“Don’t,” he whispered, a tremor breaking his voice. “Don’t.”
The monster dove aside, hardly affected by her bullets. Its flailing limbs were slick with moisture, little beads of water that looked viscous to the touch.
Juliette aimed again, but the sounds behind her—the pained, frightened groans of a victim’s last gasp before death—distracted her more than she could bear, and when her bullet only hit the monster’s shoulder, it took the chance to squeeze between two seats and dive right at a window, fracturing a web through the glass.
It was trying to escape.
Juliette reached for the knife at her thigh, intent on a throw. What creature could survive a blade through the eye? What creature, no matter how monstrous, could take its whole head carved open?
But she wasn’t fast enough. By the time she had struggled through the fallen bodies, the monster had dived against the window once more and shattered it entirely, blasting shards of glass across the compartment. Juliette gasped, throwing a hand over her face. Before she could fully recover, the monster had rolled right out, uncaring of the train’s fast speed.
“No!” Juliette exclaimed, spitting a curse. She rushed to the open window, watching the monster land upon the hills and phase back into a man, the transformation as casual as a coat being shed. In seconds he was out of view. The train flew by, leaving him in the countryside, all this blood on his hands and no one wiser to the his identity.
Juliette stumbled away from the window, her legs close to giving out. She had believed it already, but seeing it with her own two eyes was another matter entirely. No longer was this Qi Ren and his ill-timed transformations, fighting against himself and leaving sketches of his other form in an effort to uncover what was happening to his body. No longer was this a sickness spread near the water, hitting the gangsters working at the Bund at odd hours. These monsters were assassins. Assassins under someone’s command, growing to beasts at will and fading back into men when purpose suited it.
This situation was growing more and more dire by the minute.
When the screaming stopped, Roma could hardly move. Every possibility flashed before his eyes, most of them with Juliette’s body strewn in pieces on the train floor. If there was a higher power, Roma hoped they were listening. All they would hear was: Please, please, please.
Please be okay.
The silence was cut through suddenly by the sound of glass shattering in the compartment. With a trembling breath, Roma surged forward again and pulled at the door as hard as he could.
At last it slammed open.
He smelled blood immediately. Then felt the wind, howling through a shattered window. The monster was nowhere in sight. But Juliette—there stood Juliette, like some avenging angel surveying her battlefield, the only figure who remained upright in a car full of fallen corpses, her cheek smeared with blood.
She blinked, so slowly it looked as if she were waking up from a dream. When she started toward him and stumbled, Roma lunged out and caught her without thinking, holding her close for one beat, two beats, three. In that drawn-out moment, he pressed his cheek against the hard texture of her hair, against the soft skin of her neck. She exhaled, relaxing against him, and it was that which jolted Roma back to reality. Juliette was okay, so all his panic transformed into fury.
“Why did you do that?” Roma demanded, jerking back. He shook her by the shoulders. “Why would you do that?”
Bodies on the floor, throats clawed to shreds, red trails running from eye to ear. But Juliette . . . Juliette looked untouched.
“I took Paul’s vaccine,” she said shakily. “I am immune.”
“That was for the first monster,” Roma snapped. “These could have been different.”
The very thought that this had been a White Flower hiding under their noses as a monster only heightened the heat in his chest. Had he known to stop the White Flower earlier, none of this would have happened. Had he known any of this, he could have tortured something out of the man long ago and the absurd blackmailing on their city would be over.
“I figured it would work the same.” Juliette brushed his hands off her shoulders. “And it did.”
“It was a gamble. You gambled with your life.”
There was a visible twitch in Juliette’s jaw, her pointed chin tipping up in aggravation. Roma knew he was being condescending, but he cared little when the air was still permeated with gore, violence soaking into their clothes, sticking to their skin. Noting the same fact, Juliette shoved Roma over the compartment threshold and slammed the sliding door closed again.