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  Two hundred pounds of evil fiend knocking a person off a roof was never a fun experience.

  This half-finished condo development on the banks of Osoyoos Lake streamed with brackish water and my back hit the sodden asphalt with a sploosh, stealing the breath from my lungs.

  The slimy fucker had a meaty blue fist that she could have used to tenderize my midsection. Instead, three tentacles oozed over my chest, goo seeping through my shirt, and squeezed. She shifted her weight and one of her barbed knees almost amputated my dick.

  “This,” I gasped, “is why I hate tentacles.”

  One rib snapped, then another.

  Buy time. That’s what Kane ordered me to do as he’d run into the desert hills outside the small resort town of Osoyoos where we’d been stationed. And so here I was, having a little moonlight soiree with a ni’ki’t’pil demon, slowly getting my ass handed to me, all for the sake of buying time.

  I decked the demon with a right hook, slicing the side of my fist open on the invisible barbs along her jawline. Blood dripped down my forearm.

  The ni’ki’t’pil’s nostrils flared and she leaned toward me, her tongue flicking out.

  Fuck that. She wasn’t getting any more of me.

  Like a general corralling his troops, I used my magic to marshal shadows into strategic position to lever the demon off of me, but she didn’t budge. Ni’k’t’pils could stick to any surface better than a gecko, and if she didn’t want to move, even my magic couldn’t make it happen.

  She lapped at my fist, her teeth elongating to break the skin.

  I stretched out my fingertips, snagged the salt-coated iron knife stashed in my boot, and

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  stabbed her in the left armpit. The kill spot. Well, what would have been her kill spot, had she not recently birthed some baby spawn.

  Still, old habits died hard, and years of protecting that spot made her jump off me.

  The mucky combo of mud and demon goo rapidly hardening burned a path along my spine and between that and being soaked with sweat and lake water, I was starting to shiver dangerously. I pushed to my feet, blade out, holding my ribs with one arm, wondering for a fleeting second if this was the time Kane had abandoned me for good.

  The demon’s wide eyes narrowed, a cruel smile sliding across her face as she rubbed a gnarled finger over the should-be kill spot. “Nice try, but you can’t kill me.”

  A sharp whistle split the night.

  Kane Hashimoto, my co-hunter on this mission, held up a bloody placenta covered in dirt from where it had been buried. “Guess again. Look what I found.”

  The demon lashed a tentacle out to snap it out of his hands, but it was too late. Kane had activated his poison magic, his skin turning a toxic purple. The salt-based poison infused the placenta, shriveling it to a tiny hard nub that Kane crushed under his boot.

  With a feral cry, the demon disappeared, dead.

  Kane raked a critical eye over me. For a moment, his gaze seemed to linger on my stomach, my bloodied hand trembling against my chest. When he spoke, his eyes had regained their usual acerbic distance. “When I said buy time, Ari, I didn’t mean play punching bag.”

  I laughed, regretting it instantly and clutched my torso tighter. “What? This is what we have the fancy insurance for.”

  “No, it’s not.” Kane’s eyes glinted, hard.

  “I’m flattered.” I shuffled over to him, careful of my ribs, each breath costing me a not-

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  small measure of concentration to keep even, unaffected. “It almost sounds like you care.”

  The sound of his leather boots sweeping a wide turn in the gravel was sarcastic enough.

  “I do care. I care about not busting my ass doing the paperwork to bring your ungrateful corpse home. I don’t have that kind of time.”

  “That’s me. Your own personal inconvenience, dead or alive.”

  I was going to need medical attention, breathing hurt, and I could not be happier because this damn mission was over. Tracking the demon had been a shit show from start to finish: we’d failed to find her before she gave birth, then we’d failed to find the offspring before they’d destroyed the sandbags blocking floodwaters and graduated to preying on pets. They’d even managed to snatch a few babies, but thankfully we’d stopped failing at that point and cornered and killed the spawn before any damage was done. All the kids were safe and home, though maybe terrified of octopi for life. We’d even stolen a shovel from the hardware store for this mad placenta dash and I honestly didn’t know how we were going to explain that one.

  But whatever. All that was a complete cakewalk compared to spending one more second around Kane. Had this mission gone on another day, he wouldn’t have been the one saddled with the paperwork.

  We didn’t speak as we walked back, the only sound my too-harsh breaths and our footfalls on the pavement until the country music pumping out of the dive bar attached to our motel drifted across the parking lot.

  I peeled off toward the bar’s entrance.

  “Drinking again, lightweight? Alcohol poisoning falls under my paperwork ban,” Kane said.

  I threw him the finger over my shoulder and wrenched open the handle.

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  Ten minutes later I was back in my room with a case of beer. This stuff was on the crap end of the spectrum, but it would get the job done. I took a quick shower, pulled on a pair of sweat pants, and popped open the first can.

  Through the thin wall separating our rooms I heard Kane moving around, but thankfully, he didn’t come over to lecture me. Guess I’d made my point last night that it was none of his business.

  I tossed my empty can, number four, into the trash. I was a fucking disaster. I had to get some sleep. My life-long night terror issues had ramped up again over the past couple of weeks and I’d barely been holding my shit together. If things didn’t get better, I’d have to go see our Rasha-approved doctor and get some sleeping pills. Except the thought of being medicated and unable to wake up?

