“Patch me through.”

There was a short sequence of beeps, and then Henry’s voice. “August?”

“Since when am I grounded?”

“You already have a task. When I get back, you can tell me what you learned. In the meantime, Kate Harker is in your custody.”

“Kate is asleep,” countered August, temper rising.

“And when is the last time you slept?”

August took a deep breath. “I’m not—”

“Consider it an order.”

“Henry—”

But he could tell by the static, the man was gone.

August slammed his fist on the counter, igniting a brief spark of pain, there and then gone. He slid his hands through his hair. Maybe Henry was right. He was tired, in a bone-deep way. He shoved off the counter and crossed into the living room, leaving the lights off as he sank onto the couch. If he listened, he could hear Kate moving beyond the bedroom door, rolling over on his bed. Six months, and she was still made of restless limbs and shallow breaths.

Why did you come back?

He tried to focus instead on the patter of Allegro’s steps somewhere in Ilsa’s room, the distant sound of movement from the floors below. He closed his eyes and felt his body sinking deeper into the cushions, but the quieter the room became, the louder Kate’s voice in his head.

What happened to you?

The look on her face when he forced the truth from her, that horrible mixture of betrayal and disgust.

That isn’t me, he wanted to say.

Yes it is, insisted Leo.

What happened to you? demanded Kate.

You were weak, said his brother.

What happened to you?

Now you are strong.

What happened to you?

He forced himself up, slinging the violin case over his shoulder. He didn’t need a mission. There was plenty of trouble waiting in the dark.

The doors to the private elevator stood open, and he stepped in, punching the button for the lobby. The doors slid shut, and he was met with a rippling reflection, distorted steel twisting his features, erasing everything but the broadest planes of his face.

He waited for the feeling of slow descent, but the elevator didn’t move. He punched the lobby again. Still nothing. He hit the button to make the doors open. They didn’t.

August sighed and looked up, straight into the surveillance lens mounted in the corner, even though he knew looking straight at it would blur the feed.

“Ilsa,” he said evenly. “Let me go.”

The elevator didn’t move.

“I have a job to do.”

Nothing.

He’d never thought of himself as claustrophobic, but the elevator walls were starting to feel close.

“Please,” he said tightly. “Let me go. I won’t stay out long but I need . . .” He faltered. What was the truth? What did he need? To move? To think? To hunt? To reap? To kill? How was he supposed to find the words to tell his sister that he couldn’t stand to sit still, to be alone with the voices in his head, with himself.

“I need this,” he said at last, voice tight with frustration.

Nothing.

“Ilsa?”

After a few long seconds, the elevator started down.

The first time Sloan heard that humans feared the dark, he laughed.

What passed for dark was, to him, simply layers of shadow, a hundred varying degrees of gray. Dim, perhaps, but Sloan’s eyes were sharp. He could see by the light of the streetlight four blocks over, by the glow of the moon behind clouds.

As for the things that lurked in that dark, that lived and hunted and fed in that dark—well.

That was another matter.

As he reached the warehouse on Tenth, he could smell the traces of blood, but the space itself was empty, at least of corpses. Which was fine—Sloan wasn’t there to speak to the dead. He stepped into the hollow drum of a building, the floor littered with bullet casings and shreds of cloth. Light poured in from a streetlight outside, casting a triangle of safety near the open doors and there, where it gave way to shadow, were the Fangs’ steel collars, stacked like bones after a meal.

Sloan stared into the shadows. “Did you see it?”

The shadows rippled, shifted, and after a moment, they stared back, white eyes flickering against the dark.

wesawwesawwesaw

The words echoed around him, taken up by countless mouths. The Corsai were bottom-feeders, half-formed things with no vision, no ambition, only the simple desire to eat. But they could be useful, when they chose.

“What did you see?”

The darkness shifted, snickered.

beatbreakruinfleshbonebeatbreak Sloan tried again.

“What did the creature look like?”

The Corsai chittered, uncertain, their voices dissipating, but then, as if reaching a consensus, they began to draw themselves together. A hundred shadowy forms became one, their eyes crowding into two circles and their claws gathering into hands and their teeth tracing an outline of something vaguely human. A grotesque mockery of a monster.

“Can you bring it to me?”

The Corsai shook its collective head.

nonono no not real

“What do you mean it’s not real?”

The Corsai shivered and fell apart, one form scattering back into many. They went silent then, and Sloan began to wonder if the conversation was over—the Corsai were fickle things, distracted by a scent, a passing whim—but after a few moments they came shuddering back to life, drawing themselves once more into a single form.