Too late, he saw their mutilated ears, and realized they couldn’t hear him.
August swore, dropping the violin and twisting the bow in his hand to reveal the razored edge of its spine as the Malchai fell on him. He slashed a throat, black blood misting the air, noxious as death, as nails dug into his arms, and a hand snarled in his hair.
But they were no match for him, no match at all. For once, August didn’t have to worry about humans, didn’t have to hold any lives but his own. The freedom was so shocking that he lost himself in the violence.
He became an instrument of ending, a piece of music, the notes drawing out as darkness wrapped up around his hands, and smoke swallowed his fingers and climbed his wrists, that other self peeling him away, shedding him inch by inch. The Malchai screamed and thrashed, and heat flared in his chest, his pulse rising, urging him to let go, let go, let go.
But it was already over. His violin lay several feet away, the bow in his hand slick with gore, and August stood, panting from the fight, the broken bodies of the monsters strewn at his feet.
Well done, little brother.
He looked down at his hands, the skin still engulfed in shadow and smoke. The darkness lapped at the tallies on his forearms, threatening to erase the writing on his skin, to erase him, but there was no need, the fight was done, and as he watched, the shadows receded.
August flexed his hands and tipped his head back to the night.
“You’ll have to try harder than that,” he called to Alice, his voice echoing through the dark.
Henry was waiting at the Compound doors. At the sight of August, he marched forward onto the light strip. “What were you thinking?”
He doesn’t understand.
“How could you be so reckless?”
He can’t.
“You could have been taken.”
He’s only human.
But August had never seen Henry so visibly distraught. The light made him pale and gaunt, and he was breathing hard enough for August to hear the hitch in the man’s chest. Concern rose up, but he forced it down.
“What’s gotten into you?” demanded Henry.
“Nothing,” said August. “I’m fulfilling my purpose. And it feels right,” he added, even though the high had already faded, and the blood had gone tacky on his skin, the sick scent of it hitting the back of his throat.
Henry’s face filled with dismay, and August was left clawing for the calm that had surrounded him so easily during the fight, grasping at the dregs of the freedom he’d felt in the dark.
“You abandoned your team.”
“I sent them home. I didn’t need them anymore.”
Henry rubbed at his brow. “I know you’re upset about Rez—”
“This isn’t about Rez,” countered August. “This isn’t about any one human. I’m just tired of losing. What good is my strength if you don’t let me use it?”
Henry’s hands came to rest on his shoulders. “What good is your strength if we lose you to Sloan? Look at Ilsa. Think of Leo. You may think you’re invincible, but you’re not.”
“I don’t have to be invincible,” said August, shrugging him off. “I just have to be stronger than everyone else.”
Sloan ran his hand along the office shelves, nails trailing over the cloth and leather spines of Harker’s collection until he found what he was looking for.
“Here we are,” he said, returning to the penthouse’s main room.
The three engineers were sitting at the table, a broad plane of slate on a steel frame. A length of chain ran from their ankles to the table legs, which were bolted to the floor. The table was already littered with tablets, but he cleared a space and let the book thud onto the stone top, relishing the way they startled at the sound.
“What do you want?” asked one of the men.
Sloan turned through the pages until he reached a photo of the city, taken from before the territory wars, before Sloan himself. When Flynn’s fortress was just another tower in a sea of steel.
“What I want,” he said, running his nail down the page, letting it come to rest on the Compound, “is to bring this building down.”
The engineers stilled.
It was the woman who spoke. “No.”
“No?” echoed Sloan softly.
“We won’t do it,” said the other man.
“We can’t,” amended the woman. “It’s not possible. A building of that size, it’s not as if you could ever destroy it from a distance, and even if you had the materials—”
“Ah.” Sloan took the small cube from his pocket, set the explosive on the table. The engineers drew back.
“My predecessor believed in preparation. He cached his arsenals in various places around the city, stored all manner of things, from guns to precious metals to a fair quantity of this. Do not worry about materials,” he said, returning the cube to his pocket. “Just find a way to plant them.”
He started to walk away and heard the rattle of chains, the sound of the book rustling. He turned back in time to see the second man, tome raised, as if to strike Sloan with it. What a pain, he thought, catching the man by the throat. The book tumbled uselessly from his hands.
Sloan sighed, and tightened his grip, lifting the man off the floor. That’s what he got for giving these new pets a measure of freedom. He looked past the struggling, gasping form to the other two engineers.
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear . . . ,” he said, snapping the man’s neck.
The woman gasped. The other man shuddered. But neither rose from their seats. That was progress, he thought, letting the body fall to the floor beside the book.
Just then Alice came storming in, her hands clenched and her eyes blazing, no sign of her mutilated Malchai or August Flynn.
“Another failed attempt?” cooed Sloan, picking up the book as she barreled past toward her room.
“Practice makes perfect,” she growled, slamming the bedroom door.
She is alone in a place with no light no space
no sound
and then
the darkness asks who deserves to pay and a voice —her voice— answers
everyone and the word echoes
over and over and over
and over
and the nothing fills with bodies packed in as tightly as the crowd in the basement of Harker Hall when Callum stood on stage and passed his judgment every human is her father every monster is his shadow and there is a knife in her hand and all she wants is to cut them down one by one all she wants all she wants— but if she starts she will never stop so she lets go and the knife falls from her fingers and the monsters tear her
apart.
Kate lurched forward out of sleep, heart racing.
For one terrible, disorienting moment she didn’t know where she was—and then it came rushing back.
The house in the green, the man with the shotgun, the Corsai in the street.
She was lying on the couch beside the altar of batteries and bulbs, dawn slicing through the makeshift metal curtains. The ghost of the nightmare lingered as she got to her feet. She’d slept in her boots, unable to shake the fear that something would come, that she’d have to be ready to fight, to run. Her music player had died in the night, but the Corsai, they had never stopped.