  I ripped into beer number five.

  My eyelids were drooping by time I finished the six-pack, but I forced myself to do four hundred push-ups and then four hundred sit-ups. I needed to be exhausted. Sadly, my post-fight adrenaline high crashed at sit-up number two hundred and seven. I hauled my still-battered body onto the mattress under the thin beige blanket and willed myself to turn out the lights.

  Not that it mattered.

  My nightmares didn’t stay in the dark.

  Have you ever dreamed you were awake when you weren’t? This was how it always played out: I was lying in bed, in the same clothes I fell asleep in. The room was exactly as I left it, but I’d woken up because someone had turned on the light. Carefully, I evened out my breathing and cracked my eyes open a slit.

  There was a figure all in black standing, silently, at the end of my bed.

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  I struggled, like I always did, to fight the panic down. To stay still, still as death or sleep, some limbo between them.

  He stood there, watching me, waiting for the moment when my imitation of sleep was less than perfect to strike. I never sat up in these dreams. I didn’t have to in order to know what would happen.

  That’s what all the kids’ stories said, right? That if you sleep, you’re safe. The bad things only attack when you’re awake.

  I couldn’t open my eyes anymore than this, not unless I wanted to risk discovery. But even with my limited vision, I could still see him raise a hand, one long finger pressed to his lips.

  Stay quiet.

  My mouth was dry and my heart hammered in my ears so loudly there was no way the figure didn’t hear it.

  He smelled like he always did, fog undercut with rot, the blackness of his being due not to his clothing, but emanating from his very core, spun from fear and swirling shadow.

  With his hunchbacked body, red eyes, and horns, he was such a monster-under-the bed cliché that he couldn’t be a real nightmare demon, just some nervous piece of my brain overexerting itself and setting off my night terror sleep disorder. But I still set wards each night, just in case, I told myself.

  Just in case.

  I couldn’t scream, couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t wake up and end this.

  The rest of the room was blown out under the brightness of the light, forcing all my attention onto the figure and making any use of my shadow magic impossible. Not that it even worked in this dream that he controlled–as I knew from past experience. He slithered up beside

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  me, the all-encompassing black void of his eyes boring into my soul, pinning me like a spec of dust.

  My throat seized up, my entire body bathed in sweat.

  If he followed the same pattern as the past few nights, I knew what was coming next, but I couldn’t move to fight him off.

  He placed his hand on my head and I flinched, despite him having no substance. The weight of my empty existence wasn’t a physical one. His shadowy hand dissolved into smoke flowing between my lips and up my nose.

  Whimpering, I shuddered under the twin onslaughts of chills and fever, the paralyzing pressure on my chest growing. My silently screaming protests that this was just a dream, just my parasomnia flaring up, failed to wake me from this horror.

  Crash!

  My brain scrambled to make sense of Kane standing in my doorway and the figure still at the foot of my bed. My paralysis dissipated in a rush, my head snapping back against the headboard and the lights dimming from blinding to normal levels.

  Kane lunged for the creature, but he dissolve

d into thin air.

  “What the hell?” Kane sat down at the edge of my bed and gripped my shoulders. “Katz.

  Look at me.”

  “You saw him? He was real?” I cleared my throat against the squeakiness of my voice.

  “He was real.”

  Demons couldn’t breach Rasha wards, yet this one had gotten to me behind various warded up locations over the course of years. Which meant that all this time, my wards were nothing more than an illusion of safety this demon had allowed in order to toy with me.

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  I dropped my head in my trembling hands. “Oh fuck.”

  “What was that thing?”

  “I thought it was my reoccurring sleep terrors.”

  Kane frowned. “We warded up the motel. How did he get in?”

  “He’s been getting in my entire life.” How could I have been visited by an actual demon all this time? There were two possibilities. The first one was that I was wrong about demons and wards. That there was nowhere we were safe, nowhere we could ever let down our guard, for even a second, against the evil that walked the earth. I clung to the sliver of hope for door number one. “Are there demons that wards don’t affect?”

  “No.”

  Door number two it was. Laughing bitterly, I wiped sweat from my neck and shoulders with a corner of the sheet, consumed with shame and disgust at how easily the demon reduced me to the terrified child I’d been when he’d first appeared in my life. “Then it’s just me. I bring all the demons to the yard.”

  “Stop it.” Kane’s voice was low and hard. “We’ll figure this out.”

  I threw back the covers and stood up. I was a hunter. This bullshit had consumed my life for long enough. It was time to grow some balls and deal with it. Now that I knew there was a real “it” to deal with, I’d live with that reality and formulate a strategy. “Don’t inconvenience yourself. I’ll handle it.”

  Kane grabbed my arm and hauled me backward. His eyes glittered dangerously. “Like hell you will. So sit the fuck down and let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  He didn’t let go of me, his fingers biting into my flesh. Had there been any trace of the sneer he’d worn pretty constantly these past few weeks I would have thrown him off, but all I

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  saw in the depths of his dark eyes was genuine concern.

