The sound hit Kate in the stomach and she spun, already moving toward the source as a second voice joined in, and a third.
She sprinted down the block and skidded around the corner, expecting to find a Heart Eater amid a crowd of people. But the street was empty, and the screams were coming from inside a restaurant. Kate slammed to a stop as a line of blood streaked across the front window. The door hung open and someone was crawling forward on hands and knees, while others slumped on tables. At the back of the room she saw a man, holding what looked like a pair of kitchen knives. The knives were slick with blood, and his eyes shone strangely, and he was smiling—not a deranged grin, but something calm, almost peaceful, which made the whole scene so much worse.
Kate touched her ear. “Call the police.”
“What?” asked Teo. “What’s going—”
Her voice was shaking. “One Sixteen South Marks.”
A body tumbled back into the glass, leaving a red streak in its wake. The man with the knives vanished into the kitchen.
“Kate, are you—”
“Now.”
The air smelled like blood and panic as she forced herself toward the restaurant, toward the massacre, toward the chaos.
And there, in the middle of it all, so still she almost didn’t see it, stood a monster.
Not a Heart Eater, but something else, something shaped more or less like a person, at least around the edges, but made entirely of shadow. It stood, watching the scene unfold with a serenity that matched the killer’s, and as it watched, it seemed to grow more solid, more real, details etching themselves across the blank canvas of its skin.
“Hey!” she called out.
The monster twitched at the sound of her voice and turned toward her, revealing the edge of a silver eye just as sirens came blaring down the street. Kate spun around as the red-and-blue strobes of police cars swung around the corner, barreling past her toward the restaurant, where the screams had given way to horrible, blanketing silence.
The monster was gone.
Kate turned, searching the street. She’d looked away only for an instant, a breath; it couldn’t have gotten far, but it was nowhere, nowhere— There.
The shadow reappeared at the mouth of an alley.
“What’s going on?” demanded Liam as Kate took off at a sprint.
The shadow vanished again and reappeared farther down the alley as Kate cut into the gap between buildings.
Sirens wailed, and behind her eyes she still saw the streaks of blood, the man’s knives, but also his calm resolve, and the creature’s own expression, a mirror, an echo.
Her mind raced. What had it done? What did it feed on? Why was it standing there just watching— “Kate, are you there?”
She drew an iron spike as she ran. The alley around her was empty, empty—and then it wasn’t.
She slid to a stop on the damp concrete, breathless from the chase and the sudden appearance of the shadow in her path. This time, the monster didn’t flee. And neither did Kate. Not because she didn’t want to—in that moment, she did—but because she couldn’t look away.
She’d thought of the monster as a shadow, but it was more—and less. It was—wrong. It looked wrong, it felt wrong, like a hole cut in the world, like deep space. Empty and cold. Hollow and hungry.
It drew all the heat out of the air, all the light, all the sound, plunging them both into silence, and she felt suddenly heavy, slow, her limbs weighed down as the darkness, the monster, the nothing, closed the gap between them.
“Kate?” pleaded a voice in her ear, and she tried to speak, tried to pull free, tried to will her limbs to move, to fight, to run, but the monster’s gaze was like gravity, holding her down, and then its icy hands were on her skin.
Riley’s voice in her ear: “Kate?”
Somewhere, distantly, she felt the spike slip from her fingers, the far-off sound of metal hitting asphalt as the creature lifted her chin.
Up close, it had no mouth.
Only a pair of silver eyes set like discs into its empty face.
Like mirrors, thought Kate, as she caught sight of herself.
And then she was falling in.
At first
it thinks
she is
another toy to wind up
and release another match to strike
but she is
already lit so full
of grief and anger of guilt and fear Who deserves to pay?
it asks her heart and her heart answers
everyone, every one and it knows she is like it
a thing
of limitless potential— she will burn like a sun
among stars she will make it solid she will make it real she will— (Kate?)
(Kate!) and then
—somehow—
she
pulls away
it lets her go and it does not she tears free, and she does n—
“KATE?”
Riley’s voice screamed in her ear and she tore herself free—and it felt like tearing, clothes caught on a nail, skin on barbed wire, pieces left behind, something deep inside her ripping.
She was on her knees—when had she fallen?—hands scraping pavement and her head a riot of pain, everything blurred as if she’d taken a blow. But she didn’t remember—she couldn’t remember—
The voices were shouting in her skull, and she wrenched the earpiece from her ear and cast it into the dark as the alley slid in and out of focus, a second image ghosting her vision in a sickening overlay.
She squeezed her eyes shut, counted to five.
And then she blinked, and saw the red-and-blue lights dancing on the alley wall. Remembered the restaurant, the screams, the man—then the monster, that void with its mirror eyes and a voice that wasn’t a voice inside her head.
Who deserves to pay?
She remembered, distantly, a swell of anger, a longing to hurt something, someone. But it was like a dream, quickly fading. The monster was gone, and Kate lurched to her feet, the world rocking violently. She caught herself against the wall. One step at a time, she made her way back toward the flashing lights, stopping at the mouth of the alley as an ambulance sped away.
A crowd had gathered, morbidly curious, but the attack was over. Whatever it was, it had moved from an active scene to a passive one. A row of body bags lined the curb, and police moved in and out, the sirens off, and the scene already growing still, like a corpse.
A cold fear crept through her. She didn’t understand what had happened, what she’d seen, but the longer she stared, the less she could remember, and the harder she thought, the worse the pain in her head. Something dripped from her chin, and she tasted copper in the back of her throat and realized her nose was bleeding.
She pushed off the wall and nearly fell again, but forced herself to keep moving and didn’t stop until she was home.
When she finally stumbled into the apartment, she nearly missed the person on the couch.
Riley was already on his feet, moving as if to catch her.
“Jesus, Kate, what happened?”
At least, that’s what she thought he said. The words themselves were muffled by a ringing in her ears, a white noise like being underwater, pain lancing through her head, a strobe behind her eyes.