Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(64)
“Come on.”
Fresh air flooded Kate’s lungs, crisp and cool, and for an instant she was dizzy from the sheer relief of being outside, even at night.
What had Henry Flynn said about the dark?
It makes us feel free.
A ribbon of UVR light surrounded the Compound, tracing a band of safety against the dark beyond. It stretched like a broad sheet, the width of a road. Like a moat. Thinner versions traced the bases of several nearby buildings—barracks, she guessed, extensions of the FTF’s main compound—but the rest of the city was dark in a way she’d never seen it.
It was unnerving, that darkness.
Thicker than the lack of light.
The night beyond the moat twisted and writhed, the shadows whispering to her.
hello little harker
She could feel it rising in her, that longing for a fight. All her life she’d clung to it like the grip on a knife, but now she put all her strength into setting it down.
In the distance, the Seam traced a thin line, and beyond that, the looming shape of her father’s tower. Sloan’s tower.
She thought of him standing in the penthouse with his ember-red eyes, his sickly sweet voice, his tongue running over sharpened teeth.
I will kill him, she thought. And I will take my time.
Her focus narrowed, thoughts condensing to a clear and perfect point—a vision of herself drawing a silver blade over Sloan’s skin, peeling him open one slice at a time, revealing those dark bones and— August caught her sleeve.
Her boots were skimming the edge of the light strip.
“Here,” said August, drawing a tablet from his pocket. He tapped the screen, and a second later the surface turned reflective. A mirror. “You said this is how you see into its head. So look.”
Her eyes were instantly drawn to the glass, but she resisted.
“I’m not your private scrying board. If I see where it is, we go together.”
August nodded. His grip tightened on his violin case, and she told herself this would work. It had to. She would hunt the monster down, and August would slay it, and the nightmare in her head would end, and she would kill Sloan, and then she would go back to Prosperity, and the Wardens, and Riley.
That wasn’t another life, another Kate, it was this one, it was hers, it was now.
She blew out a breath and turned toward the mirror, bracing herself.
Where are you? she asked the glass, just before she fell in.
She is back in her father’s office with the monster in the black suit and the shadows whispering weak
weak
weak in the window a pair of silver eyes round as moons —Where are you?— and for the first time the darkness pushes back the vision shudders
holds
she forces her way
to the glass and when
she reaches the window the image finally cracks shatters
into—
—red eyes everywhere people
screaming sobbing
begging
for mercy the taste of fear
like ash
in its mouth it moves
away
there
and gone and there again now
a group
of soldiers on an overpass guns
and badges catching
the light a tangle
of voices it reaches out
from the dark all hollow hunger and cold delight because
they do not see it coming—
Kate wrenched back, as if struck.
The tablet tumbled from her fingers and August caught it as she doubled over, pain jabbing like a cold knife behind her eyes. For an instant she was still trapped between the mirrors, caught somewhere outside herself, the ground eroding beneath her feet.
She blinked away the blinding white of the light strip.
Three bright red drops of blood hit the ground, and then August’s hand was on her arm, his voice lost in the noise as he lifted her face.
She saw the too-even planes of his brow and cheeks fold with worry, and she wanted to tell him she was okay, but she didn’t feel okay, so instead she wiped her nose and said, “Sixteen.”
August stared at her. “What?”
“I saw a patch. It had a number—”
Understanding lit his face and he reached for the comm.
“Squad Sixteen, are they on mission?”
“Affirmative.”
He scanned the dark. “Where?”
By the time the controller read the address, August was already running, Kate close behind. He kept up a stream of orders on his comm, and sections of the grid came up around them. They were getting close—Kate’s vision kept doubling, two places overlaid before her eyes. And then they rounded a corner, and she saw the overpass and the Seam, and the stretch of street, and it was empty.
“No,” she gasped, first in frustration and then in horror as gunfire shattered the night, lighting up the arch beneath the overpass as a squad of soldiers turned their weapons on one another, and in the staccato bursts of light, she saw it, like a shadow thrown in their wake.
The Chaos Eater.
August saw it.
Only for an instant, when the short, bright flashes of gunfire lit the underpass. It stood there, a spot of stillness amid the violence, its silver eyes glinting. August saw it and felt—empty, a numbing cold, as if the burning coal at the center of his chest had turned to ice.