“Why did it stop?”
I couldn’t answer.
Fiona pressed her eye back to the window gap. Her breathing quickened—the first time I’d ever seen her composure slip into something approaching real fear.
“They’re stopping,” she said. “The ones heading east. They’re turning. Some of them. Looking around.”
Looking for new sounds.
Looking for new prey.
Looking for him.
“Can you see him?” My voice came out raw. Scraped. “Fiona—can you see him?”
A long pause.
Too long.
“No,” she said.
The word landed between us like a dropped blade.
Lily’s grip on me tightened until her fingers hurt.
Fiona pulled back from the window and turned. Her face was a mask of control, the same one she’d worn since day one. But the composure didn’t reach her eyes; in them, I saw all her twenty-four years, raw and terrified.
“What do we do?” Lily asked.
Nobody answered.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
“We wait,” I said. “We trust him.”
“And if—” Lily started.
“We wait.”
Fiona gave a single, sharp nod and turned back to the window.
Searching.
The silence screamed louder than any alarm.
Thirty
Stopping Wasn’t An Option -Finn
Ihit the street at a sprint, then dropped low, boots barely scraping asphalt as I shifted into a crouch.
Stay small. Stay fast.
Down the block, the alarm screamed—sharp, relentless, ricocheting off brick and glass. It pulled them like a current: heads snapping, bodies dragging toward the sound, mouths agape, arms slack at their sides as they shuffled south in that horrible, jerking gait.
Good.
