And then, abruptly, it faltered, and she heard Freddie scream, “Watch out!”
She turned too slowly, and found herself face-to-face with the second Malchai. The monster caught her wrist despite the oily darkness oozing from its skin, and before she could tear free, his knifelike fangs sank into her shoulder.
Pain shot through her. And then, an instant later, the monster’s fangs were gone, and he was being hauled backward. Freddie’s arms were wrapped around the Malchai’s shoulders, one of his hands pressed flat against the pale skin at the monster’s throat; and Kate stood there, dazed, thinking about how young he looked—how small—before she remembered that he was a monster, too. Freddie’s eyes were shut, his teeth clenched as he pinned the Malchai back against him, the darkness soaking from the monster’s skin into his own like a stain.
Kate’s senses finally snapped back, and she broke into motion, taking up the discarded spike and driving it up into the Malchai’s heart. He didn’t fight. He was already slumping against Freddie’s chest, the red light flickering out of his eyes by the time the iron struck home.
Freddie let go, and the monster collapsed between them, little more than teeth and bones, and for a second they just stared at each other, covered in blood and gore and gasping for air.
Neither moved.
Freddie’s gaze rolled unsteadily over her, and the corpses, before drifting to his violin, discarded in the grass. Kate’s fingers tightened on the spike in her hand.
Run, said a voice in Kate’s head.
She didn’t.
Freddie’s eyes found hers, and he swayed a little on his feet.
“What the—” Kate started, but then he doubled over and began to retch.
What came up was black, glistening like oil. He tried to straighten, but stumbled forward, collapsing to his hands and knees and heaving inky liquid onto the pale concrete of the Colton sidewalk.
Get back, said the voice, but she was already sinking to her knees in front of him. “What’s wrong?”
He opened his mouth, as if trying to speak, but choked as more darkness heaved out onto the concrete. When he looked up, his eyes were no longer gray, but black. Black, and full of pain. Veins stood out on his hands and wound like black cords over his skin, climbing his throat.
What had Sloan said?
We cannot feed on them. They cannot feed on us.
Then why? Why had he done that? She wanted to ask him, but Freddie’s eyes were sliding out of focus, his body shaking. He reached weakly for his violin, but it was too far away, and moments later he crumpled to the pavement. He wasn’t moving. Was he dead? Did she want him to be dead? A small part of her thought, so that’s how to kill a Sunai, but no, his chest was still lurching up and down with shallow, staccato breaths.
Her cell phone rang. It was still sitting on the sidewalk where it had been knocked from her hands, and she rushed forward and answered.
“Hello?” she asked, breathlessly. But it wasn’t her father. Or Marcus. It was the cab company. The car was waiting in front of the school. The meter was running.
Kate looked around at the wreckage of the fight: the two Malchai corpses, the torch scorching a black line into the sidewalk, the unconscious Sunai at her feet. She was covered in drying blood and streaks of blackish gore. She swallowed.
“Stay there,” she told the cab. “I’m on my way.”
VERSE 3
RUN, MONSTER, RUN
When August woke up, everything hurt. Pain had always been a fleeting thing, something that skimmed along the surface of his senses, but this was deep, knotting around every muscle and bone. The last time he’d gone dark, it had hurt to the core, burned through him like a fever, but even that was different. Now he felt hollowed out. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be. And for the first time in his life he wanted to crawl back into the darkness of his dreams.
Instead, August dragged his mind to the surface where his body waited and opened his eyes.
He was sitting on a concrete floor, propped up against an unfinished wall, a tangle of metal girding and wooden beams against his back. His vision swam, then focused, then swam again; he tried to move, but his wrists were bound to the metal framework on either side with zip ties.
Kate Harker was sitting in the middle of the concrete floor, arms around her knees, watching him. She was wearing his Colton blazer over her blood-streaked polo. A bruise was coming out along her jaw, and she held one arm in front of her at a protective angle, her polo torn where the Malchai’s teeth had sunk in. She looked shaken, but when she saw him staring, she stiffened, her face unreadable.
“Welcome to my new office,” she said. Her voice was cold, distant. Maybe it was shock. He’d seen FTFs go through that, after a brush with death. “I was starting to wonder if you’d ever wake up.”