But I stayed on my own. It was easier that way to keep the Butcher’s secrets and step out on jobs at all hours. Halle and Kelda were much better off without me in there with them.
I doze for several hours, under the uneasy push and pull of alcohol and the background sensation of thirst and my own restless body, but I’m fully awake by the time the distant bell towers of Covenant toll two in the morning. My eyeballs press into the black all around me, and the humming of Trinity’s song drifts across the stuffy silence. It’s barely audible right now, but I feel it pulling, making me even more agitated. When I was younger, I’d sometimes go days without hearing it or feeling it in my bones, but lately it’s always there, dragging at me, like it’s an enormous magnet and I’m a needle, pointing toward it.
My room smells of moonshine and sweat, acrid and stale, but underneath it, there are also some of the most comforting scents I know: the minty smell of the dry soap we buy at the marketfare; the lingering hints of airship exhaust and dusty sunshine embedded in my blanket from being dried out on a line on the rooftop. I lie for another minute underneath the uncomfortably heavy warmth of my blanket, and then I ease off the mattress and out of the room.
I step out into the kitchen and living area, closing the door behind me with a soft click just as yellow-gold lightning flashesoutside the windows. It throws sharp shadows across the familiar space—
—and the dark silhouette standing in the kitchen.
My pulse jumps, instantly on alert, but I hesitate, brain still muddled with moonshine and exhaustion. It’s just as likely Halle or Kelda, up late, unable to sleep. I don’t want to hurt them or scare them just because of paranoia.
That hesitation costs me. It costs me everything.
Something metaltink-tink-tinksacross the floor behind me, and in that heartbeat of a moment, my brain registers what it is, what’s about to happen, I tense—
And then a searing flash of light and the heavy impact of a shock wave smashes into me.
I must black out for a second because the next thing I know I’m a crumpled heap on the kitchen floor. Pain ricocheting up and down my spine. All the breath squeezed out of my lungs. I can’t see. My ears are filled with high-pitched ringing.
I push myself up, half rising to my feet right as something round and metal smashes across my face. I slam back into the ground. Blood coats my tongue and oozes down my face.
But I hear it this time. The shift of boots near my head. A deep grunt and the slight whistle of air as something swings down toward me—
—I phase at the last second, disappearing just as a thick metal baton smashes hard into the spot where my face was a moment ago.
I only go a few feet. Can’t risk anything further with my vision still compromised. But it’s enough to get two seconds. Two seconds to blink away the spots in front of my eyes and get my bearings.
As soon as the silhouette swings around, I recognize him. Vasya Paley. The Gold Town Hammer. Six and a half feet of muscle and fists. Fists currently wielding a baton half as long as I am. My brain almost can’t fully process his face, the fact that he’s here in my home.
No one knows where I live.
No one.
I think, just for a second, about the Butcher kit, hidden in the vent, but there’s no way I can leave. Not even for a second. Not with Halle and Kelda in the other room.
I glance back at their bedroom door.Don’t come out. Please stay in there and don’t come out.
Vasya comes at me, swinging for my chest. I skip backward and then phase—not away, but into him, where I’m too close for him to hit properly. I reach out with quick hands, grab the baton on its wide arc, and phase away again. Taking the baton with me.
Vasya grunts, whirling around.
I snap together at his back. The baton is big and awkward and not anywhere close to a good fit for me, but I swing it with everything I’ve got, hitting him at his knees. They crumple, and he staggers. I wind up for another shot—
—but he spins, still kneeling, and a knife that seems to come from nowhere slashes across my ribs.
The next phase is on instinct. I reappear in the kitchen, breathing hard, hands empty. The heavy-ass baton clatters to the floor. I was too surprised to carry it. A line of fire burns across my torso—my shirt is already sticking to it—and my whole face throbs from that very first sucker punch. I wipe the back of myarm underneath my nose and it comes away smeared with dark blood.
Another lightning flash. Pale green and sickly. It looks especially bad splashed across Vasya’s vicious grin.
I bare my teeth right back.
He’s not the only killer here right now. And this is my territory. My home.
I skip-phase all over the apartment, flickering into existence here and there and here again. Disorienting him as he tries to track my path.
And then I reappear with my legs wrapped around his shoulders and stab my thumbs straight into Vasya’s eyes.
He howls and lashes out at me, but I phase away just before the blade pierces my skin. Then I’m back, wrapped around his arm, twisting his wrist hard enough to hear it snap. The blade falls from his loose grasp, and I catch it in the air, feeling my fingers wrap tightly around the handle.
