“Hey, boss . . .” August met Rez’s gaze and saw the glint between her fingers, but before he could stop her, she drove the dagger back into the man’s leg. He howled and let go, but not before slicing her throat.
A sound left August then, low and animal, and he forced himself to lunge, not for the killer but for the violin. Hands tore at him but he ignored them, grabbing the instrument and slashing the bow across the strings.
The first note came out hard and sharp, and the Fangs recoiled, pressing their hands over their ears as if that would save them, but it was too late. They were too late.
By the second note, the fight went out of them.
By the third, they were falling to their knees.
August left the music echoing on the air and ran for Rez. He dropped the violin and sank to the floor beside her.
“Stay with me,” he said, pressing his hands to the wound at her neck. There was so much blood bubbling up between his fingers, too much, and it slicked his skin, made his fingers slip. So much red, he thought, and none of it light.
Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
Her chest juddered up, down.
“Stay with me.” The words came out pleading.
August had reaped a thousand souls, but it was such a different thing to feel a life bleed out beneath his hands, powerless to staunch the flow. For all the souls he’d reaped, he’d so rarely seen this kind of death, never felt the way it stole beneath his fingers, life spilling across the floor until that horrible cusp, the instant when it ended. When Laura Torrez stopped being a person and became a body. No transition, no ease, gone and there, there and gone, gone, gone.
August’s hands slid from the wound at Rez’s throat. Her eyes were open and empty, and red light flickered across her face. Not hers, of course, but theirs. A room of ruined souls waiting to be reaped.
August eased Rez’s body down and rose to his feet. He moved among the Fangs, bloodstained fingers searching out skin.
They whispered their sins, but he didn’t listen, didn’t care. Their confessions meant nothing to him.
He snuffed their lights, reaped their souls, his whole body humming with the sudden influx of power, his senses sharpened to the point of pain, until there was only one left.
The man who’d killed Rez.
His lips were moving, his soul a sheen of sweat against his skin, but August didn’t reach out to reap it. Leo’s words swam inside his head, not the stuff of madness, but memory—a memory from the night he’d taught August about pain, and why he so often used it.
“Our purpose is not to bring peace,” his brother had said. “It is to bestow penance.”
August watched the man’s soul sink back beneath the surface of his skin, watched his senses return.
“Why shouldn’t they suffer for their sins?”
The Fang blinked, straightened, his mouth twisting in a grimace, but before he could speak, before he could say or do anything, August slammed his boot into the man’s wounded leg, and he buckled, clutching at his thigh before August forced him to the floor, fingers closing around the steel collar at his throat.
“Look at me,” he said, squeezing until the metal bent and buckled. “How does it feel?”
The man couldn’t answer, couldn’t breathe. He scrambled and scratched and gasped as the red light of his soul surfaced again, pouring through August’s hands.
It hit him like ice, a cold so sharp it hurt, and it was the pain that brought August back to himself, to what he was doing, what he had done.
He wrenched backward, but it was too late. The light was gone, and all that was left was the man’s contorted body, eyes burned out and mouth open in a silent scream, red and purple welts rising around the crushed collar.
August felt sick.
His body ached with the pressure—the presence—of the souls, and he wished he could retch them up, expel the weight of so many unwanted lives, but it was no use. The souls were a part of him now, fusing to his bones and surging through his veins.
His chest hitched and he brought his hand to his front where the ax had cut through armored vest and uniform but failed to wound.
“Alpha pair, report.”
He looked down at his hands, coated in Rez’s blood. It was drying on his skin, tacky and cold.
“Alpha pair.”
August had always hated blood. It was the same color as a soul, but empty, useless the moment it left a person’s veins.
“August.”
He forced his mind back.
“I’m here,” he said, startled by the calm in his voice, steady when something deeper wanted to scream. “We were ambushed.” His gaze went to the broken window where the red eyes had watched from the dark. “Rez is dead.”
“Shit.” Phillip, then. Phillip was the only one who swore on the comm. “And the other squad?”
“Dead,” answered August.
What a simple word that was, not messy at all.
“We’ll send a team at dawn, for the bodies.” And then Phillip’s voice was gone, and others were ricocheting across the comm, none of them directed at him. He picked up his bow, his violin—these small, solid pieces of himself—then busied his hands arranging light batons to keep the corpses safe.
Corpse—another simple word that did so little work, failed to describe something that was once a person, and now was simply a shell.
Eventually a familiar voice broke the static in his ear.
“August,” said Emily, “you should return to the Compound.”
Her voice, as steady as his own. He swallowed back the no, no, no and said instead, “I’m waiting. . . . I have to wait.”
And Emily didn’t make him say why, so she must have understood what he meant. Violence begets violence, and monstrous acts make monsters.
The Malchai in the hall came first, rose up like spirits from the bodies of the soldiers. And he cut them down. Then came the Malchai by the smothered candle, rising up beside the word written in blood, and he dispatched that one, too. And then, it came down to Rez.
Her murder had been the work of an instant, but it felt like forever before the shadows finally began to twitch.
His fingers tightened on his bow as the night took a shuddering breath, and then, standing among the corpses, stood the monster.
It looked down at itself in a gesture so human, so natural, and yet so wrong, and then its head came up, red eyes widening right before August drove his steel bow into its heart.
Half a block from the Falstead, August knew he was being followed.
He could hear the shuffle of steps, not on the street behind him but somewhere overhead. He didn’t slow until something floated to the ground at his feet.
It was a patch, three letters—FTF—visible through the blood.
As he straightened, another drifted down.
“Hasn’t anyone told you?” said a voice on the air. “It’s not safe to wander after dark.”
He looked up and saw her standing on a nearby roof, moonlight tracing her pale hair.
“Alice.”