Howler's Night (27 page)

I laughed. “The power of sleep? Do you realize how lame that sounds?”

Her lips twitched, and suddenly I was no longer in the grassy meadow full of fairy tale idiocy, but clinging for life at the edge of a volcanic crater as the burnt-orange and red magma bubbled and hissed below me. I was also naked, and the sharp, jagged lava rocks were ripping into my skin.

I tried tracing away from there, but my body was as solid as any human’s. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The stench of sulfur and thick ash made me gag and wheeze and cough violently.

I didn’t know where Keltse had gone off to, but I had to get out of there. I took one step and winced as a sharp shard of rock shoved through the delicate flesh of my foot.

And then I screamed when a droplet of lava sizzled through my thigh.

I was about to cry out to Keltse, when suddenly I was back in the meadow and she was smiling up at me with her head cocked and her hair flowing. I wanted to throttle her.

“You did that!” I snapped, taking a step forward and realizing that the pain that’d throbbed so violently in my thigh was gone.

“Of course I did,” she said in a high-pitched spirited voice.

Glaring, I dusted off the dress I was wearing again and grunted. I’d clearly underestimated the powers of the deadly sins. Again.

A smug smile laced her full lips. “It is the distortion and manipulation of reality and dreams, but this demon is a powerful tool.”

How stuck in my own world had I been that I’d never even thought to find out just how amazing the gifts we all shared were? I’d never once asked Kemen what he could do. I’d only ever crawled to him when I needed some sleep.

Maybe if I’d taken the time to understand him more, made him see just how awesome and amazing he really was, maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to sacrifice his life as he had.

It made me sad.

“But how do you feed the demon?”

“By making your prey sleep.” She smiled, brightly. “Of course the downside is that it makes you sleepy as hell too. It’s a constant battle not to get overwhelmed by your own gifts, but if you can learn to control Sloth, then you really don’t need to give into him as us Sloth-folk tend to do. You can feed him, Pandora, by simply siphoning off the dreams of others.”

My lips curled. That could be useful indeed. In fact, that could be one of the most useful tricks under my belt.

My lips twitched. “Very interesting. So how do I lull them to sleep?”

She walked toward me and grabbed my hand as Bubba had done last night. Then, twining our fingers together, she pointed.

A conduit of power flowed from her to me. Like sun reflected off hot asphalt, a shimmering mirage wavered before our eyes.

And I didn’t even need to ask her whose mirage it was shimmering before us. I sensed the power that lived within it: sex and absinthe, fury, rage, and, threaded delicately behind it, love.

“That’s Luc, isn’t it?”

“Mmhmm.” She nodded excitedly. “That’s Luc’s soul. But in order for you to bring him in here, you must first release the demon.”

I was getting the hang of plucking only one demon at a time out of the dark box I kept them trapped in.

Lust of course had been a more permanent fixture in my life since getting together with Asher, but I could sense her curiosity as she shared space with the sleepy demon that’d crawled out of the box.

Suddenly I felt lethargic, and it was all I could do not to yawn.

“You can fight it,” Keltse assured me with a nod of her head. “You just need to feed it first.”

And using movements very similar to what Bubba had shown me last night, she began to draw Luc’s soul toward us, as if she were pulling on an invisible rope. She willed it our way.

The moment my hand brushed his soul, I felt the lethargy streaming from out of our fingers and into the heart of him.

My eyes opened wide, and I laughed with relief. Luc did not fight the tug of sleep; he tumbled straight into it, and I sensed that I shared space inside his head.

Not my physical body, but my mind. His head was a long hallway full of door after door after door.

I frowned. How come I couldn’t see him? I thought I’d be shifting landscapes on him. “Where is he?”

Keltse was no longer holding my hand. She had hers crossed behind her back and jerked her chin in the direction of the doors. “There is more to dreaming than making others see what you want them to see. And that is what I’m showing you now.”

As far as teachers went, she was nowhere near as good as Bubba had been. But I was willing to be patient and see where she led.

“These are Luc’s memories. Memories which he compartmentalizes. His entire life is sectioned off.”

“By what? Years? Moments?” I looked back down the hall. The doors were blank, giving no hint or indication of what rested behind them.

