Shadow Kissed 03 - Shadowman

lifted out of Segue and into the weak winter sunshine. With Death hanging over the land, the temperature dropped, a hush silenced the afternoon skitter of leaves, and movement slowed. The Reaper was on the hunt again.
    The devil was being careful, growing wise to the ways of the mortal world. No smears of wrongful death marked its path, yet it lurked somewhere within the streets. Khan loomed over the village of Middleton. Only an occasional soul was about. They hurried inside, drawing their coats more tightly about them, and glanced over their shoulders as if Death stalked the streets. And so he did.
    He checked each house, set children wailing with his passage. He made the dogs howl and the cats arch their backs. The leaves fell more swiftly from the wintery trees as he blackened the streets with his icy search, and he paused only when he chanced upon an angel, leaning on a lamppost in the now failing light.
    â€œShe’s here somewhere,” the angel said, with a wry expression. “Had a little trouble this morning with her. She’s been messing with people’s heads. We almost had her, but she got away.”
    â€œNo deaths,” Khan answered, or he would have felt the mark. He did not like the angels, but he was glad they were searching, too, and probably limiting the harm the woman could cause on the unsuspecting populace.
    â€œNo?” The angels had no gift for death. “Well, that’s good news.”
    â€œShe’ll be turning foul, a monster to behold.”
    â€œTakes one to know one,” the angel returned. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked down the sidewalk, his back to Death.
    The devil, a she , was biding her time. It made no sense for her to strike in Middleton now, when Layla was so near. Khan could feel a sense of waiting in the stillness of the air for the moment the devil deemed it right to strike. The angels were here to keep the peace in the interim.
    The day, like the eons of days before it, had been swallowed by the night, so Khan returned to the beat of life within Segue.
    The roses were in a vase at Layla’s bedside.
    She paced in the room beyond, wringing her hands. The air was rife with the charge of her nerves, so he drew out a chair that she might sit down and calm herself.
    â€œKhan?”
    If her apartment had had any of Kathleen’s paintings, he could have given her a familiar face to speak to. But these rooms were like all the others in Segue, similar in their comfortable furnishings, unimaginative in decoration.
    He needed another medium and found it in the glass of a window.
    He rapped with Shadow for her attention.
    She screamed when she saw him there, and he considered her perspective. For her, he was a face in the night, looking in from the dark air some distance from the ground. It took a moment for her heartbeat to slow again. He was rapt with the subtle expressions that played across her face, matching them to the emotion that touched his Shadow: an excited kind of fear, which he liked; a pleasurecoil of interest, which he liked better; and best of all, humor, though it was born of exhaustion. If she could laugh at him, they might have a chance.
    â€œI’m curious,” she said, “how you think this could possibly work out.”
    He pushed for a smile. “You doubt my ability to seduce you?”
    And got raised eyebrows instead. “Well, right now, you’re a window man, and earlier you were a painting man, and when you’re all creepy with darkness, a shadow—”
    â€œLayla!” He cut her off.
    She startled, which he regretted, but he couldn’t have her completing that thought. So often her mind worked like Kathleen’s; they’d both arrived at the same name for him. Shadowman. But names have power, and with it, she would surely know his nature.
    Layla sighed hugely, shaking her head. “You should know that we’re doomed from the start, and not only because you’re, um, two-dimensional right now.”
    â€œAnything is possible.” He had to believe that, however small their chances. Possibility was the essence of Shadow. “You bid me come to you before. I came. You asked me to touch you before. I answered the call of your desire. We gave ourselves up to each other. We made our own doom, but I’d take it again if you’ll have me.”
    â€œWell”—she ran a nervous hand through her hair—“while I might be . . . intrigued