Chapter 14 begins with Merry
trying to reach her gun before Nerys the Grey, one of the hags who protects
Sholto, attacks her. Before she can reach the gun, though, Nerys grabs her and
throws her to the ground. The hag begins slashing at Merry with her long claws,
tearing through the skin of her arms and legs. Merry briefly gets away only to
find herself back into a corner. Sholto isn’t there to come to her assistance,
she realizes, because he had been knocked down by a large black shadow.
Merry raises her arms out and
Nerys begins slashing at her outstretched arms, screaming “He’s ours! He’s
ours!” Merry feels power begin to rise through her. She places her hand on
Nerys’s chest and pushes away, which forces the power into Nerys’s body, and
then she sees Nerys’s body begin to change, as if the skin began to flow like a
thick fluid, spreading over her body. Merry realizes that Nerys’s body is
turning inside out on itself. All her internal organs were finding new places
on the outside of her body, all the muscle and sinews flowed into a massive
ball of flesh.
Nerys was immortal, and now she
had been turned inside out. Merry heard screaming come from inside the flesh
ball, so she turns and runs. As she nears the door, she sees Sholto forced to the ground with Black Agnes mounted on his body, riding that cock like it’s the
last great rodeo.
Merry runs. She makes it to the
elevator, riding it down to the lobby, before she realizes she’s not wearing a
shirt and is also covered in blood. On the way down in the elevator, Merry
begins to realize the horror she caused in the hotel room, turning Nerys inside
out with her power, and discovers that she is likely in shock, because she
knows she should be screaming in horror at the thought of her newfound power.
Instead, she uses her personal glamour magics to help conceal herself from any
sluagh that may be in the hotel, as well as glamour some clothes onto her/do
away with the blood so she doesn’t alarm any humans.
The elevator doors open, and Merry
sets off for one of the exits, but notices the third hag, Segna the Gold,
sitting on a nearby couch. Segna glances at Merry but doesn’t make any sort of
move, just narrows her eyes a bit. Merry turns on her heel and heads for the
other set of exit doors, but sees Gethin, that weird little Hawaiian shirt
wearing goblin thing, blocking that exit. She quickly scans the hotel lobby for
somewhere else to hide and then heads to the ladies’ room. As she shuts the
door to the bathroom, she quickly wards it with runes drawn in blood. Merry
sees a very small window high above the row of stalls, so she grabs a small
chair (there’s always chairs and couches in ladies’ restrooms. Always) and
begins dragging it over.
She gets the chair in place and is
about to open the window when a mass of tentacles slams against the window,
which causes Merry to fall to the floor. Knowing she cannot exit the window,
she places wards around it to keep them from getting in. She turns to the sinks
to try to stop the bleeding on her arms
when she notices a small dark shadowy figure crouching in the corner of
the mirror. The figure begins to walk towards her inside the mirror. Merry is
trapped. She cannot place wards on the mirror because it is not, to her, a door
or a window. She doesn’t have enough power to perform mirror-magic, so she
finds herself trapped, unable to leave through the door or window, and unable
to stop the figure coming closer to her in the mirror.
Suddenly, the bathroom door opens
and two normal human women enter. They entered laughing and went into the
stalls without a second glance at Merry, which lets her know that her glamour
is still holding up fine. She turns back to the mirrors and notices that a
small spider is crawling in the mirror She realizes that this probably the same
spider who helped her before, or at least sent from the same person, so she
writes “Help Me” in her blood on a piece of paper towel and pressed it to the
mirror near the spider. The paper towel passed through the mirror. The shadowy
figure picks up the paper towel and then Merry hears a voice say “Done.”
The two women, now both checking
their makeup in the other mirrors, hear this voice as well and instantly become
worried or confused. Merry realizes that she does not have enough power to hide
the figure in the mirror, and knowing that he is going to be exiting the mirror
soon, knows she must do something to hide him. She goes over to the wall and
the chapter ends with her turning off the lights in the bathroom.
Characters Introduced:
Spidey – shadowy figure who
controls spiders
Themes Introduced:
Merry was able to turn Nerys
inside out with her power.
Sex: Well, Sholto got raped by a
hag, so that’s cool.
Labels: A Kiss of Shadows, Book 1, book review, death, faeries, flesh, inside out, night hags, urban fantasy
