Shards of glass rained across the floor like frozen rain, the night air rushing in behind them. Ryan ducked instinctively, pulling Kate down with him as a figure vaulted through the shattered window.
The room filled with the smell of ozone and something older, like iron and burnt wood.
Ryan barely had time to register the attacker's shape ,tall, cloaked, moving with inhuman speed before the thing's arm lashed out. His knife clattered away, spinning under the bed.
Kate scrambled back, eyes wide, her breathing ragged. "Ryan..."
"I know," he snapped, snatching up the diary and shoving it into his jacket.
The figure straightened, its face hidden behind a smooth porcelain mask that gleamed in the half-light. For a split second, Ryan's vision doubled.
Another life.
He was in a torch-lit hall, wearing armor that wasn't his, that face above him as his own blood pooled on stone tiles.
"Ryan," the figure said, voice distorted but familiar, "you should have stayed forgotten."
Ryan forced himself to his feet. "Lucien," he breathed.
Kate blinked. "You… you know him?"
Ryan didn't answer.
The figure cocked its head. "Still clinging to the diary, I see. You never learn. The pages aren't yours, Ryan,they're mine."
He lunged.
Ryan grabbed Kate's wrist and yanked her toward the door, narrowly avoiding a blade that hissed through the air where his chest had been. They bolted into the hallway, their footsteps pounding against the metal floorboards.
"Who the hell was that?" Kate gasped as they rounded the corner.
"Not the time!" Ryan barked, skidding to a stop as another memory slammed into him
...
A battlefield of black sand. Lucien, laughing, cutting him down under a blood-red sky. A vow whispered into his ear: I'll find you in every life.
Ryan shook his head violently, the present snapping back into focus. "We need to move. Now!"
They burst into the stairwell. Ryan shoved Kate ahead of him, hearing Lucien's boots echoing closer and closer.
"You can't run forever!" the distorted voice carried through the concrete.
Ryan's pulse thundered in his ears. He'd run from Lucien in a hundred lives, and it had always ended the same way (in blood).
But not this time.
They hit the ground floor and slammed through the exit into the cold neon-lit street. Ryan pulled Kate into the narrow alleyway, pressing them both against the wall as Lucien's silhouette appeared at the stairwell door.
Kate's breath was shaky. "Ryan… what the hell just happened?"
Ryan tightened his grip on the diary. "The past finally caught up with me."
Above them, the mask turned toward the alley, tilting its head as if listening.
Ryan whispered, "And it won't stop until I'm dead."
Again
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