Chapter 229 - 230 Sleer.

I stopped dead in the center of the exhibit, the silence pressing down on me from all sides.

My magnetic senses reached outward, the unseen field humming and buzzing as it swept across the cavernous room.

I could feel the tiny steel screws fastening the drywall panels. The small metal plaques identifying the Neanderthal bones. The threaded iron pins holding the skeleton displays together.

Nothing distinctly weaponized. But that didn’t mean a damn thing here.

If whoever was stalking me possessed a functional brain cell, they wouldn’t be carrying heavy metal ordnance into an environment controlled by a man who commanded magnetism.

They’d be using arcane focus points, non-ferrous synthetics, or pure, unadulterated superpower biology.

The heavy, suffocating prickle of danger intensified, crawling up the back of my neck like a spider. I adjusted my posture instinctively, dropping my right hand deep into the pocket of my trousers.

Let’s see here... I had some loose change, my leather wallet, my keys... Not an ideal armory, but when you control kinetic force, a handful of pocket change can double as a scattergun if you throw enough velocity behind it.

First, though, I needed visual confirmation. Where was the son of a bitch?

I pulled out a tight fistful of quarters, letting the cold metal slide across my fingers as I tracked the dim, flickering reflections of the room in the thick protective glass of a nearby prehistoric diorama.

Still empty space. But I could practically feel whoever was hunting me breathing hot, silent air against my collar. Where are you, you coward?

I let the coins jingle softly in my palm, the metal vibrating in sync with my building adrenaline. Where... where—

Where had that elongated shadow on the masonry come from?

My eyes snapped toward the stretching silhouette against the stone wall. I whipped my head around to find the human casting it, but the floor space was completely bare.

The dark shape detached itself from the wall, rippling across the plaster toward me with unnatural, predatory speed.

Ah. So that’s how it is.

I spun on my heel, bringing my arm up in a fluid arc, trapping a heavy quarter securely beneath my thumb. I fired it forward with a sharp, concussive snap of magnetic force.

The coin screamed through the air like an armor-piercing round, but the shadow violently twisted in mid-motion, liquid-like, dodging the projectile by a hair.

A sharp hiss echoed off the stone as the figure lunged out of the gloom, surging across the floor with long, shadowy limbs reaching for my throat.

Like hell you will!

I didn’t try to swat him with a coin this time. I reached up toward the ceiling grid, wrenching the heavy steel housing of a track spotlight right off its mount.

The fixture swung wildly on its power cable, its high-intensity floodlamp instantly blazing down to cast a searing, blinding white cone of illumination directly over the encroaching shape.

The shadowman shrieked like a stray cat thrown onto a red-hot stove.

He whipped his head back, his dark form violently recoiling from the glare. But the sudden blinding light temporarily forced his fluid mass to solidify into dense, physical flesh.

I didn’t waste the opening. I whipped my hand forward, sending another quarter zinging straight across the room.

The coin struck true, burying itself deep into his shoulder with a wet thwack that threw him backward with a sharp yelp of genuine pain.

I straightened up as he scrambled frantically, flailing away from the light and scurrying for the deep, pitch-black shadows pooling in the far corner of the exhibit. But I wasn’t about to let him slip back into his parlor tricks.

I thrust my hand out, forcing three more ceiling lamps to groan and snap downward on their brackets, crisscrossing the corner in a blinding net of cross-illumination.

The shadowman howled in pure, unadulterated agony as the intersecting floodlights washed over him, completely cutting off his retreat.

His blurred outline rapidly thickened, the dark, smoky aura burning away into nothingness to reveal the angular, concrete-gray skin and razor-sharp features of Sleer crouching miserably on the floor.

He was clutching his bleeding shoulder, his narrow, pale face twisted into an expression of murderous, impotent hatred.

I stepped slowly out of the shadows, letting the remaining loose change jingle rhythmically in my hand, each metal edge humming with restrained, lethal voltage.

"Well, well," I said smoothly. "That was quite the dramatic greeting, don’t you think?"

Sleer hissed, his thin frame trembling as he forced himself up onto his feet, glaring daggers at me through his narrow, slitted eyes. "You... you dare strike me? Do you know who I serve?"

"Yeah, actually," I said, keeping my tone entirely conversational. "I have this quirky personal boundary about uninvited stalkers. I could feel your murderous little intentions pressing against my spine like a rusty shiv."

"It... it was merely a... a misunderstanding," Sleer spat out, his voice cracking with humiliation.

