Dangerous Creatures(46)

It was his gift, and his curse, like the old storybooks said. He could see the world, everything around him, and everyone. How it ended, and when, and why. How they ended, and when, and why.

Unless it involved him.

Lennox Gates was gifted with Sight and cursed with blindness—or vice versa, depending on how you looked at it.

Blindness could be a gift. His Sight had always felt more like the curse.

But when does power not feel like pain? His mother used to say it to him when he was a little boy. He’d always found it to be true.

She hadn’t been wrong yet.

The fire beckoned.

Nox tried to pull himself away, but it was too late. The flames had taken hold of him. His eyes traveled down to the blue root of the fire itself.

The blue divided itself into strands of light that moved together and apart, again and again, until they formed shapes instead of lines, and pictures instead of light.



Nox was nearly overcome by the smell of burning flesh.

That, and the screaming. A girl.

The girl. The Siren.

The screaming was too much for Nox. It was a kind of ceaseless sobbing—a pure expression of death.

It gave him chills.

Nox could hear her but he couldn’t see her.

He pushed and the billows of smoke parted, as if he’d walked through them.

In a way, he had.

There she was, surrounded by fire and pinned by a burning beam of wood. Probably the splintered support of a now-fallen ceiling.

Now the screaming became distinct words, familiar words.

Ancient words.


By the will of the Gods

By the will of the Gods

I see everything that happens

On the known earth.

I know you see this, Nox.

I know you see me, right now.

You told me you could, remember?

Don’t just sit there.

Do something.

Help me.

Save me!



The smoke stung his eyes, and he tried to keep looking at her, but he knew it wouldn’t last. The room was caving in around her.

Soon she’d—

Soon the screaming would stop.

So would the vision.

The dead left no stories to tell.

At least, not the way Nox saw them.

Fire, he thought.

She dies by fire.

He saw a fleeting succession of images, one after another. A wooden staircase. Flames, reaching into the heavens. The sky.

Then the wood began to crash around him, and the sobbing was muffled, and with a sudden shock, Nox realized he knew exactly where she was.



Nox found himself standing next to the fireplace, his hand resting on the mantel. Strange. He didn’t usually move during a vision. He always dreaded putting Necro into that state himself. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to regularly lose control of his body.

Abandoning your own flesh was practically begging for someone else to take it for a spin.

Nox didn’t like it, even for a minute.

He looked up from the grate, where the carved mantelpiece rose into a ceremonial coat of arms over the center of the stone hearth.

He traced the emblem of his house with his fingers. A bird and a snake, flying directly toward each other. It was the same emblem he’d seen in the last moment of his vision, carved into the burning wood.

The same wood he was touching now. It was a repeating pattern, carved at least once in nearly every room, throughout the paneled walls of Sirene.

It’s possible that the Siren is going to die in this very club, he thought with a pang.

A pang of what? Guilt? Remorse? Curiosity?

She will die. By fire.

His last thought scared him: Because of me.

It was the most likely scenario.

Nox couldn’t be sure; he could never see his own future. But if she were to die in this room, it would probably be at his hand.

It was the way the Wheel of Fate was rolling. There was nothing he could do to stop it….

For the first time in his entire life, Lennox Gates found himself wondering if he could be wrong.

Or if he just wanted to be.





CHAPTER 21


Expendable Youth


The next day, Lennox stared at Necro across the subway tracks. He needed her one more time. It was cold and damp in these tunnels, yet there she sat in a tattered white T-shirt and ripped jeans. A tattooed coil of barbed wire snaked its way up and down her bare arms. The chain-bound combat boots recalled her inner Necromancer.

Good. I want her to be tough.

Nox didn’t take threats from the Otherworld lightly, and that was precisely what he was dealing with here. Even dead Incubuses tended to have friends in low places. Lately, he had taken even greater precautions. He made sure Necro hadn’t been followed. He had sealed off the Underground stop, even from Casters. He’d dragged a broken-down bench over for her to sit on.

Then he’d compelled the Necromancer out of her warm bed and guided her here.

He didn’t feel any better about it, but he didn’t have a choice. Who was he to mess with things like vengeance and fate?

Destiny. There is an Order of Things, even now.

When the dead called for you, you had to listen. What often started with a message from the other side quickly became a premonition and then a hallucination. By the time the nightmares began, nothing good followed. After his last night, he knew it was time to talk to Abraham. The Otherworld had a thousand powerful connections and reconnections to this one. It wasn’t like Nox could ignore the call, no more than it was his fault that Necro had to take it. There wasn’t another Necromancer in his employ. And she’d displayed an uncanny gift for channeling the Ravenwoods in particular. Not to mention, a willingness to do it, so long as she didn’t have to carry the Ravenwoods around with her, in her conscious mind.