“Come now,” he said. “Wake.” He’d crouched near Layla’s fallen form and gently lifted her shirt to bare her skin and the white undergarment that snugged her breasts, though he knew doing so would embarrass her later. He should have sent the human vermin who’d attacked her deep into the river and let the ghosts within the flows grasp at the rapists’ limbs until the men drowned. Too bad it wasn’t their time.
Layla turned her head in the alley dirt.
“You’re all right,” he said to counter the confusion billowing out of her. The woman had a strong mind and a stronger will. He could not blot out the memory of the hellgate or Kathleen’s fairy tale, however brief, but he could make her doubt they had ever really happened. They would seem like dreams to her. Would she succumb to this adjustment in her reality?
“Mother of—” she groaned, her lids lifting as her face contracted in a wince.
“They’re gone now,” he said. Long gone.
She laboriously shifted up onto an elbow, then must have perceived her partial nakedness, because she scuttled back toward the concrete wall pulling her shirt down. Expression tight with shame and anger, she said, “Who are you?”
Simple question, yet he had no answer to give. Kathleen’s “Shadowman” would sound absurd to Layla’s ear. Instead, he asked, “Can you stand? My place is just there.” He lifted a hand toward the warehouse. “You would be comfortable, and we could call”—this was a gamble, for he had no modern contrivances to make good on the offer—“for aid.”
She lifted herself along the wall to standing and held up the palm of a scraped hand. “Just stay back.”
“I will not harm you.” He allowed her a very small distance between them. “We can summon the”—what did they call them in this age?—“police.”
“Police.” She nodded agreement, visibly swallowing. “Police would be good. Those guys can’t have gone far.”
He gestured to the building.
“Right.” Layla lurched into a walk, glancing once furtively over her shoulder and murmuring, “Had the weirdest nightmares.”
“You hit your head.” He felt her internal denial, then a surge of determination as she attempted to collect her confused impressions into some other order. The gate, her moments in Kathleen’s fairy-tale fantasy—yes, with a spark of desire that made him fight a grin. Then her frustration. The only reasonable answer was the one he was giving her, and Layla, he’d discovered, preferred reason whereas Kathleen lived for dreams.
She stopped at the door, gaze dropped on the knob. What had been broken, he’d used Shadow to make whole again, though only in appearance. He had no lasting hold in the mortal world. Now he was using everything he had to hold his body.
She stepped back, shaking her head. Disquiet and confusion infused the air. “I don’t want to go in there.”
Of course she didn’t. The last time she had, she’d faced a gate to Hell. Touched it and released something evil. But the gate was gone, now in the angels’ keeping.
“You need to sit down,” he said, reaching around her and twisting the knob. He pushed the door open to let her view the changed interior.
She startled, swayed, and grabbed for the door frame. He would never let her fall.
“You had better go inside.”
Still she hesitated. This was the moment she would have to decide what was real and what was false. Would she hold to the memory of the bare, dirty space and the hellish gate, or would she take this more reasonable illusion, made from a glossy image in a moldered magazine scrap: “Bachelor Pad Goes Old World.”
“Who did you say you were?”
“I’m an artist,” he answered. That’s what Kathleen had been.
“I meant your name.”
He had none to give but Shadowman and variations of Death, neither acceptable. He needed something else, and fortunately he had a great catalogue from which to choose—the names of the souls he’d taken into his keeping, however briefly, as they crossed from the mortal world, through faery Twilight, to the Hereafter. One stood out: a fighter, a leader, a gambler, and cunning enough to challenge Death.
“Khan.”
Layla snorted. “As in Genghis?”
Yes. But instead he lied. The fae were excellent deceivers. “It is common enough where I come from.”
And so he became Khan, artist. It was much better than the alternative, Death. If he could not control his Shadows, that’s exactly who he would be.
Layla stepped over the threshold, looking around to take in the trappings of his residence. He had to admit, the style, drenched in the memory of the old world, suited him. The furniture was framed in thick, scrolled wood. The fabrics were rich with deep color: burgundy, royal blues, and burnt golds. A large medieval tapestry hung on the wall, its roaring lions and crest faded with time. Candlesticks littered a nearby table, upon which a map was unfurled, the unknown expanses of sea and land marked by monsters. Holding the corners down were a stack of books and the sculpted head of Buddha, the “awakened one.”
Layla wrapped her arms around herself. “How can you live here? Eventually someone’s going to rob you. Aren’t you afraid you’ll be murdered in your sleep?”