Page 32 of Anomalies

Tears slip down my cheeks.

This isn’t like running through the forest by myself; this is like finding all the other little girls who did the same.

This is like finally figuring out what I’ve been running towards.

9

LUCINA

Iswear my eyes are open, but I can’t see a thing.

There is a steady heartbeat, loud and strong and achingly familiar.

“Don’t let them see,” a man warns, then everything gets cold.

Like his words are fallen snow.

There’s a man at the foot of my bed. I can hear him breathing.

He’s death incarnate—the Shadow Man. Tall and pale and gangly. He’s watching me through that dark void where his face should be, and when I hear the heels of his shoes clack against the hardwood, my body screams at me to move.

But I can’t.

All the heat is drained from the room as he approaches my bedside, and it’s so cold that each panicked breath I take is a puff of white smoke. He’s not real. He’s not real.

The bed creaks. The mattress dips.

Then that otherworldly voice splits the air, from every direction; above, below, and all around the room. Every square inch of my brain.

“Don’t let them see.”

My pulse rushes violently through me, that ancient beast stirring awake with it, but there’s nothing I can do when the Shadow Man reaches for my face. Long pale fingers brush against my cheek in a frigid bite that lingers, and then the bed rises.

I hear a soft thud against the nightstand, then there’s a rush of icy air.

And he’s gone.

When I’m certain that it’s sunlight bleeding through my closed eyelids, I crack them open, and I’m met with an early morning sky peeking through the sliver in my curtains.

My cabin is haunted. There’s no doubt about it.

I rip the covers back, one foot thrown out onto the floor⁠—

And then I freeze.

There, on my nightstand, as real as my racing heart, is a… sapphire.

It’s attached to a broken gold chain, the gem itself as big as a billiard ball. The streams of sunlight refract against the beautifully weathered jewel, casting a line of deep blue shadow across the wooden surface.

Real. It’s as real as my hand in front of my face.

The Shadow Man left me something tangible. Can ghosts do that?

…can demons?

Pax is waiting for me when I finally step out into the early morning humidity, dressed and ready for whatever grueling lesson the Dame has planned.

His brown eyes are tired, and his white long-sleeved shirt is wrinkled, having stayed up all night on my porch. It’s ridiculous, really, and a gigantic waste of the Captain’s resources to have one of his men watch me at all hours of the day. But these aren’t his orders, they’re the Dame’s.