Page 39 of Walking in Darkness

Because why? Because he’d thought I was too precious to be exposed to what he had to do, when I bore witness to the gravest, most horrible atrocities each night?

A part of me got his reasoning, but the other couldn’t abide him making this decision for me.

I would have been okay with waiting to hash it out with him when he returned.

But now? I couldn’t sit idle.

He was in trouble. I knew it all the way to my soul. I could only imagine that sense was something similar to how he’d known I was in trouble when he’d come to rescue me from the mental facility. The way our connection howled through me like the battering of a storm. Pulling me toward a destination I shouldn’t know but could feel like it’d been marked with a target.

We were stopped at a light, and once it turned green, the line of cars ahead of us began to move and the driver accelerated. We’d made it halfway to the next light when I felt it.

The awareness became so intense it was strangling, my throat closing off and my heart violently bashing at my ribs.

“Stop!” I shouted.

The driver tossed me a worried glance through the rearview mirror. “We still have two blocks to go,” he said.

“It’s okay. Just let me out. Please.” The words hitched with the frenzy that burned through me like a flame.

He shrugged, likely happy to get the freak out of his car, and he barely pulled to the side when he stopped, the tail end of the car still angled into the road.

The car behind us laid on the horn, and I rushed, tossing the two twenties into the front seat before I threw open the door and jumped out.

Breaths haggard and panting as I stumbled out onto the sidewalk.

Disoriented but drawn.

I turned in a circle, trying to get my bearings, to tap into the tether that was hooked directly in my soul.

I instinctively turned toward the narrow road that cut between two tall buildings about twenty feet up ahead on my right. I rushed that way, dodging the people who bustled along the sidewalk.

I rounded onto that street, and I was nearly knocked off my feet by the swell of iniquity that slammed into me. A cold rush that whipped through my hair and gusted across my face.

There were far fewer people here, and it felt as if I’d been cut off from the hustle of the city and tossed into an entirely different realm.

It was like descending into Faydor from Tearsith.

Jarred from one existence to another.

Darkness reigned, and I lumbered deeper into its midst, through the vapor that pumped out the vents low on the buildings and misted the frostbitten air. Following the tether that pulled me in his direction.

My spirit screamed in awareness as I kept myself tucked as close to the walls of the buildings as possible.

I crossed one street, racing beneath the streetlamps of the crosswalk to the other side, before I was back to slinking through the pall.

It was freezing, the air spiked with ice, but I felt drenched in sweat. Consumed by an inferno that threatened to turn me to ash.

I clutched the gun inside my jacket pocket as I crept below the dull, hazy streetlights, the grip slick against my palm.

Too heavy.

All wrong.

I could feel my pulse accelerate, eyes sweeping as I took in everyone I passed.

Wary of anyone who might suddenly turn on me.

A young couple who kissed in a recessed alcove of an apartment building.