“Look at me, darlin'.”
Layla's gaze was forced to Rose's blue eyes. An oily shiver went down Layla's spine. How could someone so nice be so awful?
Rose's voice lowered with compassion. “Honey, it's better this way. I think you know that.”
No.
“Besides, you're supposed to already be dead. It's like you're stealin' time, and that isn't good.” Rose smiled, then gently said, “Go on now, slit your throat.”
No . . .
The light of the room warped in Layla's vision.
“I can see that you're strong-willed, and I like that about you.” Rose's pretty cheeks dimpled. “In any other circumstances, I know we'd be friends. But right now, you're alone. Just as alone as alone can be.”
Layla shuddered.
“Why is that, honey? I think you know.”
Because no one wanted her. She'd always been alone.
Rose lowered her head in a confirmatory nod. “That's right. I'm sorry to have to say it, but no one loves you.”
So it was true.
They wanted Kathleen back, that's all.
“And no one
wants
you. Why else would you be stuck down here, when everyone else has left the area to the wraiths? Do you even have food? No toilet, I see.”
“They were protecting me.”
“Oh, honey.” Rose
tsk-tsk-tsked
her pity. “Couldn't you just die? Why don't you just die?”
“Stop it,” Layla said. “Why are you doing this? I never hurt you.”
“You are, though,” Rose said. “I have a man who loves me, who's waiting for me to come home. Twelve years he's been waiting, since my untimely passing. But I can't until I deal with you. You've got nobody, and your life is already over. Holding on is just, well . . . it's just sad. Pick up the knife and cut your gosh-darn throat.”
Stars filled Layla's vision.
No.
“I said,” Rose's voice took on steely intensity, “you are
alone
. You've always been
alone
and you will always be
alone
. It's better to end it
now
.”
The room went white with brightness, blurry and indistinct. Layla shook her head to clear her vision, but the action set the room careening around her.
Layla had thought they cared, thought they understood herâTalia and Adam, Khan, who wouldn't tell her his nameâbut if they'd left her to the mercies of the wraiths and a devil, she must have been wrong. So very wrong. She'd been wrong like this before.
The lifetime wound in Layla's chest opened. She could see the fissure like a black hole, sucking all her hope for love and family and peace into some dark abyss within that would never fill. How her heart beat against that terrible vacuum, she didn't know. The vortex had her in a grip her small strength had no hope to fight. It held her in place. Her only chance of getting free was to cut herself free.
“That's it, honey. Sooner or later, I knew you'd break.”
A knife was right there, within arm's reach. The shiny blade looked sharp enough to slice through anything.
“Won't hurt a bit.”
Nothing could hurt as bad as what she already endured. And even the angels had said it: she was past her time. If she'd had a place in the world, it was long gone now.
Layla reached out and grasped the handle of the knife again.
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Khan evaporated from the nursery into darkness, slid through the Shadowlands, but did not immediately emerge again on the earthly plane so as to have the advantage over whatever creature, wraith or devil, might threaten Layla.
He found her deep in the earth. She stood, tears streaming from her eyes, with a gruesome, fat blade against her throat, held by her own hand. Her grip shook and thin trails of blood trickled down her neck. Distress colored the air around her. Abject sorrow riddled the shadow of the room.
The devil stood on the other side of a clear wall, not unlike the veil between Shadow and mortality, and she had Layla's mind locked within her own. Khan remembered this foul soul. There was no other place for her but Hell.
“One. Quick. Cut,” the devil urged. Partly she looked like a human woman, but her true self was in the hell limb braced on the wall.
His strong Layla trembled, but held fast. She'd fought for this life, fought
through
this life for a second chance at happiness. It would take more than an order to break her will. Layla's will defined her. No devil could break it.
“You're all
alone
,” the devil crooned.
Khan's Shadow turned cold.
Except perhaps if the devil touched
that
fear. If the devil found the Layla who'd been misunderstood and rejected repeatedly as a child. The Layla whose fine, upstanding man Ty could not grasp the forces that drove her to her dangerous work, and left her to it on her own.
Layla's greatest fear was being alone. The devil didn't have to break her. Layla's life had already cracked open her soul.
A blind rage overcame Khan.
From Twilight, he blunted the blade with Shadow. Excised the tool from Layla's grasp. Flung it across the room with a tinny clatter.
The devil's expression sobered. Lost its mock friendliness. Became watchful. Wary. She knew that someone else had joined them.
Layla's empty hand shook midair. Her eyes did not lose the glaze of horror. The knife was gone, but Layla was still trapped. Fear, not the blade, was the keen instrument of the devil.
The devil stepped back from the glass. Her heartbeat doubled its tempo. Her gaze darted to the hallway. To escape.
As if he would ever let her go after the harm she'd inflicted on Layla. No, the devil would release Layla, and then the devil would die.
She'd been clever to use the wraiths, to use his daughter to buy time, very clever, but not quick enough. A devil against Death? There was no contest. It was hubris to think otherwise.
And she enjoyed fear, did she? Well, Khan had a forever's worth of terror in his Shadow. She'd release Layla all right. She'd release Layla
now
.
