This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity #1)(78)

She watched as he took a breath, and went under.

He didn’t come back up.

His bones had stopped glowing, easing the skeletal effect that made her think of Malchai, of monsters. Beneath the water, August looked so . . . human. A teenage boy, his long limbs folded up and his black curls floating around his face. She counted the seconds, watching the last of the breath leave his lips, wondering if she’d need to pull him out.

And then, at last, he surfaced.

He gripped the rim of the tub and dragged himself up, water streaming into his eyes. They were no longer on fire, but they hadn’t returned to pale gray, either. They were darker, the color of charcoal, set too deep in his hollowing face.

Kate knelt and curled her fingers over his. His hand tensed beneath hers, but his skin had cooled enough to touch, and he didn’t pull away. “Kate,” he murmured, his vision sliding in and out of focus.

“I’m here,” she said. “Where are you?”

August closed his eyes, took a long breath. “Lying on my bed,” he whispered. “Listening to music while my cat chews on the corner of a book.”

Kate almost laughed. It was such an ordinary answer. His hand was getting hot again, so she let her fingers slide from his and sank back against the tub wall. Behind her, the shower almost sounded like rain, and she dug the silver medallion from beneath her collar, rubbing a thumb absently over the surface.

“Your house,” said August tiredly, and she couldn’t tell if it was a question.

“It was,” said Kate, turning the pendant between her fingers.

A small, shuddering sigh from the tub. “Why are there so many shadows in the world, Kate? Shouldn’t there be just as much light?”

“I don’t know, August.”

“I don’t want to be a monster.”

“You’re not,” she said, the words automatic, but as she said it, Kate realized that she believed it, too. He was a Sunai—nothing was going to change that—but he wasn’t evil, wasn’t cruel, wasn’t monstrous. He was just someone who wanted to be something else, something he wasn’t.

Kate understood the feeling.

“It hurts,” he whispered.

“What does?” asked Kate.

“Being. Not being. Giving in. Holding out. No matter what I do, it hurts.”

Kate tipped her head back against the tub. “That’s life, August,” she said. “You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re monster or human. Living hurts.”

She waited for him to say more, wondering why she no longer felt the urge to talk. Maybe she was finally out of secrets, or maybe she was just getting used to him. When she couldn’t take the silence anymore, she got to her feet, stiff from the tile floor, and made her way down the hall to the first door on the left.

Beneath the film of dust, her bedroom walls were yellow—not sunflower yellow, but pale, almost white, the color of the sun, the real sun, not the one kids drew. The bed was narrow but soft, and there were drawings tacked up on one wall.

She rifled through the drawers and found an old journal and a few discarded pieces of clothing, things she hadn’t bothered to take with her back to V-City. They were all too small, of course, but Kate had to get out of her ruined clothes, so she continued to her mother’s room at the end of the hall.

The door wasn’t shut all the way, and it swung open under her touch.

The room beyond was simple and dark, the curtains drawn, but the sight of the bed, with its nest of pillows, sent an ache through her. If Kate closed her eyes, she could see herself sprawled on that bed, reading, while her mother playfully covered her with those pillows one by one.

She stepped slowly across the floor, over a weed growing up between the floorboards, and sank on the edge of the bed, ignoring the plume of dust. Beneath the dust, it still smelled like her mother, and before she knew what she was doing, Kate had curled up in the sea of pillows, burying her face in the nearest one.

Home, she thought, as the memory reached up and dragged her under.

They’d been back in V-City for four months, and Kate still couldn’t sleep. Every night she dreamed of monsters—teeth and claws and crimson eyes—and every night she woke up screaming.

“I want to go home,” she told her mother.

“We are home, Kate.”

But it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t like the stories her mother had told her when she was growing up. There was no happy family, no loving father—only a shadow she hardly saw, and the monster in his wake.

“I want to go home,” she pleaded every time she woke.

“I want to go home,” she begged every time her mother put her back to bed.

“I want to go home.”

Her mother was getting thinner, her eyes rimmed with red. The city was eating her, piece by piece. And then one night, she said, “Okay.”

“I’ll talk to your father,” she promised. “We’ll work it out.”

The night of the accident, Kate was still dreaming, still trapped in a room of violent shadows, when her mother shook her awake.

“Get up, Kate. We have to go.”

An angry red mark flared on her mother’s cheek, a welt with an H in the middle, the echo of Callum Harker’s ring where it had struck her face. Weaving through the darkened penthouse. A shattered glass. A toppled chair. The office doors sealed shut and sleep still clinging to Kate, tripping up her feet.