This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(43)

Sunai were sadistic. Sunai were evil. Sunai were invincible.

And on top of it all, Sunai looked human.

What little Harker and his men actually knew about the Sunai came from one monster. The only one they’d ever managed to catch on camera.

Kate logged into her father’s private uplink, and typed the name into the footage search.





LEO


He’d been part of the initial fight, Flynn’s right hand when Harker tried to take the city twelve years back. And he wasn’t shy. Kate scrolled through more than a dozen video thumbnails that tracked across the screen, all dating from before the truce. They fell into two categories.

Leo_Music

Leo_Torture

She chewed her lip, hesitating a moment before clicking on one of the videos labeled Music. The footage was more than a decade old, and it was shot from a security camera at an odd angle, but there he was in the frame, not stalking through shadows or down a back alley, but perched on a stool beneath a spotlight. Leo was sitting on stage in what looked like a bar, one foot up and a steel guitar balanced on his knee. Even at this angle, she could tell he was tall and blond and handsome, and aside from his eyes, which raked black lines across the camera every time his gaze drifted up, he didn’t look like a monster at all.

Kate supposed that was what made him so dangerous.

There was no sound in the feed, but when he began to play, she still found herself turning her head, good ear toward the screen, wanting to hear the song. And even with the grainy footage and the darkened room, she could see the crowd sit forward.

Only the room wasn’t so dark anymore. At first she thought the overheads must be switching on, but as she watched, she realized the audience itself was beginning to glow. The people didn’t seem to notice the light, didn’t seem to notice anything. They sat so still Kate thought the footage must be frozen. But it couldn’t be, because Leo’s fingers were still plucking at the guitar strings.

Movement caught her eye as two people rose from their chairs, not fast, but slowly, as if drifting up through water. The light coming from their skin was different, sickly, and they both moved toward the stage with the simple, steady steps of those in a trance, their lips moving but their expressions empty.

When they were nearly to the stage, Leo stopped playing.

He rose from the stool, set aside the guitar, and stepped down off the platform to greet the two glowing forms as if they were fans.

And then he closed his hands around their throats.

They didn’t fight back, didn’t thrash, even when he dragged them up so that only their shoes skimmed the floor. She watched as the light beneath their skin flickered, and then began to drift, out of their bodies and into Leo’s, infusing him with that strange glow. She watched as the last of their light guttered and died, watched as their eyes shriveled black in their sockets, and even then Leo didn’t let go. He stood there, eyes closed and head back, looking almost peaceful as the men went limp, turned from living, breathing people into empty shells. At last he let the bodies fall and returned to the stage, where he took up his guitar and walked out.

The glow from the audience faded, and one by one they began to move again, as if shaking off sleep, slowly at first, and then frantically as they saw the corpses on the floor.

Kate sat there, chilled. It wasn’t the act of killing that bothered her—monsters and men both did that—and it wasn’t even the chilling serenity on the Sunai’s face. It was the fact that he killed them with a sound. Those men were dead the minute he started playing. Pulled like puppets on strings.

She thought of Freddie’s violin, suddenly grateful he’d refused to play, even if she wasn’t sure why. Was he trying to spare her? Or just waiting for Flynn’s signal?

Her attention flicked back to the screen. She wasn’t like the people in that crowd, walking straight into the hands of death. No, Kate had an advantage, knew her monster’s face, his weapon. Now all she had to do was find his weakness.

She closed out of the video and was about to exit the page when she remembered the second tab.

Torture.

If a Sunai used music to lure its prey, then what was this?

She pulled her hair back, lit a cigarette, and clicked on the next video.





“Who are we hunting?” asked August.

They were standing on the front porch of a row house, its windows boarded, its siding warped. The door had been tagged with red paint that read STAY AWAY.

As if words had that much power here.

“Two men,” said Leo, rolling up his sleeves, revealing the short bands of black crosses that ran like cuffs around both forearms. The marks were too few in number, washed away every time he went dark. Leo didn’t turn because he lacked control—that he had in spades—but simply because he liked the way it felt. Like shedding a coat on a hot day. The thought made August shudder.

“Brothers,” continued Leo. “Responsible for the deaths of six. Gang politics. Drugs. I expect they’ll be armed.”

“And you had me leave my violin at home?”

Leo reached into his jacket. August assumed he was fetching one of his own instruments. Instead, he withdrew a long, thin knife, and passed it to August.

“What is this for?” he asked.

Leo didn’t answer. He was staring down at his hand, now empty, and August watched as darkness began to roll up his fingers and across his palm. August recoiled instinctively, but only Leo’s hand blackened to shadow. The way he did that, slid between the two forms, that worked only because he’d torn away the walls between. August tried to imagine what Leo must have been like, back before he burned through his humanity, but he couldn’t. He watched as Leo reached out his shadowed hand and gripped the rusted doorknob. The metal crunched like paper under his touch and fell away. The door swung open.