This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(11)

Shadow and bone will eat you raw.

Malchai, Malchai, sharp and sly,

Smile and bite and drink you dry.”

August swallowed hard, knowing what came next.

“Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal,

Sing you a song and steal your soul.”

The little girl’s smile grew even wider.

“Monsters, monsters, big and small,

They’re gonna come and eat you all!”

She gave a small, delighted squeal, and August felt ill and took a step away.

When the train pulled into the station, he chose another car.





Monsters, monsters, big and small . . .

Kate hummed as the car barreled on. She tapped the tablet’s screen, closing out of the map and opening a new window, clicking through the folders on her father’s private drive—she’d swiped the access codes on her first night home—until she found the ones she was looking for. Harker had surveillance throughout North City, not just on the Seam but on nearly every block of the red zone. Every day the footage was checked and then cleared, save for any “incidents”—those were stored so he could see them and take action, if necessary. These “incidents” would never make the news, of course. They knew better than to put stuff like this on TV. It would disturb the illusion of normalcy, of safety—and that’s what the people were paying for.

But Harker had to keep an eye on his monsters. Had to know when new ones showed up, when old ones misbehaved. The culled footage had been filtered into categories. Monster. Human. Genesis.

Kate had been working her way through the footage since the moment she arrived, trying to learn everything she could about the real monsters of Verity. She tapped Genesis, and it brought up two further options. Corsai or Malchai (they’d never caught a Sunai’s creation on film). She felt like she was traveling down a rabbit hole as she tapped Corsai and the screen filled with video clips, the thumbnails nothing but a blur of shadows. Her fingers hovered for a moment over the grid, and then she tapped a clip, and the footage expanded to fill the screen.

The film had been trimmed, all the fat cut away, leaving only the violent meat of the incident behind. The camera didn’t have a good angle, but she could still make out two men at the mouth of an alley, standing beneath a streetlight. It took her a moment to realize she was watching a fight. It started out as nothing, a conversation gone south, a shove into the wall, a clumsy punch. One of the men went down, and the other started kicking him—over, and over, and over—until the man on the ground was not a man, but a twitching tangle of limbs, his face a bloody mess.

The attacker took off, and for several long seconds, the man lay there on the pavement, chest lurching up and down in a broken way. And then, as he struggled to rise, the shadows around him began to move. He didn’t notice, was too busy scraping himself off the ground, but Kate watched, transfixed, as the darkness stretched, and twitched, peeled away from the walls and the street, and pulled itself together, its shape rising up like smoke, face marked only by eerie white eyes that shook the camera’s focus, and the glistening of teeth. Its mouth yawned wide and its body wavered, slick and shiny, its limbs ending in talons.

And the man, still on his hands and knees, made the mistake of crawling forward, out of the safety of the streetlight.

The moment he crossed out of the light, it came, a flurry of teeth and claws that sank into the man’s flesh and began to shred.

“Violence breeds violence.” One of the teachers at St. Agnes had said that, after Nicole Teak tripped Kate, and Kate reciprocated by breaking Nicole’s nose. The teacher went on to make a point about how she was only perpetuating the problem, but by then Kate had stopped listening. As far as she was concerned, Nicole had deserved it.

But the teacher had been right about one thing: violence breeds.

Someone pulls a trigger, sets off a bomb, drives a bus full of tourists off a bridge, and what’s left in the wake isn’t just shell casings, wreckage, bodies. There’s something else. Something bad. An aftermath. A recoil. A reaction to all that anger and pain and death. That’s all the Phenomenon was really, a tipping point. Verity had always been violent—the worst in all ten territories—it was only a matter of time before there was enough mass and all that bad started pulling itself together.

Kate ran her thumb over the medallion pinned to the front of her uniform, protection from things that went bump. On her screen, the Corsai continued to feast. Most of the frenzy was lost in shadow, but here and there a razor glint of tooth or claw flashed on-screen, and Kate watched as blood sprayed across the pool of light. She made a small, disgusted noise, glad the footage had no sound.

Marcus waved from the other side of the partition, and Kate pulled the earbud from her ear, plunging herself back into a world of black and white, morning light, and the soft trill of piano keys.

“What is it?” she asked, annoyed.

“Sorry, Miss Harker,” said Marcus through the partition. “We’re here.”

Colton Academy sat at the place where the yellow met the green and the city streets gave way to suburbs, the safest zone of the city, where the richest could build their little shells and pretend that Verity wasn’t being eaten alive. It looked like a photograph, pale stone buildings sitting on a stretch of vivid green grass, all of it showered in crisp morning light. Only a fifteen-minute drive from the dark heart of North City, but you’d never know it by looking at the place. Kate guessed that was the point. She’d rather be at an inner-city institution, in the heart of the red, but most of them had been shut down, and even if it had been an option, her father wouldn’t hear of it. If he had to have her in V-City, he was determined to keep her “safe.” Which meant out of the way, since there was no such thing as safe in this place, no matter which half you called home.