Page 17 of Monsters' Manor

He takes a shaking step back, face sheet-white and watery eyes wild. “Wh-what are you?”

“A nightmare,” I say with a cruel grin. “Your nightmare.”

With a flick of my wrist, a tendril of shadow snaps out toward him and whips against his cheek. I’m sure it barely stung, but he slaps a hand to cover the spot on his face and takes a few more steps away from me.

From somewhere behind me—or maybewithinme, it’s honestly hard to tell right now—the familiar rumble of Silas’s chuckle makes my grin widen.

“I think it’s time for you to leave,” I tell the man. “Unless you’d like to find out what happens when nightmares like me catch up with men like you.”

He sputters a few more times, but can’t come up with any kind of coherent answer as he continues staring at me in terror and disbelief.

I wonder what kind of sight I must make. Grinning, vengeful, darkness incarnate.

Goddess, this is fun.

“Wonderful, darling,” Silas croons, and the note of pure, sinful pleasure in his voice sends a thread of dark delight through me.

I let all that darkness gather, pull it back to me in great, pulsing waves. Looming, threatening, wicked.

The man’s trembling grows more violent, and he finally takes a step back. Then another. And another. Until he’s tripping over his own feet and stumbling off down the hill toward the parking lot.

“Good riddance, asshole,” I mutter as he goes.

I’m still cloaked in Silas’s shadows, and when another rumble of soft laughter breaks from his throat, I feel it all the way through me.

With the drunk taken care of, I expect Silas to pull back, to disentangle himself from me and leave me ordinary and human once more. Not a fearsome thing, not a creature of darkness.

But he doesn’t.

No, as the silent seconds pass, those shadows stay right where they are. Still holding me, still caressing softly, as if the feeling of being bound like this is as novel for him as it is for me.

“You were magnificent,” he says, though I’m not sure if the words are spoken aloud, or if they just flow between us as naturally as his darkness does.

“I think you get most of the credit,” I whisper, raising a hand and giving another experimental flick of my wrist, watching the darkness shoot out and retract at my command. “This is pretty fucking cool.”

Another chuckle, and his shadows gather close. “How does it feel? Wielding them?”

“It feels…” I start, then trail off, trying to find the right word for the magick still skittering along my skin, the midnight embers humming through my blood. “Powerful. LikeI’mpowerful.”

“You are powerful, darling.”

For a few long moments, every one of my retorts and all the thoughts in my head go strangely silent.

There’s nothing left but me and Silas. The darkness of him and the hush of the evening air. The steady pulse of magick between us.

It’s… incredible, this feeling. Enough to lose myself in. Not in fear this time, but wonder. Instead of pulling on all my terror and worry, his magick soothes. It cloaks me in protective darkness, draws me close and expands me all at once. I might be infinite in this magick.

Well, at least until the laughter from a nearby group of guests shakes me out of my trance and back into reality.

Silas must hear it too, because he pulls away. Like water swirling down a bathtub’s drain, the sensation of the magick leaving me is slippery, insistent, sucking the air from my lungs as it goes.

I stagger a little when the last of the shadows leave me, gasping in a desperate breath.

“Rosemary?”

I open my mouth to answer, but my head spins and my vision swims.

“Woah,” I mutter, wobbling as I struggle to regain my balance.

---