“It is your nature, Stormcrow,” she said. He had as many names as he had faces. He preferred the one that Kathleen had chosen: Shadowman. Moira shook her head. “And nature always prevails.”
Khan smiled to match the sharp flash of her gaze. There was no going back, not now, not ever. The world was different . . . and so was he. But Moira had been trapped in darkness age upon age. She couldn’t possibly understand, but he tried anyway. “I want to change.”
Moira laughed. “But you are fae.”
Fae, yes. But not the same as he had been. Kathleen had worked that miracle, and he would not, could not, give it up. To prove it, he lifted a hand and banished the illusion from the woman’s mind. He would not help her cross, but he would not leave her trapped, her soul to burn out, either. The kneeling woman froze, double blinked. Blinked again. Slowly her gaze lifted from the root-gripped earth to him.
He’d known it would happen. Could almost sense the order of her mind asserting itself. The perfumed air of Twilight changed its humor, took on a familiar stench. Likewise, his shadows stirred as the woman reformed him to match her mental image. Shadow pulsed, then condensed into a settling roil. Then went still.
And the woman screamed.
The ultimate monster now stood before her: Him. Death. The Grim Reaper.
Moira’s laughter rose. “You are as you have always been.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded. What horror had his form taken? Would Layla see a monster as well? Would she scream? “But I don’t choose it.”
The words had scarcely left his tongue when he sensed the earth shiver, a great trembling as if it sought to cast off something unclean. The devil.
Khan sent fingers of darkness skimming along the veil. Mortal life sizzled on the other side with flashes of emotion, innumerable voices raised in conversation, layering into a great clamor of humanity. Everywhere soul-lights flickered, some approaching for a cross, though he would not be the one to shepherd them. The angels had better look sharp.
There! A sticky suck of blood, the smear left behind by the devil.
Khan gathered great wings of Shadow to him.
Moira laughed, “Fly, Stormcrow!”
And he did. He had a devil to catch.
He crossed the boundary between the worlds, broke through the atmosphere, and found himself down the street from the warehouse where the gate was created, near the river. An unholy stain marred a spot on the street where the devil had taken its first victim. The kill was not palpable to human senses. The spilled blood had been washed from the street and the smell of fear had dispersed into the wind. Yet the sense of evil remained. Passersby would shudder. Neither animal nor insect would draw near. But the devil was long gone.
Khan cast his Shadow out again. And there, again, the creature had taken lives. The devil had headed south, into a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
This blot on the world, marked off by yellow tape, was situated near racks of clothing within a large store. Again, the signs of violence had been cleaned, but the sense of evil could never be completely erased. This store would fail. The building would go derelict.
Khan reached again. Where and how far could the devil go in the short space of a single day? He sought the stain of another wrongful death and found it along a highway. Through Shadow he gathered himself to that spot.
The body was still there. The spirit had crossed.
Khan crouched low to examine the corpse. It had been a quick kill, more to incapacitate than to murder. Across the gut were four long, bloody gouges, like the swipe of a bear claw. The red stuff congealed across the belly. The ground beneath was stained red. A vehicle was parked askew, off the road. It was incongruous with its owner—the metal rusted and dinged, while the body of the man had the sheen of wealth. If Khan had to guess, the devil had preferred this man’s car and had stolen it from him.
But to go where?
Mountains rose in the far distance. A green sign just up the way read, WEST VIRGINIA TURNPIKE. And then Khan knew. Of course. Where else would it be headed? To whom would it be irresistibly drawn?
Segue. And Layla, who’d set it free.
Layla sat on the bed, the blankets still drawn but now covered with chicken-scratch notes she’d jotted on a pad of Post-its she’d found in the bedside drawer. The sleek digital clock next to the bed said it was 1:12 a.m., but there was no way she could sleep. The ghost girl had made sleeping ever again unlikely, and Custo’s cryptic warning had settled it.
She was in over her head. Khan had promised her answers, but with the depth of mystery that existed within Segue, answers could easily become a life’s work.