“Taylor,” warned the second soldier.

“Enough,” called the third.

But Taylor’s mouth was close, his breath hot on her skin. “Beg,” he snarled, “the way my uncle did when your father—”

Kate drove her boot back into his knee, and heard the satisfying crack of bone right before he screamed, and in that moment of pain, his grip failed and she was behind him, forcing him to his knees, his face inches from the dark.

It would be so easy to pitch him forward across the line of light, into that place where real monsters waited.

“Stay back,” she warned as the other two soldiers started toward her.

Kate bowed her head. “This is the part,” she said, “where you beg.”

Her vision slid in and out of focus, as if she were in a dream, and the soldier began to whimper softly, and everything in her wanted to just—let go. But the Chaos Eater hadn’t come—it was still out there, still free.

Kate sighed, and hauled the soldier back into the safety of the light.

For an instant, the tower basement went dark.

A dark unlike Sloan had ever seen. True black—a total, unnatural absence of light—and then, just as quickly, the lights were back, flickering and only half as bright.

The Fangs looked around in confusion.

And there, in their midst, stood the shadow.

It smudged the air, just as it had in the footage. It had no face, no mouth, nothing but a pair of silver eyes, round as mirrors. The sight of it left Sloan cold. And hungry. As if he hadn’t eaten in nights.

A few Fangs noticed it too, turning on the monster with raised fists and bloodshot eyes, only to stop, to still. Something passed between them, a flicker of motion, the flash of silver, and it was like watching dominoes tip. The Fangs turned away from the shadow, and toward one another—

And the killing began.

Sloan stood on the stage, mesmerized by the frenzy, by the way the Fangs began tearing at one another, their motions vicious but deliberate, moving with a strange mixture of urgency and calm, but what unnerved him most was the quiet. There should have been screams, pleas, terror and pain echoing through the concrete chamber, but the humans slaughtered one other in such perfect silence, while the shadow began to drift through the mass, growing more solid with every step.

Alice was across the stage, a cable in her hand, and when the creature reached the center of the floor, she let go.

The cage came whistling down, the gold veil billowing before it landed with a crash atop the shadow. That crash was so much louder than the killing, and yet the humans didn’t waver from their slaughter, not even when Sloan leaped down from the stage and made his way toward the shrouded cell.

The sheet had slipped in the fall, a slice of darkness visible through the gap in the gold, and when Sloan peered through, he half expected the cage to be empty, the shadow gone. But there it was, a solid black shape in the center of the cell, and as he stopped before it, the shadow’s silver eyes drifted up until Sloan saw himself reflected in them.

“Hello, my pet.”

The soldier was on the ground, clutching his knee.

The other two hurried to his side as Kate stepped around his moaning form and started back toward the Compound.

She was halfway there when it happened.

Between one step and the next, her vision doubled and the world plunged away and she was falling. Not down—she was still on her feet, still on the light strip, but she was also somewhere else, somewhere cold and dark, damp and concrete—

—senses filling with the acrid taste of blood and ash a gold cage that burns like smoke and there

beyond the cage a pair of red eyes float in the dark a skeleton in a black suit and the world narrows

to the point of a single shape the name rising like smoke— Sloan.

Sloan studied the shadow while the remaining Fangs grappled and strangled and fought among the bodies on the floor. Movement stirred at the edge of his sight as a man covered in blood started toward the stairs, his motions steady, purposeful.

“No one leaves,” ordered Sloan, the words directed at Alice, who beamed before launching herself in a blur, snapping one man’s neck before tearing out another’s heart. She could be efficient when given the right task.

Sloan turned his attention back to the creature in the cage.

The footage had not done it justice.

It had shown Sloan the shadow’s appearance, yes, revealed the way its influence spread from victim to victim, the violence like a disease, contagious. But on the tablet screen, the creature had been merely a shape, flat and featureless.

Now, standing in its presence, Sloan felt hollow, cold. His skin prickled and his teeth ached, and something as simple and primal as fear began to well inside him, until it met with something stronger.

Victory.

Here was a thing of darkness, like the Corsai; a lone hunter, like a Malchai; a creature that bristled Sloan’s edges like a Sunai; but it was none of those things. It was a weapon, a thing of absolute destruction.

And now it belonged to him.

VERSE 4

A MONSTER UNLEASHED

Kate didn’t remember falling, but she was on her hands and knees, blood dripping from her nose onto the glaring white light of the strip beneath her. Somewhere, beyond the ringing in her head, she heard the sound of steps, brisk and even, and she knew she had to get up, but the pain was tearing through her skull, and her thoughts were rattling around inside her head, shaken loose by the sudden change in who, in what, in where.