Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(37)

“Hello?” she called out, moving toward him.

“Shh,” he hissed, eyes darting nervously around the street. He had a flashlight in one hand, even though it wasn’t yet dark, and over his shoulder she could see the glow of more lights inside the hall.

“Get in, get in,” he said, opening the door just enough to let her through.

She crossed the yard, but hesitated at the base of the stairs. Her shadow had vanished, swallowed up by the dusk, and she could feel something twitch behind her, but every other house was quiet, empty, except for his. It set her nerves on edge.

“Well?” pressed the man. He didn’t look very dangerous—beanpole thin, with a receding hairline and the constant twitch of frayed nerves—but Kate knew from experience that men could be monsters, too, especially in Verity. “Those other houses, they got nothing, and we got maybe ten minutes until the light’s all gone,” he huffed, “so get in or get left out.”

“I’m armed,” she said. “And I intend to stay that way.”

His head bobbed, as if he understood, or didn’t care, and Kate blew out a breath and ducked inside. The moment she was through, he shut the door and threw the deadbolt into place. Her stomach clenched at the sound of it, sharp and final as a gunshot.

He brushed past her, turning on more lights and angling them toward the door. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that underneath his coat, the man was draped in metal, had fashioned a kind of chain mail from discs of patterned iron. Medallions. The same ones Callum Harker used to sell his citizens as protection from the monsters who hunted at his whim.

But Kate’s father had never given anyone more than a single disk. She thought of the blood in the street, the missing bodies. She didn’t have to ask where the rest of the medals had come from.

“What were you doing out there?”

“Just passing through,” she said. “Seemed like a nice day for a stroll.” He stared at her blankly. No ear for sarcasm, then. Up close, his eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept in days. “Is this your house?”

He looked around nervously. “Is now,” he said, still bustling, as if unable to stop. “Living room’s through there.” He nodded across the hall, then ducked into a kitchen. Kate heard the clank of a pot, the crack of a match as she made her way through a pair of open doors into a sitting room.

A narrow sliver between the curtains showed the dusk quickly giving way to dark. The curtains themselves were made of copper wire threaded together into a delicate version of the same chain mail the man was wearing. In the center of a coffee table was a display of batteries, flashlights, and light bulbs.

An altarpiece to artificial light.

“You got a name?”

Kate jumped. He’d come up on her bad side, and she hadn’t heard him, not until he was too close. He was holding two cups.

“Jenny,” she lied. “You?”

“Rick. Well, Richard. But I always liked Rick.” He offered her one of the cups. She still had the iron spike in one hand, the silver lighter with its hidden switchblade in the other. She set the spike aside to take the cup and lift it to her mouth. It smelled vaguely like coffee and her body cramped with hunger and thirst, but she knew better than to drink it.

Rick shuffled around, adjusting more lights, and Kate lowered herself into a chair, her limbs stiff and her body clumsy with fatigue. She nodded at the curtain, the world beyond the house. “What happened out there?”

“What happened?” His voice tightened. “They came. Corsai, Malchai, everything with teeth.”

She could see it. First the Malchai had come through, tearing out throats, and then the Corsai, feeding in their wake. No wonder there was nothing left.

“I wasn’t even supposed to be here,” murmured Rick. “I was on my way into the Waste, thought the green would be a safe place to camp out for the night.” A nervous laugh.

“How did you survive?” asked Kate.

“At first I hid. And then I, uh, well, there were all these abandoned houses.” The fidgeting grew worse. He moved like an addict, strung out on fear. “I did what I could. What I had to.”

Kate turned the silver lighter between her fingers. “Why didn’t you leave? Head for South City or go out into the Waste?”

“Thought about it a hundred times. I’d walk outside in the light of day, try to get myself to go, but who knows what’s going on out there? There’s no cell signal, and hell, after what happened here, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole world’s gone dark. Man came through, a few months back, running from North City, and he said the Malchai had rounded the humans up, keep ’em like meals in a fridge.

“No,” Rick went on, “no, I’ve got everything I need here, and I’m gonna wait it out. Those bastards can’t live forever.”

Silence fell over the room, and then Kate’s stomach growled audibly.

“Hold on,” said Rick, getting to his feet. “I’ll get you some food.”

“What about South City?” she called after him.

“No idea,” he called back.

She leaned forward, fingers drifting over the collection of batteries, just as something sounded in the hall. If Kate’s head hadn’t been turned the right way, she might not have heard it. If she hadn’t been her father’s daughter, she might not have known what it was: a shotgun shell being locked into the chamber of a gun.