Page 10

After examining the sheen on the pads of his fingers for a moment, he brushed them off on his shirt and replaced his fingers on my mouth. His thumb was so large that it caressed both of my lips and grazed the tip of my nose in one long, slow sweep. And then he repeated the process of clearing away the powder on his shirt before he dusted the last of it from the sides of my nose.

“Odd,” he remarked quietly, looking at me as if it was for the very first time. “The fae-lily should have knocked you out cold.”

And then, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake, it finally clicked.

“You were trying todrugme?”

Trance well and truly broken, I put both hands on his chest and shoved him away from me as hard as I could. He staggered backwards, but his pealing laughter made me think the unsteady steps were mostly for show.

“No,” he insisted with a chuckle, eyes burning as bright as a solar flare. “Well, okay, yes.”

Flabbergasted, I looked to John for backup but found that he was hobbling towards the back of the store—completely unaware, or maybe indifferent. Floorboards creaked beneath his steps, and then the light switch flicked into place as the lanterns hanging from the rafters ignited with a crackle and hum. I’d known it was dark, but my eyes had adjusted to the low luminosity of the streetlamp and fast-rising moon. The electric lights above were blinding, and I winced, angling my head towards the floor…

Where thick, malachite-coloured blood streaked with black was oozing out of the mangled, grey-skinned bodies below me.

Under the light, the caenim were even more atrocious to behold. Their skin was taut over their bones, giving their features horrifyingly sharp edges, and tufts of thinning white hair were visible poking out from beneath their hoods. Forked tongues hung limply from their eye sockets. Their two sets of teeth were indeed ground down into stumps and browned with age and—I gulped—diet.

Dante’s floor was slick with their blood from the entryway to the centre of the bookcases, where another dead caenim lay amongst a disarray of fallen novels. And above…

I made a horrified noise in the back of my throat and reached for something to steady myself, but my hands came up empty as I turned my gaze skyward. Another monster was slumped across the rafters, dripping the gunk of its lifeblood onto the shell of its companion collapsed between the aisles. One more was heaped behind the railing upstairs, a single clawed hand drooping over the side.

Six.

There were six of those monsters.

Five dead, and one at large.

My face must have twisted in shock because Wren stepped up to my side and bent his head to my ear. I stiffened at his proximity, at the inviting scents falling over me, into me, and around me.

“Like I said,” he murmured roughly, his soft breath tickling my nape. “You’re welcome.”

Angling my head to shoot him a glare, my train of thought stopped dead and derailed as I saw him in the full light for the very first time.

Human—but not.

At his full height, Wren truly towered over me. The top of my head barely reached his breastbone. He had mid-length, wild hair; the blond was as if someone had mixed sand in a pool of molten starlight. His complexion was glass-like in its perfection, his skin as warm as a sun-drenched desert, tawny beige in colour. His eyes, still glowing like liquefied gold, were almond-shaped and framed with impractically long lashes beneath two thick, angular brows that sat symmetrically on either side of his face.

My eyes followed the slope of his nose, built from the same polished marble as every other one of his features, down to the glittering stubble along his sharp jawline, and then his mouth—curved to one side in a self-indulgent smirk.

I pointedly looked away. And then I looked right back.

Perhaps I should have been afraid, but if I was, it was not provoked by the weapons he carried or the ethereal colour shifting in his eyes. It was his face that frightened me. The look he was giving me.

He was stupidly attractive. He was stupid… He was…

“I have a portal to destroy,” he announced at an unnecessarily loud volume, winking at me before spinning on his heels.

My hand shot out to snatch his wrist before I could think twice. I missed, and my fingers gripped onto his unnervingly large thumb. “Wait.” I swallowed the lump in my throat as he hesitated, then swung his head around to look at me. “Jonah.”

John, I had decided, was a lost cause. Short of swatting him over the head with a hardcover book and dragging him by his ankles through the pool of beast blood out of the store, I couldn’t help him.But maybe Jonah…

A thick brow rose. “Wren,” he corrected with no small amount of condescension.

My pupils flared. “No.Jonah.” I let go of his thumb and pointed at my friend, who hadn’t moved at all since he was thrown through the window.

Wren tilted his head to the side. “I amnota coroner, but heisdead.”

I knew that. Iknewthat, and yet the word hit me like a blow to the chest, impossibly heavy and painful.