“I said,” Rose’s voice took on steely intensity, “you are alone. You’ve always been alone and you will always be alone. It’s better to end it now.”
The room went white with brightness, blurry and indistinct. Layla shook her head to clear her vision, but the action set the room careening around her.
Layla had thought they cared, thought they understood her—Talia and Adam, Khan, who wouldn’t tell her his name—but if they’d left her to the mercies of the wraiths and a devil, she must have been wrong. So very wrong. She’d been wrong like this before.
The lifetime wound in Layla’s chest opened. She could see the fissure like a black hole, sucking all her hope for love and family and peace into some dark abyss within that would never fill. How her heart beat against that terrible vacuum, she didn’t know. The vortex had her in a grip her small strength had no hope to fight. It held her in place. Her only chance of getting free was to cut herself free.
“That’s it, honey. Sooner or later, I knew you’d break.”
A knife was right there, within arm’s reach. The shiny blade looked sharp enough to slice through anything.
“Won’t hurt a bit.”
Nothing could hurt as bad as what she already endured. And even the angels had said it: she was past her time. If she’d had a place in the world, it was long gone now.
Layla reached out and grasped the handle of the knife again.
Khan evaporated from the nursery into darkness, slid through the Shadowlands, but did not immediately emerge again on the earthly plane so as to have the advantage over whatever creature, wraith or devil, might threaten Layla.
He found her deep in the earth. She stood, tears streaming from her eyes, with a gruesome, fat blade against her throat, held by her own hand. Her grip shook and thin trails of blood trickled down her neck. Distress colored the air around her. Abject sorrow riddled the shadow of the room.
The devil stood on the other side of a clear wall, not unlike the veil between Shadow and mortality, and she had Layla’s mind locked within her own. Khan remembered this foul soul. There was no other place for her but Hell.
“One. Quick. Cut,” the devil urged. Partly she looked like a human woman, but her true self was in the hell limb braced on the wall.
His strong Layla trembled, but held fast. She’d fought for this life, fought through this life for a second chance at happiness. It would take more than an order to break her will. Layla’s will defined her. No devil could break it.
“You’re all alone,” the devil crooned.
Khan’s Shadow turned cold.
Except perhaps if the devil touched that fear. If the devil found the Layla who’d been misunderstood and rejected repeatedly as a child. The Layla whose fine, upstanding man Ty could not grasp the forces that drove her to her dangerous work, and left her to it on her own.
Layla’s greatest fear was being alone. The devil didn’t have to break her. Layla’s life had already cracked open her soul.
A blind rage overcame Khan.
From Twilight, he blunted the blade with Shadow. Excised the tool from Layla’s grasp. Flung it across the room with a tinny clatter.
The devil’s expression sobered. Lost its mock friendliness. Became watchful. Wary. She knew that someone else had joined them.
Layla’s empty hand shook midair. Her eyes did not lose the glaze of horror. The knife was gone, but Layla was still trapped. Fear, not the blade, was the keen instrument of the devil.
The devil stepped back from the glass. Her heartbeat doubled its tempo. Her gaze darted to the hallway. To escape.
As if he would ever let her go after the harm she’d inflicted on Layla. No, the devil would release Layla, and then the devil would die.
She’d been clever to use the wraiths, to use his daughter to buy time, very clever, but not quick enough. A devil against Death? There was no contest. It was hubris to think otherwise.
And she enjoyed fear, did she? Well, Khan had a forever’s worth of terror in his Shadow. She’d release Layla all right. She’d release Layla now.
Khan poured himself out of Twilight, his darkness a Shadow storm under the earth. The deep magic pulsed with power, with his anger and rage, but he let the devil do his work for him.
Not too long ago, she’d been a mortal. He remembered well the shape she’d made of Death.
The devil woman fell back in awe as he assumed the shape of her ultimate fear. His body took on obscene height and hulk, razored teeth grew in his mouth, talons from the tips of his fingers. His chest grew huge with exposed bone and raw muscle, and his belly cavity was hollow. He was a monster for the ages, his breath a snort of fire, his stamp an earthquake. Awful, to be sure, and utterly unoriginal.
The devil woman screamed. Pitiful noise.
Khan took a breath and shrieked a sound that made her ears bleed.
The devil scuttled toward the hallway like a cockroach. He’d crush her out of this world. She’d be a gut smear on the floor. A mess to clean up, nothing more.
But a muffled sob off to the side brought his attention back to Layla.