“For myself, no, of course not.” But this was bigger than her. Layla shrugged. “I hate it, but I can’t think of an alternative. And at least we can be together there for a little while.” A very little while.
Talia shook her head. “I can’t believe it. For you guys to find each other again, and now this? It’s worse than wights and the devil put together.”
“Funny thing is,” Layla said as his winter Twilight sprang to mind, “even if he does go back, I don’t think he’ll last long. He’s too far gone.”
The desolation he faced filled her with sorrow. The ashy ground, the barren branches, the dirty gray of his unending existence. She’d felt the utter lack for a few moments last night and could bear that nothingness only with his arms around her. The pain of his abject loneliness echoed hers. It had been in his voice, and in that lonesome howl, when she’d asked him to reveal himself. He’d known the emptiness of the future, and the monster it would surely make of him.
Layla wept for her love, for his duty, and for his ruin.
“What do you mean?” Talia asked, both urgency and sadness in her voice.
Layla wiped at the tears that coursed down her cheeks. She lifted a helpless hand. “Maybe twenty-some years ago there might have been a chance, but not now.” Layla’s throat contracted at the thought of him trapped in his solitude. How long would it take to resolve things with the gate? Before she could hold him? Would he bend, or would he fight? Fight. “I think it would kill the good in him and leave the dark. And then what?”
She remembered the look on his face when he’d held her in his arms, the insane rage, backed by the might of his magic. It was more frightening than the beast who had stared Rose down before he’d changed into Shadowman before Layla’s eyes.
“I’m supposed to convince him,” Layla said.
“I wish I could help.” Worry lines formed on Talia’s forehead. “But I don’t know how or what to do.”
“No, you’ve got the kids.”
A chattery hiss rose in the room, like the sound of a downpour on a tin roof or nighttime bug talk in the middle of a jungle. Segue was exposed to neither of those conditions, so Layla stood, a now too familiar tightness pulling in her chest.
“Abby?” she heard from far, far away, but she didn’t recognize the voice. It was young and broken and afraid. “Don’t leave me, sis.”
Oh, no. Fresh alarm stirred Layla’s misery to panic. Not Abigail. Not now.
The wraith attack had precipitated something else, too. Everything was coming all at once, with no time to mourn or say good-bye. All the stolen time was spent.
The living room seemed to warp slightly, and Layla remembered the Shadow over Segue, the twisting lines of the building’s architecture. In the rush and danger of the past few hours, she hadn’t had a chance to ask Khan, now Shadowman, what it was. And now she didn’t need to. She knew.
The Shadow was here for Abigail. Zoe’s sister was passing. The reason Layla knew this was simple: Soon she would pass, too, even though she had—finally had—people who would try to hang on to her with all their might. This crossing was inevitable, for Abigail and for her.
Order was asserting itself everywhere.
Layla turned to Talia, who moved strangely slow-fast forward, her mouth shaping words, though the sound was unintelligible. Her face had that fae glow to it again, the tilt of her eyes a touch more extreme.
Abigail was putting Segue, and everyone remaining within it, at the brink, too.
“Scream,” Layla said. She meant to shout it.
Color in the room suddenly amped, and finally—finally—Talia whirled back to Adam, a look of alarm transforming the concern on her features.
And with a crashing rush like the ocean on rocks, Layla could hear again.
Adam opened a drawer and pulled out a handgun. “Where is it?”
He was looking for a wraith or a wight. Layla was shaking her head. “Shadow’s coming. An ocean of it. Scream!”
“Won’t help,” Talia was saying, holding her baby fast to her shoulder. “Have to be in the presence of the living dead, like a wraith, for my father to hear. But if it’s Shadow, we should be okay. I’ll keep us safe.”
“This isn’t just Shadow. It’s freaking Twilight.” Where was a wraith when you needed one?
A tsunami of great force was coming. Layla’s bones trembled with the gather of its force. Colors bled into others, luscious in hue and wicked in severity.
“What do I do?” Adam’s face flushed red, veins popping. The child in his arms screamed in confusion, but the one in Talia’s laughed.