabbing my chest. It hurt to breathe. Noah stopped at the steps of an abandoned brick building. The insides looked charred, the walls crumbling. Noah closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Do you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
He pointed ahead, where a pale blue color flashed in one of the windows. “Them.”
Another blue blur flickered behind the broken glass and a cold sensation pricked at my insides like needles. I took a step closer and the pinpricks hummed under my skin. Holy hell… “I do feel it.”
“Good.” Noah glanced at me and took the concrete steps two at a time. “Let’s go fishing. You’ll normally try to lure in a bigger group, but for your first time we’ll just take a couple.”
I stumbled up the steps after him. Noah dissolved right through the door, leaving me standing on the other side. Looking around the abandoned street, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
“Noah?”
“Shhh.” He hissed from behind me. I spun around in the dark and he held up a finger to his lips. I nodded, wishing I knew what the hell we were doing here. Or where we even were. It didn’t look like it was anywhere near Lone Pine. I’d been to places like LA and New York with Dad before. This place might fit into one of those places, but how the hell had we gotten that far so quick? A flash of white zipped past us and Noah nodded toward a dark hallway. The orange glow from the streetlight outside spilled in through the broken windows. I stepped over shattered glass and chunks of molded drywall.
Fear throbbing in my chest almost as hard as the pain.
“Grab him!” Noah shouted. I looked up in time to see a white glow split the darkness in the hall.
Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed on to it. It felt like a burst of electricity crackling through my fingers and I winced as the force of it shot up my arm. Someone screamed and suddenly, cold flesh wriggled under my fingers. It was…a kid. He was just a kid. He looked up at me, his face pale and gaunt. His curly black hair dangled just above his big brown eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. He looked like he belonged with the skater kids at school who took over the park every
Saturday afternoon. He didn’t look like he should be dead.
“W-what are you gonna to do with me?” he stuttered.
“I…I…” I didn’t know. What was I going to do with him? I knew what they wanted me to do, but could I? Looking down into his innocent eyes, I didn’t think so. I may have been a lot of things in my life I wasn’t proud of, but this…
Another scream erupted in the silence and we both looked up. Noah. He came pounding down the stairs, a girl behind him. He had a fistful of her long brown hair in his grip. Her face was twisted up in a scowl. She swung out, trying to connect a punch into Noah’s side, but he jerked out of the way and chuckled.
“Let go!” she shrieked.
“If you wouldn’t have run like that, maybe I wouldn’t have had to grab you by the hair in the first place,” he said.
His eyes landed on me and they brightened. “Look at that. You got one on your first try. Aren’t you just an overachiever?”
I stepped out of the hall, shaking, but keeping my grip on the kid. Everything in me was screaming to let him go, but I couldn’t seem to make my fingers follow the direction. “What are we doing with them?”
He rolled his eyes. “You know damn good and well what we’re going to do with them. Unless you’re willing to take their place.” He raised a brow.
The kid wriggled under my grip. My heart pounded so hard in my chest I could feel it in my toes.
“Well, are you?” he asked again.
I thought about those things at the foot of my bed at night. Trying to get to my soul, right through my skin, the day of Dad’s funeral. They’d do that and worse to Anaya if she went down there trying to save me.
I couldn’t let that happen.
For a moment I let myself linger with her memory. The way her lips tasted, the little sounds she made when I kissed her. Her smile, warm and sweet against my skin. If I did this, she’d hate me.
Memories would be all I had left. I took a moment to mentally lock them all away with the piece of myself I’d never give to the shadows, then steeled myself for what was to come.