What little anyone knew.
Sunai—the word alone seemed to rile the other creatures and annoy her father. But there was more to it than that. The Sunai were rare—much rarer than the Corsai or Malchai—but they still made Harker nervous. It had to be because of the catalysts. The Corsai seemed to come from violent, but nonlethal acts, and the Malchai stemmed from murders, but the Sunai, it was believed, came from the darkest crimes of all: bombings, shootings, massacres, events that claimed not only one life, but many. All that pain and death coalescing into something truly terrible; if a monster’s catalyst informed its nature, then the Sunai were the worst things to go bump in the night.
It didn’t help that South City probably fed the rumor mill itself. Some said Flynn kept the Sunai like rabid dogs. Others said he treated them as family. Others still claimed the monsters were buried in the ranks of the FTF. Another, more frustrating, theory held that they could change their faces. Control minds. Make people forget they’d met them . . . if those people ever lived to tell.
Sunai were sadistic. Sunai were evil. Sunai were invincible.
And on top of it all, Sunai looked human.
What little Harker and his men actually knew about the Sunai came from one monster. The only one they’d ever managed to catch on camera.
Kate logged into her father’s private uplink, and typed the name into the footage search.
LEO
He’d been part of the initial fight, Flynn’s right hand when Harker tried to take the city twelve years back. And he wasn’t shy. Kate scrolled through more than a dozen video thumbnails that tracked across the screen, all dating from before the truce. They fell into two categories.
Leo_Music
Leo_Torture
She chewed her lip, hesitating a moment before clicking on one of the videos labeled Music. The footage was more than a decade old, and it was shot from a security camera at an odd angle, but there he was in the frame, not stalking through shadows or down a back alley, but perched on a stool beneath a spotlight. Leo was sitting on stage in what looked like a bar, one foot up and a steel guitar balanced on his knee. Even at this angle, she could tell he was tall and blond and handsome, and aside from his eyes, which raked black lines across the camera every time his gaze drifted up, he didn’t look like a monster at all.
Kate supposed that was what made him so dangerous.
There was no sound in the feed, but when he began to play, she still found herself turning her head, good ear toward the screen, wanting to hear the song. And even with the grainy footage and the darkened room, she could see the crowd sit forward.
Only the room wasn’t so dark anymore. At first she thought the overheads must be switching on, but as she watched, she realized the audience itself was beginning to glow. The people didn’t seem to notice the light, didn’t seem to notice anything. They sat so still Kate thought the footage must be frozen. But it couldn’t be, because Leo’s fingers were still plucking at the guitar strings.
Movement caught her eye as two people rose from their chairs, not fast, but slowly, as if drifting up through water. The light coming from their skin was different, sickly, and they both moved toward the stage with the simple, steady steps of those in a trance, their lips moving but their expressions empty.
When they were nearly to the stage, Leo stopped playing.
He rose from the stool, set aside the guitar, and stepped down off the platform to greet the two glowing forms as if they were fans.
And then he closed his hands around their throats.
They didn’t fight back, didn’t thrash, even when he dragged them up so that only their shoes skimmed the floor. She watched as the light beneath their skin flickered, and then began to drift, out of their bodies and into Leo’s, infusing him with that strange glow. She watched as the last of their light guttered and died, watched as their eyes shriveled black in their sockets, and even then Leo didn’t let go. He stood there, eyes closed and head back, looking almost peaceful as the men went limp, turned from living, breathing people into empty shells. At last he let the bodies fall and returned to the stage, where he took up his guitar and walked out.
The glow from the audience faded, and one by one they began to move again, as if shaking off sleep, slowly at first, and then frantically as they saw the corpses on the floor.
Kate sat there, chilled. It wasn’t the act of killing that bothered her—monsters and men both did that—and it wasn’t even the chilling serenity on the Sunai’s face. It was the fact that he killed them with a sound. Those men were dead the minute he started playing. Pulled like puppets on strings.