She shrugged. “It’s different for everyone. You can spend an eternity inside the mind of an ancient immortal.”

The hallway seemed to flow on into eternity. Years and years and years worth of thoughts and ideas and deeds hid behind each door, and to say that I wasn’t crazy curious would be a blatant lie. I wondered about our nascent years together, and about the time I’d run away from him for over a thousand years, but mostly I couldn’t help wondering what’d happened to Luc while I’d been held captive.

I licked my lips.

“The power you can now wield, it’s very dangerous, Pandora.” Keltse walked around until she stood in front of me, her amber eyes luminescent in her face.

“I know.” Even now my fingers curled with the need to go running down the hallway, to fling wide every door, and to peek into his life. Into his heart. Into what’d really made him tick.

But then I felt a brush of something against my own mind. It was heavy and blanketing, and I cocked my head.

“What is that? Inside my head? Is that you?”

“No. It’s him. Just as you can see into his space, he, too, can see into yours.”

Hissing, I jerked back, because I didn’t want Luc anywhere around what’d happened to me. Or what I felt when I was with Asher. That was private and my own.

“If you want to prevent that, then you must shield your thoughts from him, which makes it about ten times harder to control the prey”

“Are you shielding?” I asked.

“Of course.” She smiled. “But I’ve also had a lifetime of practice.”

“How do I shield?” I stared up at the gray ceiling, wondering what Luc was seeing inside my head, desperately wanting to shut him out of my missing year.

“You throw up a wall.” And so saying, a heavy, steel wall blasted through the ground at our feet.

Jumping back to avoid being crushed by it, I gave her a wide stare. “A little warning would have been nice.”

Patting her dress down, she chuckled. “I’m not here to hurt you, Pandora. This is merely for training. If I were trying to kill you, believe me, you never would have left the lava pit.”

I really didn’t like her teaching methods. But it wasn’t like I had many choices. What Sloth could do was absolutely invaluable, and I could definitely see how it would be a benefit in battle. So I clenched my teeth and pretended like her ways weren’t annoying the crap out of me.

“How do I toss up a wall?” As I asked, I felt a buzzing growing louder in my skull. The buzz and pitch was small, but annoying. I rubbed my head.

“You will it. Create it in here.” She pointed to her forehead. “And it will manifest up there.”

Screwing my hands into fists, I tried to imagine a thick, gray, steel wall. It was easy enough to imagine it, but not so easy when it came to shoving it through my thoughts, blocking off my missing year from him.

It was so strange feeling like I was inside of and outside of myself at the same time. I could see the wall I’d built, and see it was nowhere near as strong as Keltse’s had been. In fact there were definite weak spots along the top and bottom of it, but the center was solid.

I couldn’t see Luc in my head, but I could feel the frenetic, almost angry, buzzing of his soul. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d blocked him off.

Turning my attention back to our lessons, I opened my eyes. This was like an M.C. Escher painting. All the doors were painted black, the hallway was a sickly bluish-gray, and every once in a while a flicker of light, like a bulb swinging on a pendulum, would highlight one door after another. “Luc’s head is kind of a mind-boggling place.”

She shrugged. “This is pretty standard for most immortals. We live long lives; things have to get separated away, otherwise we’d go mad.” Her lips turned down into a soft frown.

At first I didn’t think I’d be able to handle dealing with another Sloth demon. Kemen had been my one and only, and while no one could ever, ever take his place, she did remind me of him in a lot of ways.

Just like Kem, she seemed sweet. Well, as sweet as a sleepy demon could be, anyway.

“So I can alter his consciousness, make him believe what I want him to believe?”

“Mmhmm.” She nodded, rubbing her arms.

“How many people can I control at once? Does this thing have a broad range?”

“For me, a couple dozen at a time. For you”—she flicked her wrist—“probably not. Maybe two. It takes eons of practice to learn to control this many minds. But you’re doing really well for your first time.”

I scratched the back of my head as the buzzing grew in intensity. I doubted Luc could penetrate my wall. He wasn’t a Sloth demon, so even if my wall was all sorts of whack, he’d have to wait outside. But I was leery about sharing head space with him for too much longer. “One day to learn all this—seems impossible.”

