Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(13)

He’d killed Leo, reaped his life, or his soul, or whatever it was that Sunai had in them, and now it was in him. August pictured their two lives like water and oil, refusing to mix.

He’d often wondered if the humans he reaped stayed with him, if some part of who they were—who they’d been—lingered in his blood, fused with his soul. But the humans never had a voice. And Leo did.

Tell me, August. Are you still hungry?

He dug his nails into the rough surface of the rooftop. He hadn’t been hungry in months, and he hated it, hated the fullness, hated the strength, hated the fact that the more often he fed, the emptier he felt.

But most of all, he hated the fact that some small part of him wanted to slip again, to feel that feverish prickle, like an oncoming cold, to remember what it felt like to be alive, to be hungry. Every day when he entered the symphony hall, he hoped the souls would all shine white. They almost never did.

The sky began to darken like a bruise and August let his forehead come to rest against his knees and breathed into the sliver of space as dusk thickened. The sun was almost gone when the air shifted at his back and a hand settled in his hair.

“Ilsa,” he said softly.

He dragged his head up as his sister sank to the roof beside him. She was barefoot, her strawberry curls loose and rippling in the breeze, everything about her so open, unguarded. It was easy to forget that she was the first Sunai, that she had made the Barren, erased an entire piece of the city and everyone in it.

Our sister has two sides. They do not meet.

But August had never seen Ilsa’s shadow self, had only known this one, playful and sweet and sometimes lost.

Now the only thing lost was her voice.

He missed it, that lilting cadence that made everything sound light, but Ilsa didn’t speak anymore. Her collar was open, revealing the vicious line that ran like a ribbon around her throat. Sloan’s work. He’d cut right through her vocal cords, severed her voice and stolen her ability to speak, to sing.

And yet, just as Leo’s voice had a place in August’s head, so did hers, and when she met his gaze, he read the question in her eyes. The constant concern. The gentle pressing.

Talk to me.

As she twined one long arm through his, and let her head fall against his shoulder, he knew that he could tell her.

About the girl and her mother, about Leo’s voice scratching away inside his skull, about the way he longed for hunger, and that he was afraid: afraid of his purpose, afraid he couldn’t do it, afraid he could, afraid of what he needed to become, and what he was becoming, what he already was, and the truth that underneath it all—quieter than it had been, but there, there all the same—was that vain and useless and impossible longing to be human. A desire he kept trying to drown. A desire that held its breath until his focus slipped, and then surged up again, gasping for air.

He could tell her—confess, as so many damned souls did to him—but what was the point? The words were like dominoes lined up in his head, and if he started speaking, if he toppled that first tile, they would all come crashing down. For what? The selfish urge to feel . . .

Her fingers tightened on his arm.

Talk to me, little brother.

But a Sunai’s command carried no weight without words. It was unfair, he knew, that because she couldn’t ask, he didn’t have to answer.

“Everything went as it should,” he said, because that wasn’t a lie, even if it didn’t feel like the truth.

Ilsa lifted her head and sadness swept across her face like a flush. He looked away, and she pulled free and lay back on the concrete roof, her arms spread wide, as if trying to embrace the sky.

The cloudless day was giving way to a clear and moonless night, and this high up, with most of the northern grid down, he’d be able to make out a handful of stars. Nothing like the paintings of light he’d seen in the sky beyond the city, just a handful of dots flickering overhead, there and gone and there again, like the memory of that night in the Waste when he was with Kate and the sickness was just starting. When the stolen car broke down and they stood on the side of the road, Kate shivering and August burning up, and overhead, the sky was a fabric of light. When he stared, mesmerized by the sheer number of stars, and she said that people were made of stardust, and maybe he was, too.

He’d wanted her to be right.

“Alpha?” Phillip’s voice came over the comm.

August straightened. “Present.”

“We’ve got an SOS. Delta team requesting backup.”

“North or South?” asked August, rising to his feet.

The slight pause told him the answer before Phillip spoke. “North.”

August looked out past the Seam, the north half of the city reduced to sharp edges and shadows. He felt his sister’s gaze but he didn’t look back as his boot brushed the lip of the roof.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

And then he stepped off the edge.





The buildings reminded Sloan of jagged teeth, a broken mouth biting into wounded sky. It was dusk, that time when day collapsed into something darker, when even human minds gave way to primal things.

He stood before the tower windows looking out, just the way Callum Harker had done so many times. He could appreciate the elegance, the poetry of made replacing maker, shadow outlasting source.

The office occupied a corner of the building once called Harker Hall, and two of its walls were comprised of solid glass. Against the darkening backdrop, the floor-to-ceiling windows caught shards of his reflection and swallowed others. His black suit blended with the twilight, while the sharp planes of his face shone white as bone, and his eyes burned twin red holes in the skyline.