Page 99 of Mortis

“Behave, beast.”

My hands fell away from Sebastian’s coat. The pale eye was different. But the other . . . the other was his. The eye that had watched me struggle against chains. The eye that had stared down at me while I was trapped inside a circle drawn with innocent blood. The eye that had haunted my nightmares for over a hundred years.

And suddenly, I understood why Sebastian had felt wrong from the moment I met him.

Why his scent had stirred something buried so deeply within the Beast that neither of us had recognised it.

I knew him. Not as he was now, but as he had been. Small, terrified. Cowering in the corner while blood soaked the stone beneath his feet. A crying child staring directly into my eyes as his world died around him.

“Mummy!”

Sebastian stepped closer, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. His hand rose, then struck my cheek. Once. Twice. Barely enough force to sting. But more than enough to drag me into the past. To a century prior, when I was imprisoned. To sixty years ago, on the night I saw the child I now knew was Sebastian.

The only one I’d left alive.

The son of my jailor.

“Behave, beast.”

My breath stopped. Sebastian leaned towards me, his lips hovering beside my ear.

“Per avaritiam gloriam.”

Through greed, glory.

The world seemed to disappear beneath my feet.

“Kael!”

I snapped my head towards Teddy’s voice. He tore free from Arlo and ran to my side, immediately reaching for me. Then I glanced back, only to see Sebastian was gone. Only strangers remained where he’d stood, pressing closer to the police tape, eager for a glimpse of the dead man beside the fountain.

My eyes searched desperately through the crowd. Nothing. He had disappeared as effortlessly as a ghost. Something I’d once told Teddy didn’t exist.

Clearly, I’d been wrong.

Some ghosts still had a heartbeat.

15

TEDDY

I was exhausted, both mentally and physically. After the ordeal with Mr Simpson’s body, Arlo and I had spent two hours giving statements to the police. Over and over again, we told them the same thing.

The body had disappeared from the funeral home. Someone must’ve broken in overnight and taken him.

Naturally, they struggled to believe someone would steal a corpse for the hell of it. And I couldn’t exactly tell them that an ancient cult had once held my demon . . . boyfriend . . . colleague . . . whatever Kael was to me captive, and was now using Mr Simpson’s corpse to send us a message.

So we stuck to our story.

Eventually, they’d let us go with a warning that they’d be in touch. I was lucky they hadn’t tried to interview Kael. He wasn’t officially on the books as an employee, so as far as they knew, he had nothing to do with what had happened.

They did, however, call Grandad.

Walking back into Adler & Sons to find him waiting with a stern expression was a new experience for me. Even when I’d stayed out past curfew as a teenager, or accidentally crashed the hearse because I’d been too focused on whatever was playing on the radio, Grandad had never been angry. Disappointed, sure. But never angry. I wasn’t even convinced he was capable of it.

Turns out, I was wrong.

“What the bloody hell is going on?” he’d snapped, looking between the three of us.