Edge Of Darkness

47

Ignorance, for one. Using the Internet she’d done a bit of searching and it was surprisingly easy to find what she was looking for. Newspaper articles, talk show discussions, online forums and eyewitness video, the horrible recording of the m******e on Christmas Day, along with the taped manifesto of the madman who’d devised it. For the last three years, she’d been insulated in her little television-free world. Swaddled as she was in the numbing cocoon of her own pain, her mental state as fragile as that old vellum manuscript in Christian’s library, she’d grown accustomed to ignoring most everything else. It wasn’t an excuse for her ignorance, but it was a reason—a reason that was now defunct.

Now she could no longer avoid the truth.

Christian was not human.

He was, as her mother would have said, part of the world invisible to humans, elves and fairies and demons and monsters, vampires and goblins and ghosts. Her mother had a word for these kinds of supernatural beings, a word Ember had heard a thousand times as a child and dismissed as a figment of her mother’s fertile imagination:

Elsething.

Christian was Elsething, and Ember had feelings for him.

It.

The conversation they’d had in the bookstore came back to haunt her with unwelcome regularity. Whatever goes upon two feet is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four feet, or has wings, is a friend.

His eyes and face and voice haunted her, too, and she didn’t know what to do with herself, much less what to do about the situation. Because there was a situation, a very bad, dangerous situation, in which she was unfortunately caught in the middle, whether she liked it or not.

The authorities were on the hunt for the large, black animal that had escaped the night of the shooting in Gràcia. They’d found one enormous dead panther, its throat torn out—and an unidentifiable man whose heart had been eaten right out of his chest. Curiously, the man had no fingerprints. Which, a local newscaster had explained, was because he wasn’t actually a man at all.

Elsething. Apparently they were everywhere these days.

She’d heard them called Ikati, an ancient Zulu word that meant “cat warrior.” As exotic as the creatures it described, the word also held a sinister undertone when spoken aloud. It sounded supernatural because it was; it sounded dangerous because they were.

They were killers. They were murderers. They were animals, to a one.

All animals are created equal…

She wondered if her father had some weird premonition when reading his beloved Animal Farm to her when she was a child. She wondered if he somehow guessed one day she would come face to face with a creature that seemed for all intents and purposes the same kind of animal she was—the human kind—but who in actuality was not.

She wondered what her father would do in her shoes, knowing as she did exactly where that animal lived. Knowing there was a substantial reward for his capture, or the capture of any of his kind.

One million euro might have tempted someone of greater greed, but to Ember the money meant only one thing: Christian had a very, very big target on his back.

And he had not contacted her since that night.

Feigning illness, Ember had taken the week off, which forced Marguerite to work behind the counter of Antiquarian Books, an undertaking she loathed and would undoubtedly take revenge on Ember for, one way or another. She’d hidden in her apartment with the door locked and the shades drawn, terrified Christian would call or come over. She was strangely disappointed when he didn’t, wracked with the desire to see him and the desire to run for the hills.

The irony that the one person who’d made her feel alive in years was the one person who was more dangerous to her than any other person on Earth—and who wasn’t even a person, per se—made her wish for the first time in her life that she drank.

And speaking of drinking, she wasn’t even seeing Asher, which was worrying him sick.

“Ember,” he’d said sternly into her voicemail this morning, his tone just short of angry, “you can’t keep avoiding me like this. What’s happened? Are you sick? Are you dead? Actually I know you’re not dead because I went into the store and that hemorrhoidal stepmother of yours told me you had the flu. Not that I believe her; she’s probably poisoned you. If you don’t call me back, I’m coming over. Do not make me use my key.”

She’d texted him back, a mere six words:

Not dead. Don’t worry. Everything OK.

Even in type, it looked like a lie.

But she wasn’t ready to see him yet. She wasn’t ready to see anyone, if truth be told. Because how could she pretend everything was normal and life was just as it had been before, when everything had been turned upside down?

When everything she had believed about the “real” world had turned out to be false?

She hadn’t even gone to the animal shelter to volunteer as she usually did on Sundays. When she called in, the man who ran the place—a grizzled, dour, bear of a man by the name of Parker—told her she’d be missed, as they were full to overflowing.

People were abandoning their cats—beloved house pets turned suspected killers—by the hundreds.

Especially the black ones.