She smiled. “Well, you’re doing great. But you haven’t really tapped into this demon’s full potential yet. I mean, changing what someone sees is cool, but what’s even more fun is when you tap into memories.”

Her brown eyes glowed.

I lifted a brow, wondering now if Kem had ever tapped into any of mine. Man, the things my Sloth could do. It was amazing. I missed him everyday, but right now I wanted him back in the worst of ways.

Sighing, I nodded. “I don’t want to screw with Luc’s thoughts.” I didn’t want him messing in mine, and neither did I want to mess in his. “Maybe it’s time I left.”

Shaking her head, she pointed over my shoulder. “The reason Luc asked you here tonight wasn’t just for me to show you how to control Sloth. He told me to help you see a memory.”

I looked to where she pointed and realized the hallway had shifted yet again. Now there weren’t hundreds of doors leading into infinity, but just one. And a sign hung from it.

I read it out loud: “The truth.” I frowned. “He wants me to go in there?”

I wasn’t exactly sure what I might see in there. But a million different ideas of what it could be floated around in my mind. I rolled my bottom lip between my teeth, getting excited and nervous all at once. “What’s in there, Keltse?”

Her eyes were shaded as she stared at the door. “The missing year. I’ll wait out here.”

Turning on my heel, I reached for the door handle, feeling all at once jittery and calm. Luc had never been one to manage his emotions well, so it didn’t surprise me that instead of telling me what was happening, he’d show me.

I was just about to enter when I felt another wave of buzzing that momentarily threw off my equilibrium. Gripping the doorframe, I shook my head. The wall was holding; I still felt it there.

“Luc’s going insane inside of me.”

“The buzzing you mean?” she asked with lifted brow.

“Yes.” I rubbed my temple again.

“That’s not Luc.” She cast her eyes down to her feet, clutching her fingers together. It was a shy and awkward gesture and made my heart pang, missing my quirky Kemen all over again. “That’s Sloth trying to take you down again.”

“Oh.” My brows shot up. I would have thought that with Luc in its thrall Sloth wouldn’t continue to pester me, just like Lust. Once she was fed, she was sated. But apparently I knew nothing of sin.

Giving me a thumbs up, she took a giant step back, and I guessed it was time for me to do what I’d been brought there to do.

The moment I stepped through, not only did Keltse disappear, but so did the door. I stood in a vast white nothingness. But soon the white gave way to a miasma of colors whirling around me, forming images so real and lifelike I would have sworn this couldn’t be just a memory.

I could smell the burning ash of wood and cinder from the grenade blast. The stifling wet heat of that coastal Florida swamp coated the air around me.

Twirling on my heels, I saw me.

But not really me, the memory of me. Blood spilled from my temples, and I was feebly reaching a hand out, croaking Asher’s name. My trailer was a smoke pit, and Asher was screaming out to me.

My heart pounded seeing the nightmare unfold from a spectator’s point of view. But then I saw something I’d never known had happened.

Suddenly my spirit body was tossed into another scene. I was in Luc’s trailer, and he was disentangling himself from Vyxyn’s arms. He flipped open his blinds, and gazed in horror at the sight of my trailer.

Then he traced, and I heard the call of his voice even though he was nothing but particles of atoms moving toward me at the speed of thought. He was a shadow, a blur of light, racing, racing to get to me.

A shifter came out from behind a group of mangroves. And he was wearing a vest I knew all too well—a metal flack jacket that when our atoms bounced off them would force us to shift, would make us as weak as humans.

I glanced to Luc, who was still blurring toward me. The shifter came at him on a diagonal, setting himself up to cut him off. Luc had been so close to me that night, just a few yards away, and I’d never even realized it.

The shifter stepped out, claws at the ready.

“Luc!” I called, forgetting for a second that this wasn’t real. Forgetting that all of this had already happened, that the claw extended toward him had already struck.

Luc didn’t turn toward me, didn’t recognize the danger.

How could he not? He, who could scent out anything amiss, who knew when the world around him wasn’t as it should be. How could he miss the hulking form of a shifter leering just before him?