This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(74)

But August didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was the shadow coiling like a cape behind the man, restless and wrong, and the fact he was already out the front door, taking the promise of cold bones and clear thoughts with him.

August moved to follow but someone gripped his arm.

Kate. “We have to go,” she snapped. “Now.”

“Kate, I . . .” He couldn’t drag his eyes from the man’s shrinking form. “I need to . . .” But before he could finish, she took his jaw in her hand—he was amazed it didn’t burn her fingers—and turned it toward a bank of televisions mounted on the wall. Her face was plastered on the screens—all the screens—above the headline:

KATHERINE HARKER ABDUCTED, FLYNN FAMILY SUSPECTED

He felt himself surface, a painfully sharp moment of clarity as he took in the headline. “No,” he said, the word knocked out of him like a breath. “I didn’t—”

Just then the front doors chimed open, and the driver, the one who’d given them a lift, came in and saw the screens and stopped. “What’s this?”

“Shit.” Kate pulled August down below the rim of the shelves. “Go. Now.” She shoved him in the direction of a hall. He cast a last, desperate glance toward the front doors, but the man with the sin-made shadow was already gone.

“Come on,” said Kate, pushing him past the bathrooms and through the back exit, out onto the other side of the truck stop’s tarmac. The UVRs rained down on them, and August winced, head pounding.

“I didn’t abduct you,” he said. “I saved your life. You’re the one who decided to run.”

“And you’re the one who decided to come with me.” Kate was already walking away. Away from the truck stop. Away from him. She disappeared around the nearest corner, and he forced himself to follow.

“We have to tell someone,” he said, jogging to catch up. “We have to let them know you’re okay.”

“In case you forgot,” she called back, “someone is still trying to kill me.”

“They don’t even have to!” August knew he had a point. He was fighting to hold on to it. “This is exactly what they wanted, Kate. To blame my family for breaking the truce. And it’s going to work if we don’t—”

Kate spun on him. “What do you want me to do, August? I can’t just go back—”

A set of doors burst open behind them.

“Hey, you,” called a voice.

August and Kate both turned. It was one of the truckers from inside the store, a hard-looking man with a pistol hanging loosely from his fingers, a second, unarmed man trailing in his wake. August started to shift in front of Kate when another pair of doors flew open behind her, and two more figures spilled out into the pool of light. The man had a bat, the woman a knife, edge glinting in the glaring light. Beneath the UVRs, they cast no shadows—four more people, and none of them were sinners.

The ground tipped dangerously beneath August’s feet.

He started to slide the violin case from his shoulders, hoping he could at least disarm them, when the first man moved, swinging up his gun and firing. The bullet ricocheted off the tarmac inches from August’s feet. The sound was deafening, and for a moment he was back in a school cafeteria staring down at the small black tallies on the floor before Kate’s voice brought him back.

“What the f*ck is wrong with you?” she snapped at the man.

“Is it true?” said the trucker, his gun leveled on August’s chest, but his gaze on Kate. “You’re Harker’s kid?”

“Does that make you the monster?” cut in the man behind him.

Before August could answer, the man with the bat caught Kate’s wrist and dragged her toward him. She kneed him, and he went gasping backward, but the woman with the knife grabbed Kate and forced her back, shoving the blade beneath her chin.

August started forward, and the gun went off again, this time nearly grazing his cheek.

The woman with the knife smiled, her teeth half metal. “Finders keepers, boys. Reward’s mine.”

“Only reward you’re gonna get is a bullet.” August almost wished the man would follow through. He was having trouble staying on his feet, his focus swinging from the bat to the knife to the gun while the tension rose around them all like heat.

“Tell you what,” said the man with the bat. “We’ll take the girl, you can take the boy.”

“I think we’ll take ’em both,” said the one with the gun.

Kate hissed as the knife pressed against her throat. “How do you plan to do that?” asked the woman.

The air was humming now, the woman with the knife and the man with the gun locked in a kind of standoff; the man with the bat and the one with nothing but fists inching closer.

Their eyes were shining strangely, the way people’s did when they spoke to August, greed and violence all starting to surface . . . as if they were feeding on his hunger. August’s head spun; he knew he couldn’t quiet the chaos as long as it was rising in him . . . but maybe he didn’t have to. Leo knew how to twist these feelings in people, how to sharpen and focus them.

Mind over body.

Instead of fighting the influence, trying to rein it in, he turned the volume up, let it roll across the tarmac and over the men.