Chapter 2

His chest was free of bandages, though Nathan knew his wounds were still healing in the real world. Here they displayed as a spattering of new scars, the marks from the shotgun pellets mixing with the scratches from Sasha’s claws when he’d been set on a rampage by the powerful influence ofDesire, one of the Muses—a Weird Sister. Nathan could still hardly believe they had survived that encounter, let alone so many others afterward, but the scars from Sasha didn’t bother him. Frightening as Sasha’s true form could be, Nathan found it beautiful.

Slowly, he reached out to touch the mirror, filling the entire surface now as he stood directly in front of it. He touched the glass with his left palm, the one carved with a divided circle from when he’d summoned the Messenger, still clear on his skin as another scar. The glass was cool, solid. Nathan wondered if he’d rather die from these nightmares, from his mark, than the other option—if a dark fae claimed his bounty and turned him over to whoever owned it. Of course, if that happened, he wouldn’t die, no matter how much he wanted to. Nathan would be cursed with immortality as a Shadow Immortal, a servant to his dark sidhe master until the end of time.

Nathan took a deep breath and turned his eyes away. He wanted door number three. He wanted to find the bounty holder, kill whoever it was, and go on living, protecting his brother and Sasha from whatever might come their way. He didn’t ask for much from life. He didn’t expect luxury or happily ever after. He just wanted tobe—to remain himself,Nathan, and be there for those who needed him. The alternative was too terrifying to imagine.

Nathan looked up, straight into his own reflected eyes, and froze. They weren’t what he expected. He expected slit. He’d seen that before. But even when his eyes were slit in his dreams, they were always still green. This time they were red. Red on black.

Red on black…

Nathan could see flashes of brilliant color and beautiful scenery that he had heard about of the more lush places in the Veil, but had never seen. There were flashes of the fae markets, all metal and exhaust. Caves tunneling to underground cities. Endless trees dividing light from darkness, leading deeper and deeper into the black. And, at the heart of it all, a tower, a castle, and a flash of slit eyes, only they weren’t blue or green, they were red on black.

The other dream rushed forward through Nathan’s mind, like it was replaying in the glass—maybe it was—and he remembered where he had first seen those eyes. He knew instantly then that those eyes, those slit red on black eyes from the center of the darkest part of the Veil, belonged to his keeper—the holder of the bounty.

Nathan’s reflected lips pulled back into a smirk.

Outside of the mirror, Nathan tried to pull his hand away. He couldn’t. The once cool glass was growing colder, so cold it burned, like his skin was frozen in place. Pain seared through his palm and he screamed.

The reflection laughed with Nathan’s voice, but the sound seemed far away, contained within the glass. Nathan looked into those eyes again, trying to keep himself upright through the pain that was slowly creeping from his palm up his arm.

Two new figures appeared in the reflection behind Nathan’s double—Sasha and Jim. But it wasn’t Nathan’s sensitive and urgent brother, or the kind-hearted incubus he had grown so close to. Jim’s eyes were slit andamber. Amber like the Messenger’s. Amber like they had been in Nathan’s hospital room.

Nathan hadn’t told any of the others about Jim’s moment of Awakening in the hospital, his eyes like that, his expression blank, his movements so intent as he approached Nathan without answering a single plea. It was only Sasha’s interruption that had brought Jim back to his senses. What Jim might have done otherwise…Nathan didn’t want to speculate.

In the mirror, Sasha was not himself either, but transformed into a larger, more monstrous version of his incubus form. His horns seemed longer and more dangerous at their points, more of his teeth were sharpened rather than just his eyeteeth baring fangs, his wings were massive, and his claws appeared nearly twice as long. Both Sasha and Jim were smirking just as Nathan’s reflection was smirking, like they were ready to devour him.

Nathan risked a glance behind him, if only to see how much truth the mirror held, but there was no sign of Jim or Sasha in the room. They existed only in the mirror, as their terrible, dark selves.

Nathan jerked forward, forced to face the mirror again as something tugged on his hand. His reflection had curled its fingers over Nathan’s frozen hand on the glass and was pulling him in. The surface of the glass didn’t ripple or change, Nathan was simply being pulled through like nothing was there. Nathan planted his feet and resisted as best he could. Somehow he knew that if he allowed himself to be pulled inside, he’d never come back. This nightmare would become a reality, and he’d lose everything he knew and cared about.