Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(68)

And there, in the dark, August heard the next words, even though they were never said aloud. For now.

He didn’t sleep again after that.

He tried to focus on the other sounds in the building—on the footsteps, the water lines, the far-off music of Soro’s flute—but somewhere beneath it all, he heard the soldier in the cell. It was so far below, it must have been his mind playing tricks, but it didn’t matter.

August slipped from the bed, took up the violin, and went downstairs.

He expected to find the viewing room empty, the prisoner alone, but Ilsa was there, her face pressed to the window. In the cell beyond the soldier knelt on the concrete, rambling on about mercy and wrenching against his restraints until blood ran down his skin.

There had to be something they could do.

August looked around. Sublevel 3 was the lowest floor in the Compound, cut off from the world above, below, and to every side by steel and concrete. It was the closest thing to soundproof in the building. A console sat on the table, a red button marking a microphone, and when August tapped it, the soldier’s voice poured out of the cell, filling the room with madness and anguish.

He set his case on the table, and Ilsa watched him, a question in her eyes, as he drew out the violin. Leo had always believed that their sole purpose was to cleanse the world of sinners. That music was simply the kindest way to do that. But what if there were other uses? Ways to help instead of harm?

He took a deep breath and began to play.

The first note cut the air like a knife. The second was high and sweet, the third low and somber. The steel strings added their own low thrum, tense under his fingers as the music echoed through the concrete room. Every time a note reached the walls, it doubled back, both less and more as it trailed off beneath the newer notes.

He had never done this, never played to soothe a soul instead of to reap it.

But in the cell, the soldier stopped fighting. His shoulders slumped, as if in relief, the darkness inside him subdued by the song.

And August kept playing.





The air smelled of blood and fear.

Sloan inhaled it from the tower steps, but everywhere he looked, he saw Malchai, only Malchai, their mouths red and their hands empty.

“I am so very disappointed,” he said, his voice carrying through the night.

They had brought him nothing. They had witnessed nothing. They had played with their prey, dangled it in front of every living, breathing, hunting inch of the city night, and for it all they had gained nothing.

Even Alice, small, bloodthirsty thing that she was, had come back empty-handed, brandishing only stained lips and a careless shrug.

“Perhaps,” she said, climbing the steps, “we’re using the wrong bait.”

But humans were humans. The Corsai fed on flesh and bone, the Malchai on blood, the Sunai on souls, each and every part contained in the body of a human. What else was could he use?

“Sloan!”

A group of Malchai were coming toward him.

“What is it?”

“The shadow,” growled one.

His hopes rose. “Did you find it?”

But the Malchai were already shaking their heads.

“Then what?” snarled Sloan.

The Malchai looked at one another like fools, and Sloan sighed.

“Show me.”

He wove between the bodies on the station floor.

To call them dead would have been an understatement.

Perhaps if they’d had weapons, it would have been quick. But as far as Sloan could tell, the prisoners had used whatever they could find—chairs, batons, bare hands.

In short, they had torn each other apart.

And yet, Sloan had no doubt this was the intruder’s doing.

Sloan had made an offering, and been refused. He’d given up a city full of easy prey, and instead the creature had come here.

Why?

His shoes echoed on the linoleum, and Alice trailed a few steps behind. She dragged her nails against the wall, whistling softly. The other three Malchai sniffed the air, and when Sloan drew in a breath, he noted a scent like cold steel, faint and strange and out of place. But something else was missing.

Fear.

The taste that coated the streets, painted itself across the night, that most common of human traits—it wasn’t here. The station was awash in other things—anger, bloodlust, death, but no fear.

Artificial light buzzed harshly overhead, blurring Sloan’s vision. He flicked the nearest switch and the world was plunged mercifully back into muted grays. His eyes brightened, focused, drawing the room into sharp relief.

Bodies sprawled across the ground.

Slumped in halls.

Fell out of open cells.

The Crawford Street Station was a relic of the days before the war, before the Phenomenon, back when V-City had such mundane things as police, men and women enlisted to uphold the peace.

Harker had used the North City’s four stations for their onsite holding cells, and Sloan had turned those same cells into pens for some of the city’s most violent resisters. Men and women who had no desire to fight for their fellow humans in South City or serve as Fangs. Loners with their own taste for blood, for death, for power.

“What a waste,” mused Alice, stepping over a broad red pool. “It didn’t even eat them.”

She was right. What was the point of so much death if not to feed? Unless, of course, it had fed on something he couldn’t see. After all, the Sunai devoured souls. If the act didn’t burn out their victims’ eyes, there would be no way of telling what was taken, what was gone.