“Help me! Someone please…HELP ME…!”
Followed by other footsteps.
Heavier. A lurching gait that moved faster than it had a right to, given the broken mechanics producing it.
Finn pressed us deeper into the shadow, his chest solid against me, his body positioned between mine and the alley entrance—protective.
“Stay quiet,” he breathed against my ear.
I pressed my head back against the brick in silent acknowledgment.
They rushed past the alley entrance, and I caught enough, too much, the kind of image that haunts dreams.
Three figures moved with the loose coordination of animals drawn toward the same sound. The first had no lower lip—just teeth, exposed gum, and a chin dark with dried blood. The second dragged one leg, its foot twisted completely backward at the ankle, yet kept pace. The third carried something in its right hand, held low at its side, and I looked away before I could identify it.
The man screamed again, just beyond the alley wall, the sound of someone who had already understood what the next few seconds held.
“NO—NO PLEASE—”
Then a sound—something between tearing paper and something dense and wet giving way, the heavy quality of organic material under sudden force—and then the man’s voice, so human a moment before, climbed into a register that no longer sounded like a voice, and stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Like a switch.
The silence of an ending.
Chewing and frenzied feeding sounds followed. Rhythmic and patient, the sound of something working without urgency. The click of teeth contacting something hard. The pull and release of tearing.
I pressed my eyes shut.
Lily’s face appeared in the dark without invitation. Not a memory. Simply her face, the way it had looked this morning when she’d asked me to promise.
Finn didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
We stayed pinned in the shadows, the brick cold through my jacket, his body rigid against mine as the last of the terror faded.
The sounds slowed, becoming intermittent. A shuffling movement followed—retreating, directionless, the particulardrift of something that had satisfied what brought it here and lost interest in everything else.
One minute.
Two.
Finn angled his head toward the alley entrance in a single, slow movement. His eyes scanned carefully. No reaction on his face, no flinch, nothing.
“Gone,” he murmured.
My legs went weak, and I had to press my hand against the wall to stay upright.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
His eyes found mine and held them with the same focused attention he brought to everything.
“That’s what happens if they hear you,” he said, low and serious, no softness about it.
Past his shoulder, I could see the alley entrance and the stretch of sidewalk slightly beyond it. A dark smear across the pavement, glistening in the gray morning light. One shoe sat upright in the middle of the sidewalk, placed with an accidental neatness that made it worse somehow than anything else I’d seen.
Nothing else of the man remained.
I swallowed against the acid climbing my throat and held his gaze. “I understand.”
He held my gaze a second longer—making sure—then stepped back enough to move.
