Living Nightmare Read Free

in it.”
    “Send someone else. I shouldn’t be anywhere near her.”
    “Why? ’Cause she seems to have a thing for you? Wish I had such problems.”
    “She doesn’t have a thing for me. She’s crazy. That’s why she refuses to stay away. Chick’s got issues.”
    “Don’t we all. Listen, just go find her, okay? Nicholas will text you the info so you can find the car. If she’s not in it, you’ll have to track her down. And hurry the hell up. I don’t like having her out there alone at night. Who knows what could happen.”
    Joseph hung up, leaving Madoc writhing in frustration and fear. For her. The last place on the planet he wanted to be was near Nika, and yet the thought of her alone in the dark, weak and helpless, was more than he could stand.
    “Fuck.” He flung the curse out into the night, sheathed his sword, and stomped back to his truck. The nest he had been ready to cut into would have to wait. Nika couldn’t.
     
    Nika’s plan had worked. The sgath hated the cold, and every time they brushed up against her mind, they flinched back in anger.
    Of course, the flip side of her brilliant plan was that she was freezing to death. Her body shivered, and she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. The shovel kept slipping, but at least she couldn’t feel the blisters forming on her palms anymore.
    She worked for another hour without interruption and was smugly pleased with herself. Until she heard the first hungry cry of a sgath hunting nearby. This time, the sound wasn’t inside her mind; it was in her ears. It was real, and it was close.
    They’d found her.
    Panic gripped her by the neck and choked the air from her lungs.
    How had they found her? She’d been so careful to drive only during the day, when they were all asleep and couldn’t read her thoughts. And tonight none of them had tried to pry from her where she’d gone when she left the safety of Dabyr. They couldn’t know where she was.
    Tentatively, Nika sent her mind out, searching for any nearby Synestryn. Their alien thoughts and uncontrolled hunger would be easy to find among the humans nearby. Their thoughts were bleak, festering spots of darkness among the bright, clear human thought patterns.
    If there was only one Synestryn and it wasn’t too strong, she could probably control its mind long enough to kill it with the shovel. If she was lucky.
    Her body fell away as she went seeking into the night, searching for the source of that eerie cry of hunger. She found one Synestryn slinking through the darkness less than a quarter mile away. It was small—the size of a large dog—and it was weak with hunger. That hunger gave her the edge.
    She could take it.
    Nika had just begun to whisper into its mind to come her way when she felt another Synestryn nearby. Then another. There were three, then four, then seven. They were closing in. They smelled blood. Her blood.
    Before they could trap her within them, Nika pulled back into her own mind and scanned her body for signs of blood. There was a smear on the leg of her jeans; muddy, but definitely blood.
    She looked at her hands. Sure enough, the shovel had scraped off several layers of skin until she bled. The Synestryn smelled it and were moving in to feast.
    The car was parked outside the metal fence several hundred yards away. As cold and weak as her legs were, she wasn’t sure she was going to make it to the car before they made it to her, but she had to try. She couldn’t let them get her blood. Thanks to Madoc’s recent killing spree, she was just now regaining the pieces of herself that had been taken the night her family was attacked. She’d spent almost nine years living inside a nightmare, unable to tell what was real and what wasn’t, and she refused to go back to that hell.
    She’d rather die than let them have her mind again.
    Nika grabbed the shovel, knowing it was the only weapon she had to hold them at bay, and sprinted for the fence.
    Behind her a loud chorus of