"Right. Sure. I bet it was." I slid another quarter out from my palm, holding it lightly between my index finger and thumb, aiming it squarely at the center of his forehead. "Care to try explaining it again before I drill a hole through your skull?"

"W-wait!" Sleer gasped, throwing his gray hand up in a frantic warding gesture. "My master... my master sent me to confer with you! If you strike me down here, he will assume... he will assume you are officially declaring war on the New Order!"

Fucking typical.

Unfortunately, he was entirely right. Throwing away the tenuous diplomatic bridge I had just built with The Jester over a petty scrap with his overzealous errand boy would be monumentally stupid.

"Then why the hell did you try to put a knife in my back instead of just walking up and saying hello?" I demanded, the quarter still steady in my grip.

Sleer’s pale face twitched violently under the blinding glare of the museum lamps. "I... I came to inspect your progress on the project!"

"And you honestly didn’t think... I don’t know, maybe a polite phone call or an email would have sufficed?"

"My master... he prefers his sensitive intelligence gathered in person," Sleer muttered bitterly.

"I’ll bet he does," I sighed. "So if your boss didn’t send you to assassinate me, why were you acting like a rabid dog? Out of some misguided personal loyalty? Do you just naturally hate my face? Or... does this have something to do with Vanessa?"

His entire jaw twitched, a tiny muscle jumping violently beneath his concrete-colored skin.

Bingo.

"Oh, so that’s how the wind blows," I said, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across my face. "You’ve got a little crush on the boss’s daughter. And you’re terrified I’m going to ruin your chances—or worse, that I actually did spend time with her back in the day. So you decided to play big man and try to ice me in a dark museum. Brilliant strategic thinking there, jackass."

"S-silence!" Sleer hissed, baring his pointed, gray teeth in a snarl. "What could a mercenary scum like you possibly understand of our affairs?"

"Fuck-all," I answered honestly, finally slipping the quarter back into my pocket. "But here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to go back to your master, and you are going to tell him that the plan is proceeding smoothly.

"Tell him Vanessa is taking the bait, and we’re staging the big opening performance in the next few days. He can read all about it on the evening news just like everyone else.

"And if he has any complaints about the creative direction, he can take it up with me like a professional, and we can discuss a refund."

Before he could snap back with another juvenile threat, I closed the distance in a blur.

I reached out, clamped a heavy hand around his shadow-woven collar, and hoisted the razor-thin assassin a full foot off the floor with a sharp yank of my magnetic field.

"And as for you," I growled, my voice dropping into a low, uncompromising register right beside his ear. "If I ever catch you tracking me or my girls again, or if I even so much as notice your shadow lingering in my peripheral vision, I won’t just break a shoulder. I’ll pull every ounce of iron out of your bloodstream. Do we understand each other?"

"Sssss..." Sleer seethed, choking against the tight collar, his yellow eyes burning with unbridled venom.

I channeled a sharp, localized pulse of magnetic friction into the brass pin in his wounded shoulder, twisting the metal just enough to make him gasp with sudden, blinding agony.

"I asked if we understand each other," I repeated.

"Y-yes!" Sleer choked out, his hands clawing uselessly at my wrist.

Good enough.

I tossed him backward, casually releasing the magnetic lock. He slammed hard into a dark corner of the exhibit, crashing against a Neanderthal display case.

When the dust cleared, his body simply dissolved back into the surrounding darkness, his glowing yellow eyes glaring hatefully from the gloom until they blinked out entirely.

The heavy, oppressive weight of his presence vanished from my mind.

I exhaled a long, steady breath, brushing a speck of drywall dust off the lapel of my jacket.

Fucking hell.

I had been strongly tempted to just finish him off while I had him dead to rights. The bastard was practically begging for a dirt nap.

But regardless of his stupid, unprovoked assassination attempt, executing the personal errand boy of a Council of Nine warlord was a fantastic way to bring an apocalypse down on my own head.

There was a slim, microscopic chance The Jester wouldn’t care, but I wasn’t willing to bet the chalet on it.

I just had to hope I wouldn’t ever have to look at that miserable face again.

Sighing, I turned my back on the prehistoric dioramas and headed back toward the front entrance to find Lilith. Maybe I should ask the demoness to slap some kind of shadow-repelling ward around the chalet boundaries. She probably had a ritual for keeping creepy stalkers off the lawn.

Regardless, I was definitely going to have to log a formal complaint with The Jester about his HR department.

For now, though, I needed to escort my eccentric fashionista back to the car and focus on keeping this multi-million-dollar production on the rails.

Before any more hormonal, knife-wielding psychos decided to crash the party.