The Glow

Chapter 7

The door came off the top hinge on the second hit.

I was already against the window. Nowhere to go — four hundred feet of stone behind me, the whole room between me and the stairwell, and the stairwell was where the sound was coming from. Wood cracking. A low grinding growl that I felt in my back teeth.

The door came off the bottom hinge on the third hit. It fell into the room flat and the whole floor jumped.

Then it came through.

I'd seen it in the pit. That was a different animal. In the pit it had been down, still, slow. Here it filled the doorway and then it filled the room, and its breath fogged the air, and I swear I could hear its heart from where I stood.

I put both hands flat on the window behind me. Cold glass.

"Hey," I said.

It stopped.

"I'm not gonna run. Okay? I'm not running. Look at me. I'm right here."

Its head came up. Gold eyes. Not glowing, not like a movie — just gold, wet, and completely locked on me.

It took one step.

"Okay," I said. My voice was shaking. I let it. "Okay. Slow. That's good."

Another step. Its claws clicked on the stone and left little white marks.

I thought about my mom. I don't know why. She's been dead six years and I hadn't thought about her in a month, and then I did, right there, standing against a window with a monster walking at me.

Don't close your eyes, baby. If you close your eyes, you can't see what's coming.

So I didn't close them.

It got close enough that I could count the places where fur gave way to old, pale scar tissue. Its shoulder. Its ribs. A long one down its throat like somebody had tried to cut its head off once and almost managed it.

Its nose came down to my shoulder.

And then it did the thing.

It pressed its head into me. Not a nudge. Not a smell. It pressed its whole head against my chest and pushed, and its weight came down on my legs and I buckled and went down against the wall, and it followed me. Down. All of it. That enormous body folded down on top of me, and I had one arm pinned and one arm free and I put my free hand out and it landed on its head.

Its ears went flat.

It whined.

Not a growl. Not a warning. The exact sound a dog makes when it's been left outside in the rain and somebody finally opens the door.

"What—" My voice wouldn't work. "What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you?"

It pushed its face into my throat.

And my neck went hot.

Not warm. Not itchy. Hot, like somebody had poured something into me under the skin and it was running down. I gasped, and my free hand grabbed at the fur on the back of its head, and the light came up out of me.

White. Pure white, no yellow in it. It spilled up over my jaw and into the room and lit the whole tower — the bed, the four posts, the frozen face of the monster in my lap, everything got white.

I could see my own hand through my fingers.

Then the Beast made a sound I've never heard come out of anything.

It was small. That's what did it. Something that big, and the sound was small and high and hurt, and its legs gave out, all four, and its head dropped heavy into my lap, and the growl stopped in its chest.

The white faded.

I sat there against the wall with four hundred pounds of cursed Alpha on top of me and my neck still buzzing and my whole body shaking so hard my teeth clicked.

It was breathing. Slow. Out.

I put my hand on the fur at the top of its head and I stayed there because I didn't have a choice and after about a minute I stopped wanting to move.

Its chest rose and fell. It was warm. Warmer than it should've been, warmer than a person.

"It's okay," I heard myself say.

I don't know who I was saying it to.

The heat was going out of my neck slow, like a coal. I could feel it, sitting there under the skin, and when I took my hand off the fur and touched my own throat, it was hot to the touch. Not glowing. Nothing to see. Just — hot.

I'd never felt anything like that. Nobody in my family had. Nobody I knew. Silver Creek was a small pack and a boring one and people got hurt and people got healed and there were two women in town with a little healing touch, both of them old, both of them fainting afterwards.

I wasn't one of them. I couldn't shift. That was the whole story of me. I was the girl who couldn't do anything.

I sat there in the dark and I looked down at my own hands and I tried to make it happen again.

Nothing happened.

I tried harder. Held my breath. Nothing.

"You could've warned me," I said to the sleeping thing in my lap.

Its ear twitched.

And then — I don't know how to say this without sounding crazy — I got the feeling that it was listening. That something in there had heard me and was trying to answer and couldn't get the words out. Not the way a dog listens. Worse. Like a person on the other side of a wall.

I went cold all over.

"Hey," I said. "Hey. Is there—"

The fur moved under my hand.

Not the Beast. The fur, itself, going back. Slipping into the skin.

I yanked my hand away and scrambled back along the wall, and the Beast's body did the thing I'd seen in the pit, the shoulders coming down and the spine dropping and the black going out of it like water down a drain.

I didn't watch the rest. I turned my face away and I stared at the fallen door.

I heard a man's breathing. Fast. Ragged.

Then nothing.

I looked.

Lucifer was lying on my bedroom floor on his side. Naked. Covered in sweat and old scars and one fresh cut along his forearm that was still bleeding. His chest was moving. His eyes were closed.

I didn't say a word. I didn't move.

"Arthur," he said.

His voice was wrecked. He didn't open his eyes. He said it again, and then he got his hands under himself and pushed up onto one knee, and he was shaking so hard he almost went back down.

"Arthur," he said a third time, and this time it was a call, loud and raw down the stairwell.

Running feet. Two sets, then three.

I sat against the wall with my hand still wrapped around my own throat.

I could still feel the heat. It hadn't gone all the way out.

And that was the part I couldn't get past, sitting there on a stone floor at seven o'clock at night.

I'd always figured I was missing something. Something everybody else got and I didn't.

It didn't feel missing anymore. It felt hidden.

Like it had been in there the whole time, waiting for something to open the door.

Chapter 7 Ends