This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(38)

His nose was broken, his hands were bound behind his back, and he was lying on his side, chest hitching in a wounded way. August stood, staring, trying to understand what made men break like this. Not in a physical way—human bodies were brittle—but heart and soul, what made them jump, fall, even when they knew there was no ground beneath.

He felt a gust of air, and then the soft warmth of Ilsa’s hand in his as she looked through the Plexiglas insert in the cell door.

“Can you feel it?” she asked, sadly. “His soul is so heavy. Who knows how long the floor will hold. . . .”

Her hand slipped away, and she made her way barefoot into the cell. August shut the door behind her but did not leave. It was a rare thing to see another Sunai reap a life. And Ilsa had a way of making everything beautiful. Even death.

Steps sounded behind him, heavy and even. Leo. “Henry is a fool not to let her out.”

August frowned. “Who? Ilsa?”

Leo lifted his hand, brought it to rest against the door. “Our sister, the angel of death. Do you know what she is? What she can do?”

“I have an idea,” said August dryly.

“No, you don’t, little brother.” Within the cell, Ilsa sank to her knees beside the traitor. “Henry would keep you in the dark, but I think you deserve to know what she is, what you could be, perhaps, if you let yourself.”

“What are you talking about, Leo?”

“Our sister has two sides,” he said. “They do not meet.”

It sounded like a riddle, but Leo wasn’t usually one for talking in circles. “What—”

“Do you know how many stars she has?”

August shook his head.

Leo’s fingers splayed. “Two thousand one hundred and sixty-two.”

August started to do the math, then stopped. Six years. Six years since Ilsa had last gone dark. Six years since something ended the territory war.

Leo must have seen the understanding register. He traced a circle with his index finger. “Who do you think made the Barren, little brother?”

Beyond the door, the traitor was confessing in a broken whisper. Ilsa took his face in her hands and guided him down to the concrete floor. She lay on her side, stroking his hair.

Somewhere in the city was a place where nothing grew.

“That’s not possible,” whispered August. The last time he’d gone dark, he’d taken out a room of people. The idea that Ilsa could level a city block? Leave a scar on the surface of the world? If that was true, no wonder Henry didn’t want the truce to break. The FTF thought Flynn had a bomb.

And they were right.

Behind his eyes, August saw the stretch of scorched earth at the center of the city. Did she . . . did she mean to do it? Of course not—he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, either—but things got lost in the darkness. When Sunai went dark, lives ended. There were no rules, no boundaries: the guilty and the innocent, the monstrous and the human—they all perished.

A culling, that’s what Leo called it.

How many had died that day in the square? How many innocent lives lost among the guilty? It wouldn’t come to that again. It couldn’t. There had to be another answer.

“Her confinement was part of the truce,” continued Leo. “But memories are short, and it seems our Northern half needs to be reminded.”

The way he spoke of her made August’s skin crawl. “She isn’t a tool, Leo.”

His brother looked at him with those terrifying black eyes, their surfaces too flat, too smooth. “We are all tools, August.”

Inside the cell, Ilsa began to hum. The sound barely reached him, a muffled song that still sent a tremor through his bones. Unlike August, who relied on his violin, or Leo, who could make his music with almost anything, Ilsa’s only instrument was her voice.

August watched, a dull hunger rolling through him as the red light rose to the surface of the man’s skin and spread through hers like a flush. He’d just fed, and still it ached, his constant need, a hollowness he feared would cease to exist only when he did.

Twin tendrils of smoke rose from the man’s hollowed eyes as the last of his life escaped. The corpse went dark.

“One day you’ll see,” said Leo calmly. “Our sister’s true voice is a beautiful, terrible thing.”

Beyond the Plexi and steel, Ilsa ran her hand along the man’s hair like a mother putting a child to sleep.

August felt ill. He backed away, turned, and retraced his steps to the medical wing, where Harris hadn’t moved, and Henry was still working on Phillip’s shoulder, and Phillip looked halfway to dead. Suddenly, August was unbearably tired.

He almost asked if it was true about Ilsa, but he already knew.

Instead he said, “We have to do something.”

Henry looked up from the table, exhausted. “Not you, too.”

“Something to stop the truce from breaking,” said August. “Something to stop another war.”

Henry rubbed the back of his arm against his eyes, but said nothing. Harris said nothing. Leo, now standing in the doorway, said nothing.

“Dad—”

“August.” Emily brought a hand to his shoulder, and he realized he was shaking. When she spoke, her voice was low and steady. “It’s late,” she said, wiping a smudge of blood from his cheek. “You better go upstairs. After all,” she added, “it’s a school night.”