Leo and August pinned Phillip down while Henry moved with careful, decisive motions over the vicious wound. His partner, Harris, stood to the side, blood streaked across his face, looking numb from shock while Emily stitched up a gash on his bicep. She didn’t have Henry’s surgical grace, but her hands were just as steady.
Henry drew a syringe full of morphine and sank the needle into Phillip’s functioning arm. His cursing trailed off and his head lolled to the side, the pain and tension finally going out of him.
“This cannot stand, Henry,” said Leo, a smudge of Phillip’s blood along his jaw. “We have suffered enough insult. It is time to—”
“Not now,” snapped Henry as he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and set to work. August looked down at the wreckage of Phillip’s shoulder, the slick red pool spreading across the metal table, and felt ill. Under the glare of the lights, Phillip looked suddenly young, delicate. Humans were too fragile for this fight, but the Sunai were too few to do it alone, and even if three could wage a war on thousands, the Malchai and Corsai weren’t foolish enough to get close, opting instead for prey they could catch, and kill. And so the Sunai focused on hunting sinners in order to stem the flow of violence, and the slaying of the monsters fell to the humans, and the humans, invariably, fell to them. It was a cycle of whimpers and bangs, gruesome beginnings and bloody ends.
August’s gaze traced the claw marks. Messy. Brutal. This was a monster’s work. The lingering scent of the Corsai—fetid air, stale smoke, and death, always death—still clung to the torn flesh and turned his stomach. Leo was right. August was nothing like the thing that did this. He couldn’t be.
“August,” said Henry a minute later. “You can let go now.”
He looked down and realized he was still pinning Phillip’s limp body to the table. His hands slid off, and he went to wash them in a nearby sink while Henry worked.
Blood ran into the sink, and August looked away, trying to find something—anything—else to focus on, but it was everywhere, on the wall, and the counter, and the floor, a trail leading back through the doors to the steel elevators marked with a 19.
The nineteenth floor of the Flynn compound had been nicknamed the Morgue by some of the more morbid members of the FTF. Even though it was the second highest floor in the building, directly below the Flynns’ own apartment, there was no view. The windows had all been bricked up, the furniture removed in favor of sterile space. The nineteenth floor housed two essential things: a private interrogation chamber (the rest being on the sublevels with the cells) and an emergency medical suite.
“Where is he?” asked Henry, looking up from the wreckage of Phillip’s shoulder. He was referring to the traitor. The man who’d sold the information to Harker. He was a cousin of someone in the FTF, and after he’d sold them out, he’d tried to escape across the Seam and claim some kind of sanctuary in North City. But Harker didn’t keep rats, so he’d thrown him back. A squad had hunted him down and hauled him in, but not before he put two bullets in their captain. Two minutes with Leo, and he’d confessed to everything.
Leo stood before a mirror, wiping the bloodstains from his face. His black eyes went to the scar through his brow and glanced off, the way August’s had around the blood, as if disgusted by the sight.
“Cell A,” answered Harris dully, all trace of his boyish humor gone. Taken.
“He’s guilty,” added Leo evenly, and they all knew what he meant. A red soul. A reaping.
“All right.” Henry nodded to his wife. “Go get Ilsa.”
The man in Cell A looked rough.
His nose was broken, his hands were bound behind his back, and he was lying on his side, chest hitching in a wounded way. August stood, staring, trying to understand what made men break like this. Not in a physical way—human bodies were brittle—but heart and soul, what made them jump, fall, even when they knew there was no ground beneath.
He felt a gust of air, and then the soft warmth of Ilsa’s hand in his as she looked through the Plexiglas insert in the cell door.
“Can you feel it?” she asked, sadly. “His soul is so heavy. Who knows how long the floor will hold. . . .”
Her hand slipped away, and she made her way barefoot into the cell. August shut the door behind her but did not leave. It was a rare thing to see another Sunai reap a life. And Ilsa had a way of making everything beautiful. Even death.
Steps sounded behind him, heavy and even. Leo. “Henry is a fool not to let her out.”
August frowned. “Who? Ilsa?”
Leo lifted his hand, brought it to rest against the door. “Our sister, the angel of death. Do you know what she is? What she can do?”
“I have an idea,” said August dryly.
“No, you don’t, little brother.” Within the cell, Ilsa sank to her knees beside the traitor. “Henry would keep you in the dark, but I think you deserve to know what she is, what you could be, perhaps, if you let yourself.”
“What are you talking about, Leo?”
“Our sister has two sides,” he said. “They do not meet.”
It sounded like a riddle, but Leo wasn’t usually one for talking in circles. “What—”