“You’re letting out the cold,” snapped a rasping voice. August drew his head out of the beverage case to see a wiry old woman in a Horizon uniform.
“Sorry,” he said, shutting the fridge doors. “I meant to let it in.” The words sounded wrong on his tongue, but they were already out.
Nearby, a woman’s voice started rising as she talked into a cell.
A man dropped his cup of coffee, spilling it on another trucker. The second swore, and shoved the first back, a little too hard. Tension rose like pressure in the store around him.
The woman hurried away, and then, between one burning heartbeat and the next, August caught the scent of crime—old blood, a chill in the air that rustled against his fevered skin. August swayed, his fingers tightening on the strap of the violin case as his gaze slid across the store, over shelves and faces until . . . there. The whole world came into focus around the man. He was stocky, with a mud-splattered coat, a short, uneven beard, and a head too small for his shoulders.
But August didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was the shadow coiling like a cape behind the man, restless and wrong, and the fact he was already out the front door, taking the promise of cold bones and clear thoughts with him.
August moved to follow but someone gripped his arm.
Kate. “We have to go,” she snapped. “Now.”
“Kate, I . . .” He couldn’t drag his eyes from the man’s shrinking form. “I need to . . .” But before he could finish, she took his jaw in her hand—he was amazed it didn’t burn her fingers—and turned it toward a bank of televisions mounted on the wall. Her face was plastered on the screens—all the screens—above the headline:
KATHERINE HARKER ABDUCTED, FLYNN FAMILY SUSPECTED
He felt himself surface, a painfully sharp moment of clarity as he took in the headline. “No,” he said, the word knocked out of him like a breath. “I didn’t—”
Just then the front doors chimed open, and the driver, the one who’d given them a lift, came in and saw the screens and stopped. “What’s this?”
“Shit.” Kate pulled August down below the rim of the shelves. “Go. Now.” She shoved him in the direction of a hall. He cast a last, desperate glance toward the front doors, but the man with the sin-made shadow was already gone.
“Come on,” said Kate, pushing him past the bathrooms and through the back exit, out onto the other side of the truck stop’s tarmac. The UVRs rained down on them, and August winced, head pounding.
“I didn’t abduct you,” he said. “I saved your life. You’re the one who decided to run.”
“And you’re the one who decided to come with me.” Kate was already walking away. Away from the truck stop. Away from him. She disappeared around the nearest corner, and he forced himself to follow.
“We have to tell someone,” he said, jogging to catch up. “We have to let them know you’re okay.”
“In case you forgot,” she called back, “someone is still trying to kill me.”
“They don’t even have to!” August knew he had a point. He was fighting to hold on to it. “This is exactly what they wanted, Kate. To blame my family for breaking the truce. And it’s going to work if we don’t—”
Kate spun on him. “What do you want me to do, August? I can’t just go back—”
A set of doors burst open behind them.
“Hey, you,” called a voice.
August and Kate both turned. It was one of the truckers from inside the store, a hard-looking man with a pistol hanging loosely from his fingers, a second, unarmed man trailing in his wake. August started to shift in front of Kate when another pair of doors flew open behind her, and two more figures spilled out into the pool of light. The man had a bat, the woman a knife, edge glinting in the glaring light. Beneath the UVRs, they cast no shadows—four more people, and none of them were sinners.
The ground tipped dangerously beneath August’s feet.
He started to slide the violin case from his shoulders, hoping he could at least disarm them, when the first man moved, swinging up his gun and firing. The bullet ricocheted off the tarmac inches from August’s feet. The sound was deafening, and for a moment he was back in a school cafeteria staring down at the small black tallies on the floor before Kate’s voice brought him back.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she snapped at the man.
“Is it true?” said the trucker, his gun leveled on August’s chest, but his gaze on Kate. “You’re Harker’s kid?”
“Does that make you the monster?” cut in the man behind him.
Before August could answer, the man with the bat caught Kate’s wrist and dragged her toward him. She kneed him, and he went gasping backward, but the woman with the knife grabbed Kate and forced her back, shoving the blade beneath her chin.
August started forward, and the gun went off again, this time nearly grazing his cheek.