Page 94 of Terror at the Gates

Zahariev released me and took a step back. I watched as he shut down whatever part of him had given in to temptation. That cold stab of rejection brought me back to reality.

I bolted for the bedroom.

“Fuck, fucking, fuck, Lilith!” I heard Zahariev shout behind me, but he couldn’t stop me this time. I was in Esther’s room before he reached me, pushing open the door to the bathroom.

I hadn’t expected it to look worse than what I remembered, but now the blood had dried. It was no longer a glaring, bright red but a crude black, thicker in some places than others. I could see all the places she’d touched—the shower wall, the faucet, the countertop. It was like reading her panic in the minutes before she’d called me.

I held on to the frame of the door as I slid to the floor. Zahariev came up behind me and sat, his arms encirclingme, his knees caging me. He dropped his face into the crook of my neck.

I expected him to say something—one day, you’ll learn to listen to me.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t say anything at all.

Zahariev

I stepped into the hall to call for cleanup.

I needed a fucking cigarette, something to distract from the ache in my fucking balls, but I also didn’t want to think long or hard on what Lilith had said in the dining room.

You act like this has to mean something.

Fucking brat.

She meant everything.

Chapter Eleven

Zahariev stepped into the hall. I knew he was calling for cleanup, though he didn’t say it aloud, which I was grateful for. It was one thing to know it was happening, another thing to hear it said.

I wasn’t sure how long we sat on the floor in Esther’s bedroom, but eventually, Zahariev convinced me to leave. I was surprised he was still willing to deal with me. I was a fucking catastrophe, and I’d been very mean. I didn’t really have an excuse, except that I had been awake for almost twenty-four hours and didn’t have a good hold on my emotions right now.

I felt volatile. I felt reckless.

I would have fought him. I would have fucked him. I’d have done anything to do something other than what I was doing right now, which wasthinking.

I rose from my position on the couch, pulling Esther’s blanket around my shoulders, and crossed the room to Gabriel’s record collection. I flipped through them, searching for something familiar to fill the silence, when I heard a noise coming from Liam’s room.

I paused and looked toward the door. It sounded like something had fallen. I took a moment to pull out the record I’d chosen and then headed toward the room. As I opened the door, I tried to turn on the overhead light, but it looked like Gabriel had been in the middle of changing it out, because there was an empty hole in in the middle of the ceiling and a ladder nearby.

Entering this room felt like stepping back in time. I wondered if this was what Gabriel was working on before he was called away to deal with…well, whatever Zahariev had called him to do.

My chest tightened at the thought, but I shoved those feelings away.

I left the door propped open. The light from the living room was enough to see the last letter in Liam’s name had fallen off the wall. I started to look around the crib when I noticed something inside it.

I jumped, my brain scrambling to register exactly what I was seeing. At first, I thought it was some kind of toy, but as I leaned closer, I realized it was something else. Like a large pulsing glob.

“What thefuck…” I pulled out my phone to get a better look, but as soon as the light hit the creature, it gave a high-pitched screech andlauncheditself into the air. I scrambled back, knocking into Liam’s dresser as the creature grew tentacles, its pulsing mass alive with threads of purple electricity.

I reached for my gun just as Zahariev burst into the room, weapon drawn. The creature gave another high-pitched shriek and then spun itself toward him. Zahariev fired, and the creature screamed, falling to the floor. It seemed to writhe, pulsing with violet light. Its tentacle-like arms shotout toward the window, shattering the glass as it catapulted itself outside.

For a few seconds, everything was quiet.

Zahariev looked at me. “You okay?”

I nodded, though my heart was still beating a mile a minute.