Khan poured himself out of Twilight, his darkness a Shadow storm under the earth. The deep magic pulsed with power, with his anger and rage, but he let the devil do his work for him.
Not too long ago, she'd been a mortal. He remembered well the shape she'd made of Death.
The devil woman fell back in awe as he assumed the shape of her ultimate fear. His body took on obscene height and hulk, razored teeth grew in his mouth, talons from the tips of his fingers. His chest grew huge with exposed bone and raw muscle, and his belly cavity was hollow. He was a monster for the ages, his breath a snort of fire, his stamp an earthquake. Awful, to be sure, and utterly unoriginal.
The devil woman screamed. Pitiful noise.
Khan took a breath and shrieked a sound that made her ears bleed.
The devil scuttled toward the hallway like a cockroach. He'd crush her out of this world. She'd be a gut smear on the floor. A mess to clean up, nothing more.
But a muffled sob off to the side brought his attention back to Layla.
Layla, whose clear gaze told him she was free of the devil's fear.
Layla, who now witnessed the grotesque glory of Death: him.
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Layla peered beyond the glass, into the observation theater, where a mass of churning shadows had condensed, solidified, shifted through the murky spectrum of the color gray. A line of blackness became the hulk of a chest thickening as somethingâ
Khan?
âformed beast-big shoulders. His features, in profile, were harsh, the menace in his posture severe, cutting, cadaverous.
The sound he'd made turned her blood cold.
Oh, dear God. Her sweat chilled to ice. The pulse of life in her veins stalled. Her vision went dry, too clear, as she stared unblinking at the horror before her.
Death.
That's who Khan was. That was his secret. She should have known it from the start. Every cell in her body screamed Death.
And she'd let him touch her.
Her legs gave and she caught herself on the wraiths' cold slab, quailing against the moment Khan's regard would settle on her.
Please, no.
She didn't want to die. Not yet.
She must have made a sound because he turned his horrible countenance in her direction.
Please don't see me. Please don't look at me. Please. I'm not ready. I just found her,
she begged inside her head.
But his gaze fell on her just the same.
This was it then. So much time, wasted. Her moment with Talia, over.
She raised her hands and face to stop the inevitable. She knew she had about as much chance as a butterfly in a hurricane. But she met his hoary gaze. Tried to speak to him with the panic of her soul.
Please.
As she begged, the dry gray parch of his skin rippled, then rolled. He was changing again. His monster body settled and took on the posture of a man, strong and fit and naked, all of him large, legs braced, muscles flexed with power. His features smoothed, cheekbones lifting to structure his tilted fae eyes, black with soul. Shadow eroded the sharpness of his teeth and left him mouthing her name,
Layla
.And in the storm whip of his darkness, his long hair gleamed.
Oh.
Wait. . . .
Something turned in Layla's mind, like a key in the lock of her memory. Her two selves, Kathleen and Layla, merged at a singular point of awareness. Her bones shook with the force of its clarity.
She recognized him as she had on the winter plain in Twilight.
Kathleen and Layla together. She knew him. The word burned bright on her tongue.
Death, yes. But he was more than that. More than “Khan,” which was just another one of his illusions, a misdirection for his convenience. Males were such idiots sometimes, even this one.
Layla felt a smile stretching her face. She could never be afraid of him.
How could she have forgotten?
“Shadowman,” she said, naming him. At last.
But wedged in the sense of triumph that followed was an unbidden knowledge.
Her smile faltered.
The knowledge was crystalline in its perfection, igniting her mind with a purpose and a task that was hers, only hers. Because of all the people on Earth, only she might accomplish the feat.
She knew why she'd been reborn.
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With his name from her lips, all Shadow went still, and with her smile, he knew he was saved.
Fate had woven different lives for Layla and Kathleen, but both women had conceived the same body for him. Would it have been the same had he revealed his nature to Layla from the beginning? Or had this form been fixed in her mind that day on the docks? He didn't know and didn't care. As long as she accepted him.
Her gaze broke with his, flicking to the left. “Devil got away.”
The devil was no problem whatsoever. She was an irritation, a splinter, no more. There was nothing that could stop him now that Layla was his. He advanced toward the glass wall separating them.
“Everyone else okay?” Layla took a small step back in her room and was stopped by some cabinets on the wall.
She was still afraid, but the color of her emotion was now mixed with fading exhilaration . . . and tremendous sadness.
“The family is safe. The attack is over.” Why was she sad?
He lifted his hands and pushed Shadow against the transparent wall. His darkness insinuated itself into the atoms of its composition, and with a sigh of power, the wall fell to dust.
He didn't even pause in his approach.
Layla gripped the countertop behind her, eyes wide, her breath coming in short pants. He came to a stop before her, close enough to feel her trembling. “Hello.”
“It's, um, good to see you.” She spoke to his chest.
“Layla,” Khan said. To stand before her without effort filled him with an exquisite joy he'd not felt since he first stood before Kathleen.
“Been all spooky shadows for the past couple days.” She feigned lightness. Her sadness was turning to desperation.
“Layla, look at me.” He put his arms around her waist.
“I am. You're an inch away.”
“A little higher, sweetheart.”