Fear.
The taste that coated the streets, painted itself across the night, that most common of human traits—it wasn’t here. The station was awash in other things—anger, bloodlust, death, but no fear.
Artificial light buzzed harshly overhead, blurring Sloan’s vision. He flicked the nearest switch and the world was plunged mercifully back into muted grays. His eyes brightened, focused, drawing the room into sharp relief.
Bodies sprawled across the ground.
Slumped in halls.
Fell out of open cells.
The Crawford Street Station was a relic of the days before the war, before the Phenomenon, back when V-City had such mundane things as police, men and women enlisted to uphold the peace.
Harker had used the North City’s four stations for their onsite holding cells, and Sloan had turned those same cells into pens for some of the city’s most violent resisters. Men and women who had no desire to fight for their fellow humans in South City or serve as Fangs. Loners with their own taste for blood, for death, for power.
“What a waste,” mused Alice, stepping over a broad red pool. “It didn’t even eat them.”
She was right. What was the point of so much death if not to feed? Unless, of course, it had fed on something he couldn’t see. After all, the Sunai devoured souls. If the act didn’t burn out their victims’ eyes, there would be no way of telling what was taken, what was gone.
“You,” he said, pointing to the tallest Malchai. “Show me.”
The Malchai dragged a pointed nail across a tablet, pulling up the footage. Four feeds: two of the cell halls, one of the main room, and one of the front doors.
Two Fangs wandered the cell halls, while a third lounged in the main room.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Sloan rolled the timestamp forward, watching the seconds, minutes, tick by and— The lights on the footage suddenly guttered and went out.
They came on again an instant later, flickering and low, and in the half dark, Sloan saw the shadow. It stood a step or two behind the Fang, nothing but a streak of black across the screen. The light itself seemed to weaken around it, a halo of darkness tracing its edges. The camera blurred as if struggling to catch the creature’s shape.
“Is that it?” whispered Alice.
Sloan didn’t answer. He watched, expecting the human in the room to startle, to scream, to fight, and instead, the Fang stared, as if entranced. The shadow advanced, and the human rose to his feet and stepped toward the creature. For a long moment the human disappeared from view, swallowed by the shadow on the screen. When it withdrew, the man looked unchanged in every way but one.
His eyes.
They blurred the camera, streaks of light that cut across his face as he turned, took up a set of keys, and headed for the cell halls. He appeared on the next screen, another Fang moving toward him, and Sloan watched, mesmerized, as both men slowed, pausing for the barest second and in that second, something passed between them, spread from one to two. And then they were moving again.
One went to find the third Fang while the other unlocked the first cell door.
And began beating the prisoner to death.
Or at least, he tried. But the man was twice his size, and in seconds the Fang lay on the floor, his neck snapped, and the prisoner was in the hall, his own eyes shining with that monstrous light.
The other cells were open now.
The slaughter started.
All the while the shadow stood, almost peaceful, in the center of the station. But as Sloan watched, the creature began to harden, details etching themselves across its surface. Its arms tapered into long, thin fingers, its chest rose and fell, and the flat plane of its face took shape, cheeks hollowing and jaw growing sharp. And when blood splashed across its front, it did not pass through, as matter through shadow, but landed and stained, having met a solid surface.
So, it was feeding on the prisoners.
Not on their bodies or their souls, but on their actions, their violence. Sloan was suddenly glad that his Malchai had failed to kill the shadow. A monster that turned humans against each other—that was a pet worth having.
On the screen, the shadow started moving through the station, fingers trailing along the tables and walls. It brushed up against iron bars and recoiled slightly. So it wasn’t invulnerable.
And whatever it had gained from the humans’ deaths, the effects did not last long.
By the time it reached the front doors, it was thinning again, edges smudging. By the time it crossed onto the fourth screen and stepped into the street, it folded into mist and simply disappeared.
Sloan stared at the screen, which remained picture-still despite the passing seconds. No Malchai rose from the corpses. No Corsai stretched out of shadows. No Sunai shuddered into life.
Monsters were born from monstrous acts. But here were monstrous acts without the monstrous aftermath. The only aftermath, in fact, appeared to be the creature itself, the violence fed back into its source, leaving nothing but bodies in its wake.
“What do we do?” asked one of the Malchai.
Sloan looked up. “Let the Corsai have the corpses.”
“And what about the shadow?” asked Alice, drawing patterns in a pool of tacky blood. “We can’t let it run loose.”
“No,” said Sloan. “We can’t.”
Her red eyes narrowed. Alice had a way of reading others, reading him, that usually made him want to tear out those eyes. But for once, he only smiled.
She is standing before a mirror staring
at her own reflection and it has silver eyes and talks of mercy with a smile while blood drips from its fingers and the bodies pile
at its feet and the reflection reaches out a nail
against the glass tap-tap-tapping until it cracks.
Kate woke alone.
The sun was up, and August was gone, nothing but a ghost of space, an indentation on the other side of the bed.
A weight landed on the blankets, and a pair of green eyes peered over her shoulder.
Allegro.
He regarded her uncertainly, as if he didn’t know what to make of her.
“You and me both,” murmured Kate.
She knew she’d had another dream, but it was already gone, and she forced herself up and into the bathroom, running the shower as hot as she could bear. The pressure in her head was worse, matched now by a vise around her chest.
Steam filled the small room as she knelt and searched the bathroom drawers until she found something that looked like it might ease a headache. She took three before stepping into the scalding spray.
Everything ached, and she had to sing to herself to keep her thoughts from drifting toward the razor on the shelf.
When she got out, the mirror had fogged over.