Day Reaper. Melody Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ face she sees in the mirror might be new to her, but I saw the potential in her human form long before her physical transformation. To me, nothing about her has changed besides the overdue assurance that I can hold her in my embrace with my full strength, and she will not shatter.”

      —Dominic Lysander

      Chapter 1

      Seven days later

      A bird was squawking, and after several minutes of attempting to ignore its repetitive, shrill bleating, I came to grips with the fact that it didn’t seem inclined to stop on its own. I snapped open my eyes, prepared to reach out the window and stop it myself, with my bare hands if necessary—I’d never heard such an obnoxious bird in my life, not in the city, not on the West Coast, not even on my one excursion to visit Walker upstate—and froze. There was no window. And if the vents Bex used to filter fresh air into her underground coven were any indication, there was no bird. Although the vents here resembled the ones in Bex’s coven, I didn’t recognize the room as the inviting, well-decorated step back in time that Bex had created either: no extra furniture for lounging, no scented candles, no gerbera daisies, and no kerosene lamps pulsing in a hypnotic, romantic beat.

      This room contained only sparse necessities: vents for underground-air filtration, a bare bulb for light, a door for privacy, and, of course, a bed. I was in a strange room in a stranger’s bed, its dimensions and décor familiar only by its unfamiliarity, and suddenly, the last moments of my memory smashed into my brain like a semi.

      Jillian tearing out my throat. Dominic healing me. The blood and burning. The transformation.

      Someone was speaking in the room outside this bedroom’s door, and even through the scarred door and the cement wall, I could hear every word being said and recognize the voice speaking: Ronnie Carmichael.

      “Lysander said he would. There’s no reason to think he won’t, so I don’t think—”

      And following Ronnie’s voice was the squawking of that damn bird.

      “Exactly. You don’t think,” Jeremy snapped.

      “Lysander said that he would try,” Keagan said patiently, his voice nearly drowned out by the bleat of that insufferable bird. “His priority is Cassidy and our safety. He won’t take unnecessary risks, like remaining aboveground, away from Cassidy longer than absolutely necessary.”

      “Yes, he said he would try,” Ronnie insisted, but her voice was faint now. “Lysander doesn’t say anything lightly.”

      The bird squawked even louder, in time with Jeremy’s audible groan, triggering a memory of Ronnie’s little-girl voice and something she had confided in me: I never even knew he thought of my voice as grating. I never knew someone’s annoyance had a sound, let alone that it sounded like a squawking bird.

      I was right about the bird not being underground, but unlike anything I’d ever heard, the sound wasn’t a bird at all. The squawking was the sound of Keagan’s annoyance at the grate of Ronnie’s whining voice. Unlike Jeremy, Keagan was too well-mannered to audibly express his frustration with Ronnie, but among other vampires, he could no longer hide his true feelings. His unspoken annoyance had a sound—as loud, obnoxious, and obvious as Jeremy’s audible hostility—and Ronnie could no doubt hear it, too, over the calm, reasonable tone of his words.

      I could hear it.

      I could hear the sound of Keagan’s annoyance.

      The weight of the sheets covering my body was suddenly suffocating. I raised my hand to tear them from my body, but someone else’s hand whipped into the air. I gasped at the skeleton-skinny joints of each finger, the knobby protrusion of its wrist and the elongated talons sprouting from each fingertip instead of nails. I ducked under the hand, trying to avoid its attack and swallow the scream that tore up my throat, but the hand moved with me, moving with my intentions, attached to my body. I froze again, for the second time in as many seconds, and raised the hand in front of my face. It looked lethal. With one wrong move, it could eviscerate me. As I ticked each finger, the long talons swept the air as I counted—one, two, three, four, five—and each moved on my command. Like the inevitability of a rising sun, I realized that the hand was mine. Fear of that hand turned to horror and then to a kind of giddy resignation. Hysteria, more likely.

      I had ducked against the attack of my own hand.

      A swift peal of laughter burst from my mouth.

      I stopped laughing just as abruptly. Even my voice was different: guttural and sharp, like shards of glass scraping against asphalt.

      The voices outside my door and the squawking bird had abruptly stopped, too, and in the sudden silence following my outburst, an uncomfortable, aching vise circled my chest. The pain wasn’t physical, but its presence triggered a dull burn in the back of my throat. I had the immediate urge to destroy everything, to pound the cement walls into crumbs with my fists and tear the sheets into ribbons with my nails—my talons—and fight my way free from this prison. I held myself motionless, resisting the urge, and I realized with a belated sort of curiosity that the aching vise was panic. Without a beating heart to pound and without a circulatory system to hyperventilate, I hadn’t recognized the emotion without its physical symptoms, but even so, it felt the same in one way. It felt horrible.

      I took a deep breath to dispel the panic, purely from habit, but the action wasn’t calming. My heart that wasn’t pounding didn’t slow, and I couldn’t catch a breath that I hadn’t lost. The vise around my chest tightened. I squeezed my hands into fists, trembling from the force of my will to remain still and silent. Something sharp pierced my hands, and I gasped, the raging panic stuttering until I looked down at my bleeding fists. My talons were imbedded in my own palms.

      A door slammed somewhere outside this room, farther away than the voices directly behind the door, but I didn’t hear it slam with my ears. I felt it slam from its flat slap against my skin. Never mind that the door wasn’t near enough for me to see, nor in this room; never mind, the impossibility that I could feel its sound waves; my entire body felt its sting as if I’d been smacked from all sides.

      “Why are you just staring?” His words were impatient and aggravated, but no matter the tone, hearing his voice made the aching around my chest both loosen and worsen.

      The clip of his tread across the cement floor stung like the warning barbs of a wasp. I knew the physical pain on my skin was only the tactile manifestation of sounds—first, the door slam, and now, his walking—but that didn’t change the fact that the sounds really did hurt my skin. I tried to rub away the lingering sting and realized my hands were still fisted, my talons still imbedded in my palms, so I just sat on the bed, motionless and bleeding, like someone trapped without an EpiPen, waiting for the inevitable swelling, choking, death: trapped within a body that had betrayed me.

      “Did you have time to—” Ronnie began, but her voice was too small and too fragile not to crumble under the weight of his will.

      “You heard her waken,” he accused. “Don’t you smell the blood?”

      I could actually taste the pungent, freshly sliced, onion musk of their silence.

      The door swung open, and suddenly, inevitably, Dominic entered the room. He didn’t need permission to cross my threshold, not anymore, and he didn’t bother with the perfunctory acts of knocking or requesting my consent to enter. He simply strode inside and slammed the door behind him with a final, fatal bee sting.

      He’d СКАЧАТЬ