A clanging, echoing thunk sounded from outside. Not from the apartment, but the hall.
She moved. The apartment warped, shrinking and expanding as if it were breathing, the floors rising with each inhale, but she managed to move.
The small kitchen table lay in fragments. Her blood-slick, shaking fingers wrapped around one of its wooden legs, silently lifting it over her shoulder. She peered into the hall.
It took a few blinks to clear her contracting vision. The gods-damned drugs—
The trash chute hatch lay open. Blood that smelled of wolf coated the rusty metal door, and prints that did not belong to a human stained the tile floor, aiming toward the stairs.
It was real. She blinked, over and over, swaying against the door—
Real. Which meant—
From far away, she saw herself launch into the hallway.
Saw herself slam into the opposite wall and rebound off it, then scramble into a sprint toward the stairwell.
Whatever had killed them must have heard her coming and hidden inside the trash chute, waiting for the chance to leap out at her or slink away unnoticed—
Bryce hit the stairs, a glowing white haze creeping over her vision. It blazed through every inhibition, disregarded every warning bell.
The glass door at the bottom of the stairs was already shattered. People screamed outside.
Bryce leapt from the top of the landing.
Her knees popped and buckled as she cleared the stairs, her bare feet shredding on the glass littering the lobby floor. Then they ripped open more as she hurtled through the door and into the street, scanning—
People were gasping to the right. Others were screaming. Cars had halted, drivers and passengers all staring toward a narrow alley between the building and its neighbor.
Their faces blurred and stretched, twisting their horror into something grotesque, something strange and primordial and—
This was no hallucination.
Bryce sprinted across the street, following the screams, the reek—
Her breath tore apart her lungs as she hurtled along the alley, dodging piles of trash. Whatever she was chasing had gotten only a brief head start.
Where was it, where was it?
Every logical thought was a ribbon floating above her head. She read them, as if following a stock ticker mounted on a building’s side in the CBD.
One glimpse, even if she couldn’t kill it. One glimpse, just to ID it, for Danika—
Bryce cleared the alley, careening onto bustling Central Avenue, the street full of fleeing people and honking cars. She leapt over their hoods, scaling them one after another, every movement as smooth as one of her dance steps. Leap, twirl, arch—her body did not fail her. Not as she followed the creature’s rotting stench to another alley. Another and another.
They were almost at the Istros. A snarl and roar rent the air ahead. It had come from another connected alley, more of a dead-end alcove between two brick buildings.
She hefted the table leg, wishing she’d grabbed Danika’s sword instead, wondering if Danika had even had time to unsheathe it—
No. The sword was in the gallery, where Danika had ignored Jesiba’s warning and left it in the supply closet. Bryce launched herself around the alley’s corner.
Blood everywhere. Everywhere.
And the thing halfway down the alley … not Vanir. Not one she’d encountered before.
A demon? Some feral thing with smooth, near-translucent gray skin. It crawled on four long, spindly limbs, but looked vaguely humanoid. And it was feasting on someone else.
On—on a malakh.
Blood covered the angel’s face, soaking his hair and veiling the swollen, battered features beneath. His white wings were splayed and snapped, his powerful body arced in agony as the beast ripped at his chest with a maw of clear, crystalline fangs that easily dug through skin and bone—
She did not think, did not feel.
She moved, fast like Randall had taught her, brutal like he’d made her learn to be.
She slammed the table leg into the creature’s head so hard that bone and wood cracked.
It was thrown off the angel and whirled, its back legs twisting beneath it while its front legs—arms—gouged lines in the cobblestones.
The creature had no eyes. Only smooth planes of bone above deep slits—its nose.
And the blood that leaked from its temple … it was clear, not red.
Bryce panted, the malakh male groaning some wordless plea as the creature sniffed at her.
She blinked and blinked, willing the lightseeker and mirthroot out of her system, willing the image ahead to stop blurring—
The creature lunged. Not for her—but the angel. Right back to the chest and heart it was trying to get to. The more considerable prey.