“Jacob, we need to go.”
She heard the toilet flush. Finally.
Jacob emerged from the bathroom. “I washed my hands with soap,” he informed her. “Do you want to smell them?”
“No. Does anybody else need to go?”
They shook their heads. Emily hugged her leg. “I want to go home, Mom.”
“Excellent idea.” Karina led them down the hallway.
The man moved to block their way. “Thank you for letting us use the bathroom,” Karina said. “We’ll be on our way now.”
The man leaned forward. His nostrils fluttered. He sucked in the air through his nose and his face split in a grin. He didn’t smile; he showed her his teeth: abnormally large and sharp, triangular like shark teeth, and definitely not human.
Ice skittered down Karina’s spine.
The man took a step forward. “You ssshmell like a donor.” His teeth took up so much space in his mouth, he slurred the words.
Karina backed away, holding her hands out to shield the kids behind her. She wished she had a can of mace or a gun—some weapon in her purse other than Kleenex, her pocketbook, and a cell phone with a dead battery.
“Let us out!”
The man advanced. “Rishe! The woman ishh a donor.”
“We’ll be leaving now!” Karina put some steel into her voice. Sometimes if you looked like you were ready to fight, people backed down and looked for an easier target.
The man bared his teeth again and she glimpsed what looked like a second row of fangs behind the first in his mouth. “No, you won’t,” he said.
Time for emergency measures. “Help!” Karina screamed at the top of her lungs. “Help!”
“No help,” he assured her.
The kids began to cry.
Maybe this is a nightmare, flashed in her head. Maybe she was dreaming.
“Mom?” Emily clutched at her jeans.
Dream or not, Karina couldn’t let him get a hold of her or the kids. She kept backing away to the door behind her, the one labeled “Stairs.”
“Let us go!”
He kept coming. “Rishe! Where are you?”
The wall on their right exploded.
Splintered pieces of wood peppered the hallway, knocking the shark-toothed man back and missing Karina by mere inches. Stunned, she glanced into the gap in the wall. The redheaded woman—Rishe?—jumped over the counter and ran directly at Karina and the children, her face twisted into a grotesque mask. The skin on Rishe’s neck bulged, rolling up, as if a tennis ball slid up her throat into her mouth.
This is just crazy . . .
The woman spat.
Something dark flickered through the air. Pain stung Karina’s left side. A long thin needle, like the quill of a porcupine, sprouted from her stomach, just under the ribs. She yanked it out on pure instinct. She should’ve been terrified, but there was no time . . .
Something hit the red-haired woman from behind, arresting her in midstep. Rishe’s mouth gaped in a terrified silent scream. Huge claws grasped her face, jerked, and her head twisted completely around.
Oh, my God.
Rishe’s body fell, and beyond it Karina glimpsed a thing. Huge, dark, inhuman, it stared back at her with malevolent eyes. Its very existence was so at odds with everything Karina knew, that her mind simply refused to believe it was real.
An odd odor saturated the air, dry and slightly metallic, like copper warmed by the sun. The thing stepped over the woman, its gaze fixed on her.
“Run!” Karina turned on her heel and dashed down the hallway, herding the children before her.
The man with shark teeth rose slowly, pulled a wooden splinter out of his eye, tossed it aside, and, with a deep bellow, charged into the lobby through the hole in the wall.
A snarl answered him, a promise of pain and death. It whipped Karina into a frenzy. She swiped Jacob off the floor—he was the smallest—and ran faster to the heavy door barring the stairs. She jerked it open. “Up the stairs, go, go!”
They ran up, whimpering and sobbing. The same fear that drove her propelled them up the stairs better than anything she could’ve screamed.
Karina slammed the door closed, balancing Jacob on one arm, and looked for something to bar it, but the stairway was empty. Her stomach burned, the pain from the needle puncture spreading up and down her body as if her skin had caught on fire. She ran after the kids. The boy in her arms was stone heavy. They reached the top of the staircase and crowded on the landing.
Below something clanged. There it was again, the scent of hot metal burning her lungs.
Karina set Jacob down and wrenched the door open. They burst into the upstairs hallway. She scanned the rows of doors and tried to shove the nearest one open, but it was locked.
Another—locked, too.
Third—locked.
This is a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare.
A vicious snarl chased them. Emily screamed, a high-pitched shriek that could’ve broken glass. Karina grabbed her daughter by the hand and dragged her down the hall, to the single window. “Follow me!”
Beyond the window a fire escape waited.
Karina grasped the window latch and jerked it up. Stuck.
