Nine While Nine

Prologue-2

Robert hugged Isabeau, and then grabbing William, Lucas, and their two new friends, went in search of bands in the grandiose house, where musical offerings were being presented in two rooms at opposite ends of the building. Excusing themselves to hunt down a powder room, Cat, Moira, and Gigi made plans with Isabeau to meet back up shortly in the ballroom where a presentation of baroque dancers was to take place. She couldn’t wait to watch them and participate in the minuet lessons to follow.

Her Shadow trailed as close as he dared as she wove her way through the revelers and got caught up in the shuffling stream leading up the elegant stairs. Isabeau found herself being jostled into a room full of props on the third floor, having been completely swept past the second-floor landing and on upward. Music played from a sound system set up in the corner near a snack station offering canned sodas and various Halloween treats. The room featured a red felt-covered pool table, but the obvious centerpiece was an antique-looking casket sitting on a raised dais. It was full of plastic eyeballs, souvenir voodoo-mojo satchels, and rubber rats with painted red eyes. Chairs and café tables lined the walls, waiting for guests.

Isabeau stopped suddenly, her focus darting around the dim room. “Hello?” she called out, looking down one connecting hall and then in the opposite direction through another doorway. Her brow furrowed in that familiar way it did every time she thought she wasn’t alone. The room remained silent, with no response forthcoming from its darkly obscured corners.

His ward often scanned crowds, thoroughly searching for something beyond her sight, peering deeply into the space he occupied, yet seeing nothing as he remained invisible to her. Her brow would crease in confusion, she’d bite her lip in concentration, and her gaze would dart about as if she’d lost something precious, before she’d stumble back into a conversation or move onward through a crowd. Then her Scáthanna, her Shadow, could relax and blend back into the throng of people to reserve his magic, no longer needing to slip behind the delicate curtain that hung between their worlds.

“I’ve wandered off to an attic room in a very old, probably haunted, New Orleans mansion. Not the smartest thing to do, Isabeau.” She laughed nervously.

They were alone. No guests and no ghosts.

His kind watched. Protected. Always unseen. Always at the fringe of her life, never in it. Those were the rules. He was nothing if not exemplary with rules. He was honor-bound to protect her—body, mind, and soul.

The period dancers had probably begun spinning beautifully around the ballroom somewhere on the level beneath her. She just wanted to find her way there, get back to exploring every room the mansion offered and take part in every event. It was a perfect night, and she was missing out on too much while being lost in the incredibly shadowy and deserted portion of the house.

Shivering as a sudden cold burst swept past her, she wrapped her arms around herself and ran her unseeing gaze over him, past him. She turned first one way, then the other as she tried to decide which direction to go, determined to reunite with her party.

A furtive motion and soft scuttling noise caught her attention. A dark and indistinct mass low to the floor moved from under the pool table to behind the casket. It might have been a trick of the lighting, or lack thereof, but it spooked her all the same.

Straining her eyes to peer through the gloom, she skimmed the area, hunting for a presence other than him. When she searched for him, there was always a look of longing and hope. This trepidation sliding across her features was something he wasn’t used to seeing on her.

Isabeau perked her ears to listen for any other sound beyond the music. She heard a scraping, groaning sound from somewhere in front of her. A low, muffled, depraved snickering from off to her left accompanied it. The sound was terrifying in the way it seemed to slather across her skin.

It brought to mind the swampy midnight pond from her childhood nightmares, full of things no one should ever see. Dank and rotting things that oozed malevolence. Upon awakening from the nightmares, she’d wrap herself beneath layers of quilts while holding her breath, cocooning against the dark things waiting beneath her bed or behind her closet door.

She eyed every surface and unlit corner as she exited the room. The hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention. It dawned on her that she’d become turned around when she entered the attic space. Instead of returning to the hallway from which she’d entered, she found herself in a much gloomier tunnel of a corridor. The ceiling was low and claustrophobic, and she couldn’t see to the end of the passage. She had no idea where it might lead, but as long as it was away from the attic room, away from those sounds, that would be just fine.

Isabeau halted as a figure seemingly crafted from the dark particles of the gloom emerged from the shadows just feet in front of her. He moved forward closing the space between them. As she peered up into the most beautiful male face she had ever seen, relief flooded her body. He was just another young man who wandered too far from the festivities. She felt foolish for being so shaken by the trappings of a Halloween party.

“I’m so sorry, I totally didn’t see you there, it’s so dark in here,” she exhaled the words in a rush of alleviated tension. “I’m all turned around. Do you know how to get to the ballroom? My friends are waiting for me there.” She babbled, but the note of relief lacing her voice was audible; happy not to be alone any longer in the nightmare room. She glanced back over her shoulder to the attic. “I think that room got to me, the craziest sounds . . .” Her voice dwindled to nothing as her sight returned to rest on the young man’s features.

