“Having trouble sleeping?” came a sudden voice from behind me.
It scraped up my spine like a hairbrush of nails. I spun around, hands out at once with claws and scales following in the same second, hovering at the ready.
Sitting in the shadow of the chimney was a man with white eyebrows, the same man I’d twice seen in my nightmares: Wyck.
17
White
The claws on Wyck’s hands were spread apart like the teeth of a shark, gray eyes trained on me with fierce intent, lips parted in a smile. His breathing was so even that I knew he’d been waiting while I’d been inside the house, preparing for the moment I would emerge. His face hadn’t aged a day from the man I knew in my nightmares.
I’d been in that position so many times in my dreams that I knew there was a pistol in his right hand. But when I looked and saw no weapon besides his claws, the shock broke me out of my deer-in-the-headlights petrification.
Seized by internal programming I didn’t fully control, I launched into the air, claws extended fully for Wyck’s throat.
Wyck was faster. In a flash, he cut through the air, the scaled back of his left hand catching my jaw like the strike of a steel hammer. The thud and crack were deafening, throwing me off my feet and into a black void.
My back slammed into the grass, muted colors spinning above me like muddy paint in a running blender. My jaw felt like it had been dislocated below my ear. The ringing in my head was unbearable as I tried to lift myself, waving my arms like an overturned beetle rocking back and forth to find which way was up and where the sky and ground became separate.
“Of course you weren’t dead. I knew better than to fall for that,” Wyck’s leering voice came from over my scalp as he landed on the grass behind me. He spoke like all of this was merely play to him, a slow singsong quality in the way he accented his words. He laughed in victory, a tiny sound coming from deep in his throat.
“You’re much too smart for that,” he went on. “But I’m smarter than you are, it seems. Smarter than Mr. Sharpe, too—the idiot bastard.”
There was twisted glee in his voice, a maniacal cadence that caused him to accent certain words oddly and wheeze as he tried to breath in and out. I choked for air that’d been knocked from me in the fall. He watched as I struggled, offering neither help nor any prevention, tilting his head down over me.
“You’re bleeding,” he told me. Wyck studied the blood as it ran down the side of my face with an odd interest. I could feel the liquid dripping from somewhere on my lip where his red ring had grazed. I gagged on it, spitting and choking.
“It’s just a little blood,” he said. “No need to thrash. I’ll get it.”
He bent closer to me and I tried to move, so he slammed a knee onto my shoulder in response. I groaned out a cry that refused to escape as I felt my bone ground into the grass, his head nearing mine from the other side. He extended a single silver claw, hand wavering as it came closer to my face, ignoring my squirms of pain under him. For one terrible moment I thought he meant to slice my throat, but instead he only wiped the blunted flat side of his claw across my lip, staining his silver with my blood.
He lifted up straight, looking at the blood, finally releasing. I’ve just got to stand up. If I could stand then I could get my hands from under me, I could slash him across with the razors…
I found a sliver of strength and dove to grab his legs, but he stopped me with a swift knee to my stomach that sent me curling up again. I managed to get onto my side but my arm had too little strength to keep me up, so I fell over onto my front. I struggled to put my hands out but only managed to tilt my head and see the sides of Wyck’s black leather shoes as he knelt beside me. He continued to study the red on his claws before finally retracting them, the blood sliding to stain his fingers.
“I’m just so happy that we finally get to meet this time,” he said. “I’ve met you so many times before that it’s almost like I know you already. Maybe we should introduce ourselves again?”
If someone standing nearby had heard his tone, they never would have thought that he was kneeling over my beaten body. He was so calm that it was frightening, a control that told me that he’d already accounted for any possible means by which I might escape.
He reached out and grabbed me by my chin, squeezing it so tightly that the inside of my cheek felt like it was being cut against my own teeth. He pulled me to look at him, his grip around the side of my neck and upper throat.
“I’m Wyck Alyson,” he said. “I’m Morgan Alyson’s Chosen, and her son too. I’ve killed you a lot. And now you’re mine. Mine!”
He tapped me with his thumb. He tilted his head again. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me who you are, Michael.”
I gritted my teeth together, refusing to play a part in whatever sadistic game was going on in his head. But he became impatient and tightened his grip, turning me back and forth.
“I’m Michael Asher,” he said in a high voice, squeezing my lips to move. “I will rip your skin into tiny pieces, Wyck—if you’ll just help me up off the ground, please.”
Another tiny laugh, like a child playing with dolls, but maniacal when coming from such a man. I wanted to run, to fly, to draw him away from that place, so close to my sister who probably was in her bed again, thinking I was far away.
I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t even have the breath.
Wyck grew tired of waiting. He pushed his shoe under my chin, lifting my face up with its hard rim. I couldn’t cry out, even as the pain in my back burned from the impact I’d made. I ground my teeth together until I was up and staring straight at him, his head bent over to see mine. He looked confused.
“And you’re supposed to be humanity’s hero?” he said. “It’s times like this I wonder if I’ve tracked down the wrong person.”
He dropped his foot and let my head hit the dirt again. Fight, Michael! Get up! No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t. He stepped over me, shoes on either side of my face, and methodically pulled a black bag over my head, tightening the string around my neck. I could see nothing.
“Feel free to sleep for the rest of our trip,” he told me. I felt a gentle prick like a mosquito bite on the inside of my elbow. Something cold ran into my arm. Then I was gone.
A tinny cry slashed through the silence, a long pronunciation of an insistent, mechanical beep that refused to be abated. It was like the painful burn of an alarm clock buzzer, broken so that it continued as a single tone, screaming for attention, never giving any indication that it might fade.
Someone shut that off, I thought. Can’t anyone hear that abysmal noise?
I couldn’t tell from which side of me it was coming from, or if it was actually behind my head—or above me, even? It came from all directions, confusing me, continuing with the same force as it had when I’d awoken. So I opened my eyes to search better.
White.
All that surrounded me was so bright that nothing could be distinguished from the glow, blinding me the moment my eyelids parted. My vision blurred like I was peering through an out-of-focus lens—then again, when all there is to see is white, it’s impossible to focus on anything.