The door closed with the pneumatic hiss of a lock engaging, and I was alone in the room.
I sat there.
The guard outside shifted his weight. I could hear it through the door, the creak of his duty belt and the faint squeak of his boot sole on the floor. He was probably thinking about lunch.
I was thinking about Silas.
About whether he’d reached the mountains yet, whether the blood trail held, whether the skinwalker was holed up in some cave or ravine slowly knitting its broken limbs back together while the clock ticked and I was stuck here with these assholes.
I put my head on the table and closed my eyes.
Time passed. I couldn’t tell how much. The camera’s tiny red indicator light blinked steadily in my peripheral vision. The guard outside coughed once and then returned to silence.
I was beyond exhausted, drifting in the gray space between sleep and wakefulness, my cheek against the cool metal table, my thoughts looping through the same circuits without arriving anywhere useful.
Then it hit me.
All at once, like a wave breaking over the back of my skull and flooding downward through every nerve in my body.
The dread.
It poured through me from someplace below conscious thought, the wolf inside surging to a state of alert so fast I was up from the table and on my feet before my eyes had fully focused.
It’s here.
“Oh, shit.” I spun toward the door. “Oh shit, it’s here!”
I crossed the room in two steps and pounded on the door with my open palm. The sound was flat and metallic and unsatisfying.
“Hey! HEY! Open this door!”
The guard’s face appeared in the narrow window, annoyed. He looked even younger than I’d initially estimated, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, with a jaw that hadn’t quite decided if it was going to be strong or not. He looked at me the way you look at a vending machine that’s making an unexpected noise.
“I need you to listen to me,” I said, pressing my face close to the glass. “There is something in this building. Something dangerous. It’s here right now.”
His expression settled into the kind men deploy when they’ve decided a woman is being emotional. “Ma’am, you need to calm down.”
“I’m not being hysterical. I’m telling you there is athingin this facility right now and if you don’t?—”
“I’m sure there is,” He said it with infinite, condescending patience. “Why don’t you have a seat and?—”
A sound cut through the building.
It was muffled by the walls and the corridor between us and wherever it originated, but it was unmistakable.
A scream.
Then another, from a different direction, male this time, truncated by something wet.
There was a gunshot, then two more in quick succession. Then a sound that wasn’t a gunshot and wasn’t a scream, but rather a scraping, tearing noise that traveled through the walls.
The guard’s hand went to his holster. His face had changed. The condescension was gone.
“What the hell was that?” He turned from the window to look down the corridor, his weapon now drawn but held with an uncertain grip.
I pressed my face against the window. “Listen to me. Listen closely. If you want to live through the next two minutes, you will shoot whoever walks through that door. I don’t care if it’s your partner or your childhood crush or your fucking mother. They aren’t who you think they are.”
He looked at me through the glass. His eyes were wide and his breathing had quickened, and I could see the calculations running behind his face: the training that told him to hold position, the sounds from the corridor that told him training hadn’t covered this, and the woman in the interrogation room who was telling him things that made no sense but who was, for whatever reason, the only one who didn’t seem at all surprised by what was happening.
