She had been stupid. Fatally stupid, thinking he had wanted her, alone and unimportant, because—because she loved photography, like him. Because she had traveled. Because she was special. It sounded so hollow now. The kind of thing only someone desperate would swallow. Bile crept up her throat.
How his eyes had glittered, when they fixed on her. How hungry he had looked.
“He—theysacrificedme. For money. For power.” She tried to laugh. It came out a bark. “But they can’t get away with it. Even in the mortal world. The police must have asked questions. Like who I was with that night. Idisappeared;they’ll have to have arrested someone. One of them, at least.”
“I wasn’t sure whether to show you,” Saskia said. “I looked at mortal newspapers too. They have them on file here. There were a few about you. This one—”
It was an edition of the student newspaper, dated nearly a year earlier. Emma smoothed the front page.
“SECRET SOCIETY” EMBROILED IN MISSING STUDENT CASE
As Emma read, she began to shake. So the Turnbulls had been able to deny it all. To lie about where she had been and what they had done. “Little to no relationship with Emma Curran.” That was how Jasper had put it.
Emma’s claws were scoring gouges into the Librarian’s armchair. She felt a vicious delight as it yielded under her. The snap of threads, like tiny sinews. The muscular padding, ripping under her claws. She barely saw the study or Saskia’s worried face. Red coats whirled before her eyes. The fox sang through her blood, reminding her that she was a hunter, that this is what she was built for—
to tear and kill
blood on claw and jaw
She laughed aloud.
“I am going toripthem apart.”
It was marvelously simple. She would start with the first, and move along them in a line. Shredding through dinner jackets and bow ties as though they had been the velvet skins of voles. Then to the rich flesh beneath, their blood a wash of color over her claws. She would leap last for Jasper’s heart, feel it burst like overripe fruit between her jaws. She was death and darkness and the night. He would cry before she was done.
Saskia’s voice stopped her at the door, pained and urgent. “You can’t. None of us can. Emma, no one in the City is allowed to harm them. They’re marked. Special, somehow. They’re the only mortals we can’t touch.”
Saskia’s words made their way into Emma’s brain, slow as molasses. She had to struggle back from her dark visions. To coax a mouth open to snarl to form words instead. “Marked?”
“I’ve only seen one once. It’s really obvious. Like a glowing sign on their backs.”
“But how do you know we can’t hurt them? Have you ever seen someone try?”
“No, but—”
“The Judge said I was marked too. Can you see that?”
“No, Emma. I can’t see anything. I would have told you, you know that.”
“They let him go.” Jasper’s face leered from the newspaper. Laughing at her. “They let all of them go. Like he—like they didn’t take everything from me,” Emma spat. “I’m here, but they get to go on with their lives? And no one does anything to stop them? No.No.”
“Wait!”
The door splintered against the wall.
The corridors of the Library rumbled with Emma’s growl.
CHAPTER 30
She waited, cloaked in the shadows outside the Turnbull Clubhouse. The town house stood aloof in its cobbled crescent, cold under the night sky. It seemed to sneer down at her: crouching by its bins, surrounded by the stink of the Turnbulls’ discarded bottles and the decomposing scraps of meat from their plates. It only spurred her rage. A panicked part of her fluttered at her rib cage, trying to remind her that consequences existed. But something in Emma was ready to bare its teeth. She was tired of being afraid.
The clubhouse door swung open, and someone in a dinner jacket and a wine-stained cravat stumbled out. On his back was a glowing green mark, like a complex hieroglyphic. So it was true. The Turnbulls were special, protected by their bargain with the Night City. The mark a warning that they could not be harmed.
A growl rumbled in Emma’s throat. Her first draining was going to be a Turnbull. And the second. And on and on until the debt was paid.
She had come to hunt.
Piers Popwell did not have a great deal in the way of compassion or humility, but he did have a very keenly developed instinct for survival. Which is why, when most people would not have seen anything to be wary of in the cheery, halogen-lit street outside the Turnbull Clubhouse, he stopped and sniffed the air. All quiet and dark. There was nothing to hear beyond the muffled cheering inside the clubhouse. Two of the slags from the women’s hockey team had been throwing up in the soup tureen when he left. Classic banter, that. Chuckling, he wove briskly down the steps.
