Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(25)

“Alpha pair.”

August had always hated blood. It was the same color as a soul, but empty, useless the moment it left a person’s veins.

“August.”

He forced his mind back.

“I’m here,” he said, startled by the calm in his voice, steady when something deeper wanted to scream. “We were ambushed.” His gaze went to the broken window where the red eyes had watched from the dark. “Rez is dead.”

“Shit.” Phillip, then. Phillip was the only one who swore on the comm. “And the other squad?”

“Dead,” answered August.

What a simple word that was, not messy at all.

“We’ll send a team at dawn, for the bodies.” And then Phillip’s voice was gone, and others were ricocheting across the comm, none of them directed at him. He picked up his bow, his violin—these small, solid pieces of himself—then busied his hands arranging light batons to keep the corpses safe.

Corpse—another simple word that did so little work, failed to describe something that was once a person, and now was simply a shell.

Eventually a familiar voice broke the static in his ear.

“August,” said Emily, “you should return to the Compound.”

Her voice, as steady as his own. He swallowed back the no, no, no and said instead, “I’m waiting. . . . I have to wait.”

And Emily didn’t make him say why, so she must have understood what he meant. Violence begets violence, and monstrous acts make monsters.

The Malchai in the hall came first, rose up like spirits from the bodies of the soldiers. And he cut them down. Then came the Malchai by the smothered candle, rising up beside the word written in blood, and he dispatched that one, too. And then, it came down to Rez.

Her murder had been the work of an instant, but it felt like forever before the shadows finally began to twitch.

His fingers tightened on his bow as the night took a shuddering breath, and then, standing among the corpses, stood the monster.

It looked down at itself in a gesture so human, so natural, and yet so wrong, and then its head came up, red eyes widening right before August drove his steel bow into its heart.





Half a block from the Falstead, August knew he was being followed.

He could hear the shuffle of steps, not on the street behind him but somewhere overhead. He didn’t slow until something floated to the ground at his feet.

It was a patch, three letters—FTF—visible through the blood.

As he straightened, another drifted down.

“Hasn’t anyone told you?” said a voice on the air. “It’s not safe to wander after dark.”

He looked up and saw her standing on a nearby roof, moonlight tracing her pale hair.

“Alice.”

She smiled, flashing knifepoint teeth, and sank into a crouch at the edge of the roof. August told his hands to move, to lift the violin, but it hung there, dead weight at his side. She wasn’t Kate, but every time he saw her, his stomach still dropped. Every time, for just a second.

The Malchai didn’t look like her, not really—all the pieces were wrong—but the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Alice looked like the Kate he’d never met, like the one he’d expected to find at Colton before he met the real girl. The way she’d been described to him—daughter of a monster. All the things Kate wasn’t, all the things she pretended to be, Alice was.

He had known—hadn’t wanted to think about it, but had known all the same—that something would walk out of that house beyond the Waste, and yet it had still been a shock, meeting her. It was two weeks—maybe three—after Kate. After Callum. After Sloan. He was responding to a distress call, but when he got there, all he found were corpses. Corpses, and her, standing the middle of it all, covered in blood, and grinning, the same grin she was wearing now, a grin that was all monster.

“Your trap didn’t work,” he said.

Alice only shrugged. “The next one will. Or the next. I’ve got plenty of time, and you’ve got plenty of people to lose. Such a shame about your friends.” She tossed patches like petals over the edge of the roof, far more than the number of soldiers he’d lost that night. “They’re all so fragile, aren’t they? What do you see in them?”

“Humanity.”

Alice laughed softly, a sound like steam escaping from a pot. “You know, I thought, if I used humans, you might try to spare them.” Her red eyes danced over his bloodstained front. “I guess I was wrong.”

“I don’t spare sinners.”

Alice’s gaze flicked up. “You spared Kate.” The name like a barb in the monster’s mouth. “You’re sparing me, right now, with your friend’s blood still on your hands. Must not have been a very good friend.”

He knew she was baiting him, but the anger still rose like heat on his skin.

As if on cue, red eyes began to flicker around him in the dark.

Alice hadn’t come alone, but there was a reason she kept her distance, lobbing taunts down from the rooftop. A Sunai’s music was as toxic to a Malchai as a Malchai’s soul was to a Sunai. If August started playing, the other monsters would die, but Alice would get away.

She flashed a smile, and there it was again, in the twist of her lips, the shadow of someone else.