Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(24)

The pure metal turned his stomach. His legs went weak, the chain wrenching him to his knees, and for one horrible second he was back in the warehouse in the Waste, heat screaming through his skin as he burned from the inside out and Sloan stood laughing at the edge of the light and—

The blunt side of the ax came down on the back of his neck, and he hit the floor hard, the boards cracking beneath him. His vision doubled, the chain at his throat vising, and then they were on him, kicking and beating, the blows shallow, the pain brief, but disorienting.

“. . . Sunai . . .”

“. . . just like she said . . .”

“. . . truss him up . . .”

August’s hands tightened into fists, and he realized he was still holding the bow, the steel pinned beneath someone’s boot.

Through the tangle of limbs he saw Rez wrest herself free. She managed a single step toward him, and he tried to tell her to run, to get out, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listened.

She threw herself at the tangle of bodies, peeling one away from the group. In the instant of distraction, the other Fangs faltered, torn between the two targets. The boot came off his bow and August slashed violently across the man’s leg. He went down screaming and clutching his calf as blood, but also light, bloomed across his skin.

Music wasn’t the only way to bring a soul to surface—Leo had taught him that. August grabbed the man’s ankle, bone cracking beneath his fingers as the soul sang through him, sharp as electricity and just as violent. Ice water and anger and a single, pealing scream.

Embrace it, urged his brother, as the world slowed, every detail in the broken room suddenly vivid, from the warped boards to the candlelight.

The Fang collapsed, his eyes burned black, and August shot to his feet, tugging the chain from his neck as the others scrambled back, clearly torn between whatever they’d been told—given, promised—and simple, physical fear.

They all recoiled, except for one.

A single Fang stood in the doorway, holding Rez like a shield, one hand clutching her hair and a serrated blade at her throat.

“Put down the bow,” he said through bloody teeth.

“Don’t you dare,” growled Rez.

Dead weight, repeated Leo.

August heard the clank of chain, sensed the other Fangs closing in on him again, the violin still wedged between the cracked boards a yard away.

“Hey, boss . . .” August met Rez’s gaze and saw the glint between her fingers, but before he could stop her, she drove the dagger back into the man’s leg. He howled and let go, but not before slicing her throat.

A sound left August then, low and animal, and he forced himself to lunge, not for the killer but for the violin. Hands tore at him but he ignored them, grabbing the instrument and slashing the bow across the strings.

The first note came out hard and sharp, and the Fangs recoiled, pressing their hands over their ears as if that would save them, but it was too late. They were too late.

By the second note, the fight went out of them.

By the third, they were falling to their knees.

August left the music echoing on the air and ran for Rez. He dropped the violin and sank to the floor beside her.

“Stay with me,” he said, pressing his hands to the wound at her neck. There was so much blood bubbling up between his fingers, too much, and it slicked his skin, made his fingers slip. So much red, he thought, and none of it light.

Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Her chest juddered up, down.

“Stay with me.” The words came out pleading.

August had reaped a thousand souls, but it was such a different thing to feel a life bleed out beneath his hands, powerless to staunch the flow. For all the souls he’d reaped, he’d so rarely seen this kind of death, never felt the way it stole beneath his fingers, life spilling across the floor until that horrible cusp, the instant when it ended. When Laura Torrez stopped being a person and became a body. No transition, no ease, gone and there, there and gone, gone, gone.

August’s hands slid from the wound at Rez’s throat. Her eyes were open and empty, and red light flickered across her face. Not hers, of course, but theirs. A room of ruined souls waiting to be reaped.

August eased Rez’s body down and rose to his feet. He moved among the Fangs, bloodstained fingers searching out skin.

They whispered their sins, but he didn’t listen, didn’t care. Their confessions meant nothing to him.

He snuffed their lights, reaped their souls, his whole body humming with the sudden influx of power, his senses sharpened to the point of pain, until there was only one left.

The man who’d killed Rez.

His lips were moving, his soul a sheen of sweat against his skin, but August didn’t reach out to reap it. Leo’s words swam inside his head, not the stuff of madness, but memory—a memory from the night he’d taught August about pain, and why he so often used it.

“Our purpose is not to bring peace,” his brother had said. “It is to bestow penance.”

August watched the man’s soul sink back beneath the surface of his skin, watched his senses return.

“Why shouldn’t they suffer for their sins?”

The Fang blinked, straightened, his mouth twisting in a grimace, but before he could speak, before he could say or do anything, August slammed his boot into the man’s wounded leg, and he buckled, clutching at his thigh before August forced him to the floor, fingers closing around the steel collar at his throat.