Page 11 of Satanic Shadow

The oxygen to my lungs cuts off, and my eyes widen with the pressure as the snake tightens around my throat until I’m unable to breathe. But as quick as my air supply stops, the snake vanishes, and Dane steps back.

I cough, trying to fill my lungs.

Dane shoves his hands in his pockets, probably to try to hide himself. “Why do you keep trying to provoke me?”

“Me?” I sit up and rub my throat. “You’re the one who won’t leave me alone. You’re like a child. Who acts this way? How old are you?”

Dane’s entire expression changes as he backs away from me, and he appears to be thinking. When he doesn’t respond, realization hits.

“You don’t know how old you are?”

“That is none of your concern,” he replies. “Age is a number. You are born to die, whereas I am born to live. I don’t need a number.”

“You can just say you don’t know. Unless you’re two hundred years old, then it would be weird that you keep targeting someone a hundred and eighty years younger than you. You say humans are pathetic, yet you’re acting like one by bullying me. You,Dane Dalton, are the pathetic one.”

As his eyes darken, so does my room. My walls turn to black, the floor crawling with swirling, angry shadows, the ceiling full of them. The happy silhouettes are gone now, replaced by evil. He takes a step forward, and although I feel trapped in place, a force shoves at me from behind, as if it’s pushing me towards Dane, and suddenly I’m standing.

My bed creaks before it slides backward and hits into something.

A wind builds, and my chandelier swings, the room turning cold enough that I can see my own breath.

Two more steps and Dane is right in front of me, his eyes narrowed, his jaw tense. “Do not speak to me like I’m beneath you.”

He’s fuming with rage as he glares at me. Something presses down on my shoulders, and my legs give way until my knees crack into the ground. I look up at him, my hair a mess over my face, and watch his eyes flickering to a bright silver.

Now I’m scared.

I think my heart might beat out of my chest as my things start to fly off the units and pictures crash off the walls. The rug in front of my fireplace is thrown across the room, and flames swirl out of the hearth.

As if something slaps him across the face—maybe the realization that he was about to destroy my room with me in it—he looks around us, eyes wide, noticing all the mess and the gathering shadows on the walls, the ceiling and slowly crawling towards us on the floor.

I can feel them too. They’re excited; they want Dane to keep going, to let out all that power.

No. They aren’t excited. They’re… aroused.

He realizes the same time I do, or he reads my mind. He doesn’t walk out; he vanishes in a swirl of darkness, and I let my lungs fill with much needed air as my room falls silent, as all my things return to their rightful places. The shadows vanish, and the silhouettes are back, watching me.

Dane is powerful, but I don’t think he realizes just how powerful he is.

5

“Tell me, human girl,” Mel begins while brushing Poppy’s hair, “what does an orgasm feel like to you?”

I sigh, looking up from my papers. “Really? Why would it be any different from yours?”

“She has a point. We take a human form now,” Poppy says, wincing when Mel hits her head with the brush. “Ow! You bitch.”

Mel ignores her twin. “Have you nearly died from one?”

I choke on air. “What?”

“I take that as a no. Then it’s clear you have the worst sex life in the universe.”

“Nearly dying from an orgasm sounds horrific, so maybe yours is the worst.”

“I cannot die,” is her reply.

“Then you can’tnearlydie,” I retort. “And I used to have a great sex life, I’ll have you know.”