Page 8 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

Glass fell from the display, clinking against the hardwood floor. The figure stopped in the beam of light shining in from the street to smile at me.

My stomach churned. Ice-cold sweat trickled down my spine.

It was not a person.

Not a person at all.

As if he had read my thoughts, the strange man pulled out a dagger and said tightly, “No, it’s not.”

The thing—thecreature—was not human and not of this world.

It had a head that might have belonged to a mammal if its eye sockets did not look like small mouths filled with blunt teeth and narrow, forked tongues. The creature’s actual mouth was empty and cavernous, taking up the entire width of its face, and its thin, chapped lips were pulled back across the dark void of its exceptionally wide throat in a hideous grin. The rest of its body was rat-like; short arms, hind legs and a scaly tail poking out from beneath the tattered black cloak it wore.

It was not human. I was not even sure the strange man with glowing gold eyes was human. But Jonah…

Jonahwas.

And he was lying on the hardwood floor, his head propped up against the side of the front desk, with his neck twisted in a permanent and unfixable way.

Chapter four

Cauldron-Worshipping Death-Wielder

The monstrous creature sniffedthe air once through the flat hole in the centre of its face that flared like a single nostril, and then it lunged at Jonah.

My terror never made it out of my throat.

As more debris shifted and clinked onto the ground in the wake of the beast, the strange man and his shining dagger moved with expert skill and preternatural grace. He crossed the room in a heartbeat, meeting the creature with the sharp end of his blade before it could sink its falcon-like claws into Jonah’s unmoving body.

A high, keening squeal perforated my eardrums as he drove the dagger into the beast’s side. The blade made a wet, bursting sound on impact like the creature’s body was a balloon skin of fat and juices stolen from past prey. He pulled the dagger back, spurting liquid I could only assume was blood as the creature stumbled along the ground.

Off-balance, it whirled on him.

Teeth pulled back, mouth closed and forked tongues wriggling in the air, it let out a seething hiss and settled back on its haunches. Its long, oval-shaped head tilted to the side, nostril flaring wildly, and I realised that it couldn’t see him.

Although it had appeared to be smiling directly at me, the teeth in its eyes must have rendered it blind. Instead, its forked tongues seemed to taste the air, and it moved following scent.

The man with the dagger held completely still, letting the creature calculate the distance between them with its other senses—and then he leapt to the side, out of its reach when it sprang forward.

Flying over Jonah’s body in a streak of depthless onyx, the creature was still midair when the man appeared behind it, a broadsword suddenly in hand. With breathtaking ease, he plunged the blade through its midriff, all the way down to the sword’s leather-bound hilt. He nailed it into the floor, right on top of the body I had stumbled over when I first arrived—which I quickly understood to be the corpse of a similar creature.

Silence blanketed the room.

I stared, biting down on my tongue as I considered whether it was really worth adding to the mess by throwing up the contents of my stomach to ease its sick, tight churning.

Those stunning golden eyes met mine, and the man broke out into a sinfully handsome grin as he braced one foot against the creature’s backside and pulled the sword from its rotten carcass. His blade came out dripping with dark blood that smelled of sewerage, which he promptly wiped off using the creature’s own cloak.

My stomach roiled, but I decided it was not worth contributing to the horror on the floor.

“Whatwasthat?” I whispered.

He glanced back at me, cleaning the sword once more for good measure, and sighed. “We call themcaenim,” he answered grimly. He studied the blade, sparkling silver in the light from the rising moon, before sheathing it at his side. “They’re the pets of something much worse.”

“Malum,” John grumbled at my back. I spun around to find him emerging from behind the armchair, brushing dust from his clothes. “Filthy bleedin’ things.”

John’s nonchalance—not to mention his very presence in the store so late at night, and with such peculiar company—diverted my attention from the nightmarish corpses lying in Dante’s entryway. Disbelieving, I shook my head at him and turned my attention back to his strange companion with an arsenal of highly illegal and obsolete weapons strapped to his waist.

“Who are you?”

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