Free Shadowbound: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Realm Protectors Book 2) by Spencer DeVeau Page A

low volume (a reporter talked of the end of days and he wound up switching to an FM station to get the latest pop hits, because if Hell was going to come to Earth, it was going to arrive while listening to some teenaged asshole with little musical talent wearing jeans skinner than their ambitions).  
    The once deserted highway still looked deserted, just a different kind of deserted. Post-apocalyptical, perhaps.  
    A few cars had piled up on the shoulder near an exit into Flaxton Township, and up ahead he could see the distant glow of red taillights, but that must’ve been a few miles up. Didn’t matter. He meant to catch them and pass them if he had the chance.
    But his phantom eyelids were so heavy; he might not get that chance.
    The car swerved, ran over the bumps off to the side near the divider, jolting him back into full consciousness. Consciousness that didn’t last long, and he had to turn up that wretched pop song.
    A sign told him an old Motel 8 was a few exits ahead, and he’d really debated pulling off towards it, but in the end settled for their parking lot. Because, like Sahara said, being a Protector didn’t mean barrels of money. Really all it meant was some pain, seeing scary some scary, unnatural shit, and a burnt skin suit.
    The Motel 8 looked like it had been ransacked, but he got the feeling it always looked like that — end of days, or not. The brick was a washed out pink. Blinds hung in the windows crookedly with missing strips. The glass of the front door was cracked. Motel 8, high above the road, buzzed and flickered.
    He parked between an old phone booth, one that had not been used since the first Nokia dropped, and a towering street lamp that, like the phone booth, no longer had any use.
    He left the car on, the rumbling soothing him, rocking him to sleep like a baby.
    Just fifteen minutes. A quick cat nap.
    “The Lake…the Lake,” Sahara mumbled, but as Harold’s eyes got heavier, her voice faded.  
    And then he could no longer keep whatever was left of his eyelids open. And she’d have to wait. A power nap, that’s all. Then they could find the Lake. If it existed. He didn’t think it did. Could’ve been death babble — knew it was death babble.
    The power nap, intended to be fifteen minutes, turned to an hour, and the sky rippled with flames. Outside, the temperature went from a cool, and calm seventy-five to a solid ninety degrees, and at that time of year on the cusp of Gloomsville, those numbers were unheard of.
    Yet Harold Storm slept through it all like an infant, and as he snored in the Realm of Reality, he screamed in the Realm of Dreams.
    A baby crawled towards him through the black muck.  
    Where was he at? A minute ago, a pop singer sang songs about how he’d ‘never leave you, girl.’ A sound of splashing water came to him, and he jumped. But the eyes, the glowing eyes approached. Eyes he’d somehow recognized.
    Marcy’s eyes.  
    But Marcy was no baby, and Harold owned no time machine. The nose, too. He recognized that nose. It had stared back at him every time he’d looked in the mirror — and how vain he used to be, before all of the burns and the blisters and the festering wounds.  
    It was his nose, though much smaller and maybe a little cuter.
    He reached at the crawling child, the one he knew to be his own. Valentine, he wanted to name her, but Marcy wouldn’t have it. Back in the throes of one of their heated fights, back in a simpler time, one Harold had not recognized until now. Until the responsibility and the pain cracked his shoulders. The weight of the worlds, the weight of the Realms snapped his spine.
    The child balked, but the eyes didn’t.
    “Come here,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
    He longed for the child’s touch, for something to remind him of the real world and break through the stuff of nightmares.
    “But you already hurt me, daddy,” the child said — Valentine, screw Marcy, the baby was named Valentine.
    “No, no, I