August didn’t have an answer.
They found the first body on the stairs. A baton sat in his lap, casting an eerie pool of light around his corpse, shining on the blood spilling down the steps. His combat vest was gone, his head hung at an impossible angle, and the FTF patch had been torn from his sleeve.
“Shit,” muttered Rez, her voice laced not with panic, but anger. “Shit, shit . . .”
Beyond the steady beat of her swearing, August caught the far-off sound of something dripping, the faint creak of boards somewhere overhead.
He held a finger to his lips, and she went silent, crouched beside the body. Nothing happened, and after several long seconds, they both started moving again.
Up ahead, a mass coiled and writhed in the middle of the hall.
August caught a glint of silvery talons, a razor jaw, but Rez was a step ahead, lobbing a small light grenade across the floor. August squeezed his eyes shut as it detonated, throwing out a silent blast of UV light. The Corsai scattered with a hiss, fleeing into deeper shadow. Most of the creatures escaped, but one went up in smoke, its teeth and claws raining to the floor like chips of ice.
Two more corpses lay in the hall, their bodies twisted.
But by the looks of it, the Corsai hadn’t killed them. Their bodies were still mostly intact, their patches taken like trophies.
What had the voice on the comm said?
Patrol on the Seam caught a light signal . . . went to investigate.
Where was the fourth soldier?
Light danced in a doorway at the other end of the hall, not the steady glow of a dropped baton but the fickle stutter of a candle. August pocketed his light, and gripped the neck of his violin with one hand and the steel bow with the other. He left Rez with the bodies and moved toward the room, drawn by the light and the soft sound of a weight on floorboards, the drip of something against wood.
A single candle burned upright in the middle of the room—it was more like a cage, slats missing from the ceiling and floor—and against the far wall, beneath a cracked window, sat the last member of Squad Six, gagged and bound. The soldier’s head lolled. His vest was gone, and his shirtfront was soaked through with blood.
Dead weight, warned Leo, and real or not, he was right. August could hear the man’s heart fighting, losing, but it didn’t stop him from calling for Rez or picking his way through the room.
He didn’t slow until he was close enough to see the word on the floorboards, scrawled in the soldier’s blood.
BOO
August’s gaze snapped to the cagelike room, and then to the window. The darkness beyond was studded with a pair of watching red eyes, the sharp corner of a smile.
Alice.
Rez was beside him now, reaching for the soldier’s pulse. He caught her wrist.
“Get back,” he said, pushing her toward the door, but it was too late.
The ceiling creaked above them and August looked up just in time to see the glint of metal, the flurry of limbs, before the first monster came crashing down.
They came from everywhere.
Not monsters, he realized, but humans, Fangs with blood on their cheeks and steel collars wrapped around their throats and the manic smiles of the drugged and the mad. Some had knives and some had guns, and one dropped down right behind Rez.
She spun, cracking him across the face as August raised his violin. Bow met strings, but before he could draw a note, a shot exploded through the air, grazing the steel and ripping the instrument from his hand. It went skittering across the floor.
Rez kicked out, trying to send it back while headlocking a man twice her size, but it was lodged between two broken boards, and before August could reach her or the violin, a hulking man slammed him backward into the soldier, the wall, the window. The soldier slumped, lifeless, and the glass gave way. August nearly fell through, catching himself against the jagged edge. Glass bit into his palms, but drew no blood, and he surged back into the room just as an ax caught him in the chest.
The blade cut through mesh and cloth before slamming into his ribs. It didn’t break the skin, but it drove all the air from his lungs, and he doubled over, gasping. The Fangs circled him and he slashed out with the sharp spine of his bow as a length of iron chain wrapped around his throat.
The pure metal turned his stomach. His legs went weak, the chain wrenching him to his knees, and for one horrible second he was back in the warehouse in the Waste, heat screaming through his skin as he burned from the inside out and Sloan stood laughing at the edge of the light and—
The blunt side of the ax came down on the back of his neck, and he hit the floor hard, the boards cracking beneath him. His vision doubled, the chain at his throat vising, and then they were on him, kicking and beating, the blows shallow, the pain brief, but disorienting.
“. . . Sunai . . .”
“. . . just like she said . . .”
“. . . truss him up . . .”
August’s hands tightened into fists, and he realized he was still holding the bow, the steel pinned beneath someone’s boot.
Through the tangle of limbs he saw Rez wrest herself free. She managed a single step toward him, and he tried to tell her to run, to get out, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listened.
She threw herself at the tangle of bodies, peeling one away from the group. In the instant of distraction, the other Fangs faltered, torn between the two targets. The boot came off his bow and August slashed violently across the man’s leg. He went down screaming and clutching his calf as blood, but also light, bloomed across his skin.
Music wasn’t the only way to bring a soul to surface—Leo had taught him that. August grabbed the man’s ankle, bone cracking beneath his fingers as the soul sang through him, sharp as electricity and just as violent. Ice water and anger and a single, pealing scream.
Embrace it, urged his brother, as the world slowed, every detail in the broken room suddenly vivid, from the warped boards to the candlelight.
The Fang collapsed, his eyes burned black, and August shot to his feet, tugging the chain from his neck as the others scrambled back, clearly torn between whatever they’d been told—given, promised—and simple, physical fear.
They all recoiled, except for one.
A single Fang stood in the doorway, holding Rez like a shield, one hand clutching her hair and a serrated blade at her throat.
“Put down the bow,” he said through bloody teeth.
“Don’t you dare,” growled Rez.
Dead weight, repeated Leo.
August heard the clank of chain, sensed the other Fangs closing in on him again, the violin still wedged between the cracked boards a yard away.