Page 12 of Shannon in Sombra
I exhale.
Malphas approached me hesitantly. “Are you mad?”
That’s the thing. I’m not reallymad. Disappointed, yes, but how can I be mad when he was only doing what he thought was best for me and Alana? “No,” I tell him. “Not really. But if you ever do something like that again?—”
I don’t honestly know how I was going to end my baseless threat. Probably with something I wouldn’t actually mean, but it doesn’t really matter because, suddenly, I’m distracted by two very seemingly impossible things happening at the exact same moment.
For the first time that I’ve seen, Alana throws back her head and cries. It’s a loud, piercing screech that is like a knife to my heart. Her cries quickly turn inconsolable, gasping sobs that has her face becoming as red as a full-blooded Sombra demon.
That’s enough to shock me. I guess I got used to such a well-tempered baby that part of me thought she would never cry.
But as I instinctively go into ‘mom’ mode, trying my best to comfort her while Mal hovers beside me, eager to help, I see something on the window that IknowI’ve never seen before.
Droplets of water. Honest-to-godraindroplets.
My breath catches in my throat.
Panic has me rushing over to the glass, peering through it, making sure I’m not imagining what I’m seeing.
I’m not.
“Mal…” My voice is quiet. Shaky. Alana’s cries drown it out, but he hears me anyway as I whisper, “It’sraining.”
CHAPTER6
RAIN
MALPHAS
It’s raining.
It’s raining in Sombra. Not the hazy, barely there mist of moisture that is enough to water the ash farmers’ fields before evaporating, but a constant fall that reminds me of my time on Earth.
Worse, as the rain pours, my child cries.
Alana doesn’t cry. She giggles and coos and, when she’s hungry, she makes a demanding sound for her mother’s breast, but she has never cried that I’ve seen. Not real tears such as the ones streaking down her cheeks as Shannon rubs her back, attempting to soothe our spawn even as she stares out the window.
To keep the Sombra heat out, the glass is closed. When Shannon and I first decided that we would stay in Nuit after Alana was born, the window was the first concession I made so that my home became ours. Like the window in the apartment that allowed us to look out over Jericho, she likes to peer out into Sombra.
She calls it being nosy. I’m not sure what that her nose has to do with anything since her human senses can’t scent anything through the glass, but if it makes Shannon happy to have a window in our front room and upstairs where Alana sleeps, I was happy to make one for her with my own two hands.
The glass opens. I created our window to be just like the one in New York, another slice of the human world that I gave to Shannon in Sombra. Because I don’t know how to get Alana to stop crying, I focus on the window instead.
Sliding it open just enough that I can reach outside, I let the rain land on my skin.
Sombra demons are heat. As scalding as the rain drops are, they sizzle and evaporate the instant they touch my flesh. But they burn, a sensation that I’ve never experienced before. From a young age, spawn know to stay away from the lava pits if they can’t control their shadows. I’ve never touched fire unless I’ve first faded to my second form?—
No. That’s not true. When my Shannon summed me to her human world, she’d known enough about demonkind to create a protective circle that trapped me. I could break through it, but doing so, I burned away some of my essence—and my hand. Then, before Shannon understood that Sombra demons are trulyshadowdemons, she tried to leave me. The gods don’t allow that until a bond is finalized, or it’s broken.
I burned then, too.
But it didn’t hurt. Not like the tiny droplets that sear my skin wherever they hit do. Almost instinctively, I let my shadows out. The next raindrop falls through the edge of them, finding my corporeal form inside.
That feelsworse. Like an itch and a sting and an ache all at the same time.
I wince, and Shannon moves into me.
“Mal? What’s going on?”
