Branch. Infection. Bears. Chew her freaking food? Her stomach turned as she mentally added to the list: assault, car accident, gunfire.
“I’m going to die, right?” That had to be it.
Adam went still and looked at her with those tortured gray eyes of his. Finally, he exhaled. “Not if we can help it. Not again.”
There was a resignation in Adam’s gaze, a sad kind of premature “You’ve finally got it.” So Layla worked fast to parse the riddle.
She was Kathleen, who had died. . . . Yeah, around Layla’s age.
But she was still young. Healthy. She should have years ahead of her. This was nonsense. She wasn’t going to believe it at all.
Layla looked up at Adam. “How much time do I have?”
His nostrils flared. His jaw twitched. “As far as I know, you’ve been borrowing time for the past twenty-four hours.”
Khan hung in the air like a crow, dark wings stretched over the wood, his eyes keen for signs of the living malice, called wraiths, or their even hungrier brothers, the wights.
Wights. They were bound to emerge, for one kind of monster would always beget another. Starve a wraith for long enough so that all humanity is eroded, its body self-consumed with its unforgiving hunger, and you have a wight. Adam’s tight boxes wouldn’t hold them. Gravity couldn’t hold them. They had too little substance to mind mundane restrictions. Yet they were still not spirit, not ghost, and never could be, because they had no soul. Only their appetites drove them.
What Adam needed now was an old technology, one of earth, stone, and magic. A barrow, a grave. Khan would suggest something of the sort to Talia.
The sun was just cresting the horizon. Below Khan, in the forest, Layla was moving with Adam toward the remains of Khan’s first kill, the wight who’d almost had her in its grasp. Dead now.
A sear on Khan’s skin signaled the approach of yet another race to the field of battle, The Order, shining bright enough to light the bare lawns near the main building of Segue. The wraiths had come for Adam and Talia, but Khan knew the angels were here for him.
He hung in the sky considering their approach. The wraiths were dead or fleeing. Layla was in Adam’s care, and yes, the angels had to be dealt with. They had the gate in their keeping. Eventually they would have to ask its maker how it might be destroyed.
After their first failed attempt, he’d been expecting them.
He left the wood, stretched across the sky, and gathered himself before the five angels who were situated on the dried lawn in a V, as if they were geese flying south for the winter. Custo stood in the ranks, coolly meeting Khan’s gaze, even as Shadow roiled in the boy’s eyes.
Khan did not concern himself with his appearance, as he did with Layla; they all knew who he was. Whatever their individual conceptions of Death, how they conceived the fae entity before them, Khan didn’t care. To one he was evil-eyed, skeletal. To another, a dark, horned thing. To Custo, he was an echo of Kathleen’s Shadowman, but harsher, more vicious, yet still a man.
The angels’ combined presence scorched him, but he stood fast as his skin flecked, blackened, sloughed into darkness, then repaired itself again. In mortality, however monstrous the form, pain accompanied the burn, but he preferred it that way. It was something physical, earthly, to feel, and thus brought him closer to Layla.
The angel at the head of the V was yellow blond, with pale blue eyes, and slightly pink, fair skin. “I am Ballard,” he said. It was an old Norse name, meaning “strong.” “By now you know that we can destroy the hellgate you created.”
Quiet, somber conviction filled the air around the host—so they hadn’t come to ask him anything; they’d come to state their intent.
Khan guessed what that was. “No.”
“Doing so,” Ballard continued, “will take the life of Layla Mathews, a life we know to already be at its end.”
“No,” Khan repeated, with greater force. He should never have let Custo take the gate in the first place. “You cannot. Such an act would be—”
Ballard held up a hand. “We would certainly do everything in our power to mitigate the pain she’d have to endure. None of us want to cause harm, but we know that nature, in due course, will eventually take her life.”
Not if Khan could help it. Not today, or tomorrow, or the day after that. They’d just found each other.
When the sun rose this morning, Khan had thought he’d soon fight a devil. It was a fight he could win without difficulty. In the mortal world, the devil might be stronger, faster, more vicious than humans, but it was still mortal and Khan was not.
His Shadow burned, his cloak whipping with his fury.