  This was my problem. So what if it was real now? It was still my problem. And sure, I wished someone would have my back on this. I could call Nava and she’d be out here as fast as she could. But something prevented me from shrugging Kane off and shucking out my phone to call her.

  Could I be any stupider for wanting this? I had better odds with the demon. “Okay. Uh.

  Your arm.”

  He released me slowly, his fingers dragging along my skin before he sat back with his hands folded on his naked chest. “Did you ever try to find out what kind of demon it was, even if you did think it was a dream?”

  I dragged my eyes away from his sculpted torso and sat back down on the bed. “I checked books, the database. I never found one that looked exactly like him.”

  “For now, let’s say he’s a Unique. The visits started when you were young, right?”

  I was surprised he remembered, because I’d only mentioned them to him one time when I was about twelve. “Yeah.”

  “Always at night?”

  “Always when I was asleep. A couple times it was during the day when I was napping.”

  “Did you think you were awake?”

  “No. Because finally waking up was what ended the visit.” I resettled myself back into the position I’d been in when I’d felt paralyzed and cast my mind back to my first inkling he was there. I replayed the entire visit in my memory, frame-by-frame, adjusting my corresponding movements as needed, processing every detail. “Were my eyes open when you came in?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

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  “I think they’ve always been open because I’ve always been awake. Just in some kind of trance. The door opening tonight broke me out of it. I always thought I woke up within a dream when the light snapped on and there he was, but I must have actually woken up. I just couldn’t tell.”

  “Good. So we’ve got a potential Unique who can get at you when you’re asleep, but isn’t visiting you in your dreams,” Kane said. “Lowered inhibitions when you sleep. Your guard is down.”

  “That shouldn’t matter though because of the wards.” I shrugged into my discarded shirt, then bent over and tugged on my boots. “I want to check them. Just to make sure.”

  Kane followed me outside where we walked the property line of the motel. The wards hadn’t been disturbed.

  “Could you use your magic on him?” Kane asked.

  “No. It was always too bright. No shadows–” I stopped so suddenly that Kane almost ran into me.

  He placed his hand on the small of my back to stop himself, the warmth seeping through the fabric of my shirt to bloom inside me. “Ari?”

  “Wait here.” I stepped into a pool of shadow, accessed my magic, and entered the EC.

  Short for Emerald City because being in it was like seeing our world through green night vision goggles, EC was the realm through which I shadow-ported. It was kind of like an overlay on our world, with no sound or smells, but where I was still in the same time and place as normal reality. I’d acquired this ability courtesy of sharing a womb with my sister, who was a witch, and our respective magic affecting each other. The Katz twins were nothing if not complicated.

  I paced the entire perimeter of the motel, but the ward we’d set wasn’t visible in the EC.

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  I returned to Kane’s side. “I know how he’s getting to me.”

  Kane made me go rustle up some breakfast while he cracked open his laptop to do some digging in the database without leaving any trace of his searching. The Brotherhood didn’t know about this shadow-transport ability of mine and we had to keep it that way.

  I cleared up the fast food wrappers and threw open the sliding door. The sun already gave off a hot dry heat in this pocket desert, a welcome warmth after the onslaught of the A/C. I turned my face to the breeze coming off Osoyoos Lake. If I peered through the trees, I saw a sliver of blue and none of the sandbags lining the beaches to stop the floodwaters.

  I dragged out two chairs, motioning for Kane to come outside and sit. He brought his laptop, working quietly beside me, while I watched a travel-weary family unload suitcases, tennis racquets, and blow-up swimming toys from their minivan. “I didn’t know about the EC

  until I got my magic. But the demon knew about me my entire life. How?”

  Kane swung a leg up onto the railing, bracing his computer against his hard thighs. “Your shadow jumping. That’s because of your twin thing and Nava’s witch magic affecting you, right?”

  “That’s the working theory.”

  “Witches are born with their magic,” he said. “They don’t get it in a ceremony like we do. Just because you didn’t know you had this ability, doesn’t mean you didn’t have it. What if you’d accessed it when you were too small to know or remember what you were doing and that’s how the demon found you?”

  I’d have brushed off his theory, except there’d been this one time when I was sixteen when I’d gotten super drunk after my first love had gone horribly wrong. I’d been sitting on a roof, looking over the city, when the world had kind of swung sideways and gone all green. I’d

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  figured it was the booze, but what if I had entered the EC?

  “I think you’re right.” I drummed my fingers on the metal arm of the chair. “My grandmother used to tell me that before I’d even learned how to walk, she’d left me in my play pen with Nava and then five minutes later, she’d come back in the room and I was gone. She freaked out and didn’t find me for ten minutes.”

  “The EC?”

  “Maybe. No one ever figured out how I’d ended up in her kitchen. If the demon lives in there, then yeah, he’d have been aware of me.” I peered over Kane’s shoulder. His spiky black hair brushed my cheek and the soap he’d used teased my senses, triggering the memory of our one kiss like a punch to my gut. I knew Kane better than anyone did, and it was on me how badly I’d screwed that up.

  I cleared my throat, curling my hands into fists so I didn’t touch him. “Anything useful in the database?”

 

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