Sascha flipped through the book he’d found while he waited for his left hand to dry enough to start the other. There was one pattern in particular that kept catching his eye, a swirly blue number that almost seemed to move when he stared too hard.
He set one of the newspaper pages he’d been using to catch any stray drops next to the book, using the nail polish brush to copy the design. It looked pretty nice, actually. The thing had seemed complicated when looked at as a whole, but each individual part was easy enough.
When he’d finished his doodle, Sascha leaned back to compare the two. The only difference was the stanza of poetry or whatever under the design in the book.
Sascha tried sounding it out phonetically. “Too-ah-thun fay-mon…”
He continued mumbling while he traced the pattern over again with a second coat of polish. When he got to the end of the little poem, he flipped the page to see if there was any more.
Fuck.
Sascha hissed and flinched back, a familiar burning on his index finger. “Ouch.”
He’d gotten a paper cut.
Sascha’s stomach turned over, and he looked to the side as quick as he could, holding his finger out of sight. A paper cut alone probably wouldn’t be enough to make him faint, buthe didn’t want to risk it. He could feel the drops welling up, dripping onto the newspaper.
Gross.
He’d wait for the bleeding to stop, then put a paper towel over it. He could wash it in the sink without looking and then—
BOOM.
Sascha startled, a yelp escaping his lips.What the fuck?
BOOM.
He straightened in his seat. The noise—and this was no subtlerustlinganymore—seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
BOOM.
Sascha stood, bleeding finger forgotten. That definitely wasn’t rats. And if it was a ghost, it was a goddamn poltergeist.
He made to exit the living room, to see if maybe there was some construction going on outside, but the noise sounded again, this time accompanied by a thick blue smoke filling the room, obscuring Sascha’s vision completely.
Oh God, was he under attack? Had Ivan’s stupid enemies found him and now instead of stabbing him they were going to give him a heart attack via haunted house special effects? Should he run? Hide? Throw a bottle of nail polish into their eyes?
But before he could decide, the smoke cleared in an instant, like it had never been there at all. It might have been reassuring—the unnatural speed of it all aside—if not for what the cleared smoke revealed.
Oh. Oh fuck.
There was a goddamn monster standing in Sascha’s living room.
3
Sascha
Sascha had been in front of some terrifying men before. Dead-eyed, callous, trigger-happy.
But now he was standing less than two feet away from an actual monster.
Like, in the flesh—all sevensome feet of it, plus whatever extra inches the black horns twisting out of its head added.
Good thing this place has such high ceilings.Sascha let out a hysterical giggle.
As he stood there, his giggle trailing off into a weird, choked gasp and his feet seemingly frozen to the living room floor, the monster blinking at him calmly, Sascha had to eventually admit that it was at least ahotmonster.
Its face was human-looking, if you ignored the strange color, and almost eerily beautiful, in a harshly masculine way. Like a statue, all sharp lines cut from stone, with its dark slashes of eyebrows pulled together in a slight frown. The black hair trailing down to the middle of its chest looked unbearably soft and smooth, like a waterfall of silk.
