Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(23)

“Doesn’t do much good,” she’d said, “to fear one kind of death and not another.”

Their lights caught broken glass on the Falstead’s front steps. The doors hung askew, and the place had the eerie feeling of the recently abandoned.

Someone had already set a baton in the center of the lobby floor. The pool of light didn’t reach the corners of the room, but it carved a path. Another waited at the base of the stairs.

Bread crumbs, thought August absently. A relic from another one of Ilsa’s stories.

As they started up the stairs, a bad feeling began to spread like cold through August’s chest.

Feelings again, little brother?

He pushed Leo’s voice aside as they climbed.

Around them, the Falstead began to change.

The lobby below had retained its air of luxury, but the second floor was starting to show the rot. By the time they reached the third, wallpaper was peeling back, boards crumbling underfoot. The walls were riddled with bullet holes and flaking drywall, whole sections staved in, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. Through open doors he saw furniture overturned, glass shattered, dark stains coating every surface, stale smoke and old blood, all of it human.

“What the hell is this place?” murmured Rez.

August didn’t have an answer.

They found the first body on the stairs. A baton sat in his lap, casting an eerie pool of light around his corpse, shining on the blood spilling down the steps. His combat vest was gone, his head hung at an impossible angle, and the FTF patch had been torn from his sleeve.

“Shit,” muttered Rez, her voice laced not with panic, but anger. “Shit, shit . . .”

Beyond the steady beat of her swearing, August caught the far-off sound of something dripping, the faint creak of boards somewhere overhead.

He held a finger to his lips, and she went silent, crouched beside the body. Nothing happened, and after several long seconds, they both started moving again.

Up ahead, a mass coiled and writhed in the middle of the hall.

August caught a glint of silvery talons, a razor jaw, but Rez was a step ahead, lobbing a small light grenade across the floor. August squeezed his eyes shut as it detonated, throwing out a silent blast of UV light. The Corsai scattered with a hiss, fleeing into deeper shadow. Most of the creatures escaped, but one went up in smoke, its teeth and claws raining to the floor like chips of ice.

Two more corpses lay in the hall, their bodies twisted.

But by the looks of it, the Corsai hadn’t killed them. Their bodies were still mostly intact, their patches taken like trophies.

What had the voice on the comm said?

Patrol on the Seam caught a light signal . . . went to investigate.

Where was the fourth soldier?

Light danced in a doorway at the other end of the hall, not the steady glow of a dropped baton but the fickle stutter of a candle. August pocketed his light, and gripped the neck of his violin with one hand and the steel bow with the other. He left Rez with the bodies and moved toward the room, drawn by the light and the soft sound of a weight on floorboards, the drip of something against wood.

A single candle burned upright in the middle of the room—it was more like a cage, slats missing from the ceiling and floor—and against the far wall, beneath a cracked window, sat the last member of Squad Six, gagged and bound. The soldier’s head lolled. His vest was gone, and his shirtfront was soaked through with blood.

Dead weight, warned Leo, and real or not, he was right. August could hear the man’s heart fighting, losing, but it didn’t stop him from calling for Rez or picking his way through the room.

He didn’t slow until he was close enough to see the word on the floorboards, scrawled in the soldier’s blood.





BOO


August’s gaze snapped to the cagelike room, and then to the window. The darkness beyond was studded with a pair of watching red eyes, the sharp corner of a smile.

Alice.

Rez was beside him now, reaching for the soldier’s pulse. He caught her wrist.

“Get back,” he said, pushing her toward the door, but it was too late.

The ceiling creaked above them and August looked up just in time to see the glint of metal, the flurry of limbs, before the first monster came crashing down.





They came from everywhere.

Not monsters, he realized, but humans, Fangs with blood on their cheeks and steel collars wrapped around their throats and the manic smiles of the drugged and the mad. Some had knives and some had guns, and one dropped down right behind Rez.

She spun, cracking him across the face as August raised his violin. Bow met strings, but before he could draw a note, a shot exploded through the air, grazing the steel and ripping the instrument from his hand. It went skittering across the floor.

Rez kicked out, trying to send it back while headlocking a man twice her size, but it was lodged between two broken boards, and before August could reach her or the violin, a hulking man slammed him backward into the soldier, the wall, the window. The soldier slumped, lifeless, and the glass gave way. August nearly fell through, catching himself against the jagged edge. Glass bit into his palms, but drew no blood, and he surged back into the room just as an ax caught him in the chest.

The blade cut through mesh and cloth before slamming into his ribs. It didn’t break the skin, but it drove all the air from his lungs, and he doubled over, gasping. The Fangs circled him and he slashed out with the sharp spine of his bow as a length of iron chain wrapped around his throat.