Shadow Kissed 03 - Shadowman

never let her go. It was made for her.
    Never alone again, it said.
    Her eyes teared. She felt exposed, the hole in her chest so easily revealed. She crossed her arms over the pain. Ty had tried to fill it, had offered her a fantasy of children, a happy life without the drive of her dangerous work.
    kat-a-kat: Never alone.
    But Ty wasn’t the answer. He was just a nice guy. And she was his challenge.
    Home, the gate promised.
    The gate knew her. If she opened it, her isolation would be at an end.
    The darkness around seemed to shift, as if something or someone was coming—the street thugs or dreaded wraiths even—but she couldn’t so much as lift her flashlight to pierce the dark.
    Her deepest wish could come true.
    kat-a-kat, the gate explained, and Layla understood perfectly. The gate was meant to be opened. Why else make a gate, except to open it?
    The shadows churned, whipped, and lashed.
    Layla dropped her flashlight and stretched out her hand as she stepped closer. A turn of that twisted, black metal and her lifetime longing would be at an end.
    â€œDon’t,” a man said in her ear.
    Where he came from, Layla had no idea and didn’t care. His urgent, low voice was compelling and familiar, but the pull of the gate was stronger.
    â€œIt is evil,” he explained.
    â€œCan’t be,” Layla answered. Her every cell quaked with expectation. She took another step.
    The man’s voice came out of the shadows. “You fought those men on the street. Fight this.”
    kat-a-kat: Open me! Now!
    Layla shuddered, eyes tearing again in awe of the livid creation. There was no way to explain this feeling. It was much easier to keep it simple. “I don’t want to fight it.”
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    Shadowman knew he never should have saved her. Meddling with Fate always had repercussions. The woman should be dead in the street, her body slack, her soul just entering Twilight.
    And now she was clearly going to open the gate to Hell. The thing must have insinuated itself into her weak mortal mind.
    Death gathered Shadow to him until the mass of darkness snapped and thrashed in his grasp. He sent it rolling toward her, to crush her, to knock her from her path to the gate.
    If it had any effect, she did not let on. Her reaction was the same as it had been at the door. The same as with his repeated attempts to impede her progress through the warehouse. She was impervious.
    He could not use Shadow against her and didn’t have the time to figure out why.
    There would be no retrieving Kathleen if devils poured out into the world. He was work weakened, gate plagued, and he didn’t even have his scythe.
    He’d kill her himself if he had to. And with the gate’s control over her mind, he most likely would.
    Shadowman poured his strength into forming a body. Lungs to move air. Tongue and teeth to shape words. Hands to throttle her with. The body he created was the one most familiar to him, the one created from Kathleen’s imagination, the hero of her dreams. Better still would have been the terrors other people made of Death. Monsters of deepest nightmare. Something to scare her into submission.
    â€œDon’t,” he repeated in her ear. His spine cracked into place. His legs assumed the weight of a man.
    But her arm was already outstretched. Her hand gripped black metal. The cursed lever turned.
    He threw himself toward the gate as her weight shifted back.
    The woman turned to face him, still gripping the metal behind her, her confusion and terror bleeding into the shadows. Where before her heart had calmed, now it raced again. “I . . . I’m sorry.”
    A queer deathlight lit her features, illuminating, stripping away the mortal coil of her life, shining through her fresh, pink flesh as if the atoms had little substance at all, revealing her soul.
    It cannot be.
    And Shadowman slammed the gate shut again. Held it closed with his greater strength while the woman trembled in the cage of his arms, her lips parted, breath frozen mid-inhalation.
    But too late. Something wrong was in the room with them. A presence edged with bloody menace. A devil.
    Shadowman almost didn’t care, not as the woman got her first good look at him. Her mind functioned as all other mortal minds did, remaking Death to her conception of him, and for once in almost thirty years, his Shadows nearly obeyed. Such was the power of mortals. Shadowman had held Kathleen’s conception