While she shot that brief glance behind her, he’d rapidly moved in closer. Gone was the sublime visage from mere seconds ago. Instead, she found herself looking up into a face that flickered in and out of focus before morphing and settling into something so abhorrent she couldn’t draw a breath to scream. Instead of the charming smile, she now stared into a mouth full of dripping needles, and the boggy sludge rimming his mouth threatened to ooze onto her. Its eyes—she could no longer bring herself to use the term he—changed from glimmering pools of opulent waters to black pits of soul-sucking despair and loathing that were sunk deeply in a face so pasty and clammy it seemed to belong to a water-logged corpse. Its unnaturally long fingers with too many joints reached to grasp at her shoulders, shoving her dangerously hard against the wall behind her. The fingertips that might as well have been glass slivers were dangerously close to puncturing her skin.

Something in the primal depths of her soul knew this was no party-going reveler in costume. No amount of FX makeup could produce this look or the putrid stench floating around it. An outpouring of absolute depravity encircled them, fouling her skin right through her gown. She knew without the slightest amount of doubt that whatever was holding her abrasively in its grasp was not human and had never been human.

Evil things do exist.

Her Scáthanna threw all caution out the window—consequences and dictates be damned. Isabeau was about to be ripped apart and devoured by a Sgoltadh, and whatever mess was left behind would meticulously be lapped up from the walls and floorboards by his minions, the Sgrìoban.

With one simple thought, he dropped the veil between them. He was visible to her, but not to the Sgoltadh; the creature was too enthralled with its prey to notice. The Shadow, whose career originated with the Eirr Rúnaigh, employed his skills by wrapping his arms around the girth of the monstrosity and pulling it away from Isabeau a scant second before it would have dipped its shard-like claws into her tender flesh.

He threw the hulking, stench-ridden body away from him. It crashed into the end of the passage, causing the heavy wood door behind it to groan under the strain. Her rescuer, drawing two incredibly long blades from somewhere, raised them up in a flash under the monster’s jaw to sink into the soft matter within its skull. The creature, stunned by the impact with the door and the sudden appearance of an adversary, never had a chance to duck away from the blades, never had a chance to raise its own razor-sharp implements to intercept the incoming death blow. It collapsed on the floor, and simultaneously she heard tiny screeches of protest and anguish rising from the attic room, followed by crisp pops. There was a brief silence before she heard a tearing sound, like a mash-up of fabric being torn at the seams with the sound of steam escaping a tea kettle, sans the whistle.

She looked back to the corpse of her attacker, or where it should have been. Nothing was there now. The dead thing was gone. There wasn’t even any blood. Only her champion remained. She finally exhaled the breath stuck in her throat from terror. “Oh, my gods . . . what the hell . . . what . . . what was it . . . not real . . . couldn’t be . . .” she stammered as adrenaline-driven words tumbled from her mouth. “Monsters don’t . . . not really . . . was it dead? It smelled like death. I’m just crazy. Its fingers . . . all wrong . . . its hands . . . this didn’t happen . . . but it did . . . no eyes . . . just pits . . . needle teeth . . . so many . . .”

Her eyes met those of her Scáthanna. When he brushed the terror-produced tears from her cheek, warmth spread across her face, traversed through her skin, and made its way to her heart. He flashed a bold grin that made her smile in return, made her heart lift.

“It was all just for show, huh? No expense spared, right? For the party. They really went all out, didn’t they?” She paused to catch her breath as relief flooded her. Before he could reply, she continued with a furrowed brow. “Do I know you?”

He seemed so familiar. Is he from my L.A. crowd? There’d been many recognizable faces from the club scene on her plane. Perhaps, she’d seen him there.

“No.” He answered simply, with a baritone voice. The sound sent a delicious shiver through her. He shook his head slightly, never removing his gaze from hers. It was a multipurpose answer. No, it was not for show, the creature had been authentic, but he wouldn’t tell her. He’d let her think his response was in answer to whether she knew him. “You’ve never met me.”

Her heart was thudding in her chest, and her head felt light and dreamy. She could hear the music from downstairs more distinctly, while at the same time the narrow room in which they stood grew fuzzy and imprecise . . . and became actually quite unimportant to her. Why was she here? Who was she with? It didn’t matter if she went left or chose right, or if she found the dancers. What dancers? Every thought other than the man in front of her slipped from her mind. In this moment, only being here with him mattered. Standing right in front of her was the man she’d been seeking within every room for as long as she could remember.

He was wrong to pull her through to the In-Between in which they stood. It was neither on his side of the veil nor in her world, but perhaps herein existed a loophole to the situation at hand—that he absolutely, without fail had to embrace this chance, embrace her. He’d nearly lost her to a Sgoltadh. It happened so fast. Why had it been in the attic room with its minions? Why was it at the party?

She’d never before faced more trouble than a close-call traffic accident or a possible tumble down some stairs. Once, when on the verge of having that one-drink-too-many, which would have tipped her over the edge into being ill, he’d pushed her glass from a table to break on the cement floor of the night club. All of them human dangers, not a Sgoltadh.