Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(42)

He heard movement in the kitchen, the soft shuffle of steps, the whisper of something like sand, and when he rounded the corner he saw the cupboards open, a sack of sugar spilling across the counter and onto the floor.

None of the lights were on, but his sister stood at the island, hands dancing over piles of sugar, separating it into hills and valleys with her fingers while Allegro padded around her legs, leaving tiny paw prints in the white dust.

August took a cautious step forward, careful not to startle her. He kept his voice low.

“Ilsa?”

She didn’t look up, didn’t even register his presence. Ilsa lost herself sometimes, got stuck inside her head. Once, during these episodes, her thoughts had poured out in tangled ribbons of speech. Now she unraveled in silence, her lips pressed into a thin line as she swept her fingers through the sugar, and as August drew close, he realized what she was making. It was a shallow model—the loose sugar couldn’t form anything tall without losing its shape—but he recognized the snaking line of the Seam running down the center, the grid of streets and buildings to either side.

Ilsa had sculpted V-City.

Her hands slid to the island’s edge and she bent forward, bringing her face to the counter as if to peer between the walls of her creation.

And then she drew a deep breath, and blew.

The entire city scattered, the only sound the whoosh of Ilsa’s breath and the rain of sugar as it spilled onto the floor. She looked at him then, at last, her eyes wide, but not empty, not lost at all. No, she looked straight at August, and swept her hand above the counter as if to say, Do you see?

But August only saw one thing. “You’re making a mess.”

Ilsa’s brow furrowed. She smoothed the sugar beneath her palm and drew her finger in slow, looping curls. It took August a few seconds to realize she was writing a word.

Coming

August stared at the mess, at the message. “What’s coming?”

Ilsa let out an exasperated breath and swept her arm across the counter, scattering the remains of the city and sending a cloud of sugar into the air. It dusted August’s hair, settled on his skin. To a human, it might have tasted sweet, but to him, it tasted like one thing:

Ash.





Growing up, Kate had plenty of nightmares, but only one of them recurring.

In the dream, she was standing in the middle of Birch Street, one of the busiest roads in North City, but there were no cars. No commuters on the sidewalk. No movement in the shop windows. It was as if the city had been tipped on its side and shaken until every sign of life had fallen out. It was just . . . empty, and no people meant no sound, and the silence seemed to grow and grow and grow around her, the white noise weighing her down until she realized it wasn’t the world, it was her ears, the last of her hearing stolen away, plunging her into an eternal silence, and she started to scream and scream until she finally woke up.

As Kate rode through the red zone, that same horrible silence swept around her, that old, irrational fear, and she strained, trying to catch something—anything—besides her own pulse and the hush of tires over pavement.

But there was nothing, nothing, and then—

Kate slowed. Were those voices? They reached her in pieces, highs and lows fragmented by the stone and steel buildings, the sounds brightening in her good ear only to fall away again before she could find the source, or figure out if they were getting closer or farther away. She dismounted as carefully as possible, leaning the bicycle against a wall just as someone whistled behind her.

Kate spun, and saw a man perched on a fire escape. He was dressed in dark jeans and a T-shirt, but the first thing she noticed was the band of steel around his throat. It looked like a collar.

“Well, well,” he said, rising to his feet.

A door swung open nearby, and as two more figures—a man and a woman—stepped through, she realized the first one hadn’t been whistling at her. He’d been whistling for them. They were rougher, their skin weathered and stained by old tattoos, but they wore the same metal circles around their throats.

Like pets, she thought, and between the pallor of blood loss and the puncture wounds that ran like needle scars up the inside of their arms, it was obvious whom they belonged to.

“Oh, this is perfect,” cooed the woman.

The man on the fire escape broke into a grin. “Just his type, isn’t she?” Type? “Down to the blue eyes.”

“It’s uncanny. Sloan will be . . .”

If he said anything else, Kate didn’t hear it. The name caught like barbed wire in her head, bringing with it red eyes and a black suit, a shadow at her father’s back, a voice in her head whispering, Katherine.

But Sloan wasn’t here in Verity, because he was dead. She’d seen him lying on a warehouse floor, a steel bar through his back and—

Kate’s attention snapped back to the alley. One of the thugs was coming close—too close—his hands raised as if she were a child or a dog, something easily spooked.

“Careful, Joe, you know he likes them fresh.”

Kate shifted up against the wall and felt the familiar weight of the handgun at her back. She drew it out, and the moment the gun was in her hand, her pulse began to slow, and there it was again, that wonderful, terrifying calm, the whole messy world narrowing to a single, even road. Shoot.

Her finger came to rest against the trigger, the safety still on.