Her head swam. The air around her had grown scalding hot. Every breath burned her lungs from the inside out. She stumbled, caught herself on the windowsill, and pulled the sash upward with all her strength. The wood groaned and suddenly the frame slid up.
A door thumped. Kids screamed. The terrible dark beast had made it into the hallway.
She grabbed the nearest child and hurled her onto the fire escape, then the next, and the next. Little feet thudded, running down the metal stairs. Emily was last. Karina clutched her daughter to her and climbed out on the fire escape.
A black van waited below. Several men stood by the van. They had the children. They stood there silently, watching her, so calm while the kids screamed, and suddenly she realized that they and the beast inside were allies. They were trapped.
A growl washed over her.
The world gained crystal clarity, everything becoming painfully vivid and sharp. Slowly Karina turned. Her daughter hugged her, her breath a tiny warm cloud on her neck. The metal rail of the fire escape dug into Karina’s back. The thudding of her heart sounded so loud, each beat shook her rib cage like a blow from a sledgehammer. Every breath was a gift.
She saw the thing emerge from the darkness. Slowly, it solidified out of the gloom, one gargantuan paw on the windowsill, then another. Enormous claws scratched the wood. It climbed onto the windowsill and perched there, a mere foot from her. Karina stared into its eyes, inhaled its scent, and knew with absolute certainty that she was going to die.
The thing opened its maw, revealing huge fangs. Its deep voice issued forth in a single mangled word. “Donor.”
“Are you sure?” asked a male voice from below.
The beast snarled. Karina jerked back, shielding Emily with her hands. Her legs gave out and she fell to her knees.
“My lady?” said the voice from below, closer now.
She barely turned her head, not daring to take her gaze from the monster in the window. A dark-haired man climbed the fire escape toward her. His face was preternaturally beautiful, his eyes a dark, intense blue. “I have a proposition for you, my lady . . .”
His voice faded, replaced by darkness and the feel of cotton against her body.
I agree.
Karina sat up . . . She was in her bed. The room lay dark about her. A nightmare. That was all.
Her heart thudded in her chest. She rubbed her face and her hands came away slick with cold moisture.
I agree. “I agree” to what? What did she agree to in her dream?
It didn’t matter. It was a nightmare. In the morning, she’d call the grief counselor.
Karina frowned and pushed free of the blankets. She felt a strange sense of wrongness, as if there was something very important she was missing. Something vital. A small lamp waited on the table next to the bed. She flicked it on and a cone of soft electric light illuminated the room.
The bedroom wasn’t hers.
For a moment Karina froze, and then fear caught her in its fist and squeezed. “Emily?” she whispered. “Emily?”
No answer.
She was alone in a strange bedroom.
There could be a rational explanation for this. There had to be. She just didn’t know what it was.
I agree. An echo of her voice from the dream. She had a terrible suspicion the unfamiliar bedroom and those two words were connected.
Her clothes were gone. She wore only underwear and a giant T-shirt, three sizes too big.
A pair of carefully folded jeans lay on a chair next to the bed. Her jeans, the ones she had worn on the field trip. Karina pulled them on. She had to find Emily.
The door swung open with ease and she found herself in a hallway. To the left, the hallway ended in a stairway leading up. To her right, a pool of electric light brightened the wooden floor and the rust-colored rug. Quiet voices carried on a soft discussion.
She followed the voices and stepped into a kitchen, blinking against the light. Three men sat at the round table in the center. They turned to look at her. The one sitting farthest from her wore the unearthly face of the man from her dream. His name surfaced from the depths of her memory. Arthur.
I agree.
Arthur nodded to her. “Ah. You’re up. Why don’t you sit down with us? Henry, please get a chair for Lady Karina.” His soft, intimate voice caressed her almost like a touch. It should’ve been soothing. Instead her insides clenched into a tight knot.
A tall man with a shy smile rose and held a chair out for her. So oddly domestic, all three drinking tea. Nobody was startled by her appearance. Clearly she was expected.
Karina sat. “Thank you.” The automatic response rolled from her lips before she even realized it.
“You’re welcome,” Arthur said. He leaned back with a quiet elegance, artfully posed without putting any effort into it. His hair was soft, black, and brushed back from his perfectly sculpted face. His eyebrows were equally black and so were his eyelashes, long and soft like velvet. They framed big eyes, crystalline blue, distant, and cold. Angelic, she thought. He looked like an angel, not a plump cherub, but an angel who roamed freely in the sky, possessed of heart-wrenching beauty and terrible power, an angel who had stared into the bottomless blue for so long that his eyes had absorbed its color.