Read Online Iron (The Warding Book 1) by Robin L. Cole - Free Book Online Page B

my chair. I even rolled my eyes and snarled silently. I was so not in the mood for faux fawning tonight, but a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do. She would owe me big for this.
    “Of course I do. Happy belated birthday, Cat.” There was only the bear minimum of friendliness in his voice. It was pretty clear he was as sick of my fake flirtations as I was, but if he insisted on playing the same game over and over, I sure as hell wasn’t turning in my cards early. It irked me to hear him call me Cat. Nobody but Jenni and my father did that. We certainly weren’t on chummy enough terms for him to be using nicknames. Still, I plastered a smile on my face as I turned back to the table.
    My overly cheerful greeting shriveled up and died on my tongue. Instead of saying anything, I gaped. There’s no other way to describe it. I sat there, mouth hanging open like a hooked trout. I blinked rapidly, like that was going to change something. Like there was a film over my eyes, making me see something straight out of a nightmare not two feet away from my face.
    Now Bryan was sitting eye-level with me, facing me—or, what I had once thought of as Bryan was. Though it remained man-shaped, there was little else about the thing before me that could be considered even remotely human. Its gray flesh was almost translucent, with a strangely pearlescent sheen, like a large wax doll. Milky whiteness seemed to roil beneath the surface of its skin, like smoke. The gaunt, oval face I stared into was all but featureless. It was like someone had quickly made the barest impressions of a human face in the wax, smearing thumbprint indentations where the eyes and mouth would have been and nothing else.
    I glanced down, away from that horribly blank stare and saw that the clothing it wore hung off its emaciated frame, rippling with its every movement. How had I not noticed that sooner? The hand that rested upon the table was skeletally thin, its knobby, elongated fingers sheathed in the same strange, waxy skin.
    I wondered— hoped —briefly, that I was seeing things. That maybe my days on end of paranoia were causing my brain to project something for me to fixate on. Unfortunately, rapidly fading buzz or no buzz, that made no sense. All night I had been looking over my shoulder, afraid I’d see horns or wings or fur on some stranger, but nothing had caught my eye. Not a single fairy in all of Riverview, until I let my guard down in a place I had pretty much trusted to be safe.
    What the fuck was with the creepy-ass fae and bars?
    I couldn’t tell what kind of look the Wax Man formerly known as Bryan gave me during my long pause. (It’s hard to read something with no face .) However, over its shoulder I could see Jenni giving me a wide-eyed “WTF?” look complete with mouthed query, so I scrambled to pull myself together. I faked a laugh—and let me tell you, it sounded pretty fake even to me—and forced myself to give the creature next to me a playful slap on the shoulder. Not caring how lame it sounded, I giggled and said, “Come on now, Bryan! Where are your manners? You should know better than to acknowledge a lady getting older!”
    Whether or not they believed my previous shock to have been play-acting, they both laughed along with me. I kept that teasing smile on my face though my stomach was knotted tight. I wondered where that laugh was coming from. The pit-like indentation of its mouth didn’t seem to move. How did it even have a voice?
    Thankfully “Bryan” turned it’s gaze back to Jenni, giving me a slightly less disturbing profile view. I knew they were having a pleasant enough sounding conversation without me—Jenni’s tipsy laugh sounded genuine—but I couldn’t follow the words. My mind was buzzing with fear and gibbering to itself that I should grab Jenni and run for the hills. She would think I was nuts if I did, of course. She obviously didn’t see what I saw, otherwise she would never have tolerated it