Page 9 of Aberrant Monsters
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “Tomorrow night. We’ll go together.”
I nodded as she quickly copied Elina’s address onto a scrap of paper.
We put the diary back in its hidey-hole and slipped from the room. I couldn’t relock it, but hopefully Uncle Fred would assume he’d left it unlocked.
We parted ways down the corridor with a quick hug. I slipped into bed as the sky turned gray and closed my eyes when I felt Telarion enter the room.
He was a shadow now, incorporeal, a whisper of his magnificent form. He sank through the duvet and into my skin, stealing my breath and forcing my back into an arch.
I felt him settle and become one with me, wrapping himself around me, cocooning me like big spoon to my little. My body relaxed, thoughts fluttering away like tattered ribbons as he pulled me into sleep.
This shouldn’t feel so good. It shouldn’t feel so right.
It had to stop.
four
The Real Deal offices were located north of the city on the outskirts of the Underbelly, which was home to the New Bloods—mutated humans thought to be infected by a virus that had made its way into our world through an eldritch rift.
The location worked well as we catered to humans, supernaturals,andNew Bloods. The journey was an hour by car and forty-five minutes on the underground. Not too bad at all for the city.
We took the underground this morning so we could stop off at the bakery around the corner from the station to pick up breakfast. There was something wickedly delicious about a chocolate-filled croissant that kickstarted the morning like no other.
Telarion stirred inside me, awake and aware as I devoured the pastry. He could communicate with me if he wanted to, and in the first week of being captive in my body he’d taken advantage of that, almost driving me crazy with his incessant commentary and unwarranted advice and observations.
He was mostly silent now, rarely making himself known during daylight hours. I could feel him, though—a constant pressure at my solar plexus. It’d been unsettling at first, but now it was almost comforting, which should have been unnerving because he was an alien entity from another realm, and I knew literally nothing about him.
Oh, I’d asked him plenty, but when it came to his origins, his life in the eldritch realm, he was tight-lipped.
It bugged me.
And the fact that it bugged me bothered me. Because why should I care who he was or why he existed? All that should matter was getting rid of him. His story didn’t matter. I didn’t want to know it because disclosure bred familiarity, which in turn created emotional closeness. I may not have control over how physically close we had to get, but I would certainly control how close we got emotionally.
I was halfway done with my coffee by the time we got to our office on Crow’s Path, a narrow parade of novelty stores and businesses that petered out at the gates to the Underbelly.
They said the Underbelly wasn’t a prison, but the gates around it and the guards told a different story. New Bloods were registered, carded, and treated like outcasts in certain parts of the city. The ones lucky enough to be able to pass for human were allowed to work in the main city. Some even managed to have social lives outside of the Underbelly, but romantic and sexual relationships with humans were prohibited—the government’s way of preventing more New Bloods from being born.
Rift walkers, although technically New Bloods, were exempt from this rule. My kind were too valuable, and as I’d managed to remain undetected and unregistered, my New Blood nature wasn’t common knowledge. People I worked with assumed I had extrasensory abilities or that I was a supe. I allowed them the misconception.
We finally reached our tiny office tucked between a pawnbroker and an antique bookstore. It didn’t stand out much, but that didn’t matter—the people who needed our help tended to find us regardless.
I faltered a little going past the pawn shop, unable to ignore the shimmery green residue smeared across the glass. I knew what it was, of course. Uncle Fred had explained it to me, and I was supposed to ignore it. It had been there for months.
“You okay?” Nandi asked, looking from me to the glass. “Is it still there?”
“Yeah, but it’s not our problem.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Exactly. Come on, I need a fresh hit of caffeine.”
We entered our offices to the tinkle of the bell above the door and found Archie, the third member of our team, tussling with the coffee machine.
“Stupid, fucking, buggering thing.” He fought with the pot, trying to yank it out of its cradle.
“It’s okay, babe,” Nandi said.
Archie’s head whipped round, and his brows shot up before a smug smile painted his lips. “Knew you’d come round eventually.”
Nandi rolled her eyes. “I was speaking to the coffee machine. Out of the way, Neanderthal.”
