Then a sound reached us from the back of the store, and everything stopped.
A thud. The worst part? It was faint, almost careful, coming from somewhere in the dark beyond the last row of shelves.
Finn’s gun cleared the holster before I’d consciously registered the sound fully. His whole body pivoted toward the back of the store.
The second sound came.
Dragging. The sound of something heavy being hauled across tile—catching, then sliding, and catching again, dead weight redistributing itself with each step. Not frantic. Not fleeing.
“Finn,” I whispered. It was the only sound I could make, the only word I had.
He didn’t glance at me. “Stay behind me.” Low and absolute, the voice of someone who already had a plan for when the dark answered back.
Abruptly, a new odor cut through sharper. Copper and iron, the stench of fresh blood, enough that it still hung in the air rather than settling into surfaces. Close.
Every instinct I had pointed me to the door. I held still anyway.
It had been there the whole time. Waiting in the dark between the shelves, still and patient, taking in everything—our entry, our voices—without moving, because moving hadn’t been necessary.
We had walked to it.
Finn didn’t hesitate.
“Move!” His voice cut the stillness, and his hand slammed into my shoulder hard enough to drive the air from my lungs and send me stumbling toward the door.
The things in the store woke up.
Not all at once. A single shape in the dark between the shelves. A head turning degrees too slowly. A scrape against tile. Followed by another. The silence underneath them gave way entirely.
They converged.
I stumbled forward, my boots sliding through something slick. I didn’t look at it. Finn’s hand hit my back and stayed there, driving me toward the door, and when I slowed for half a second, his grip tightened to the edge of pain, and I understood that slowing was not an option he was giving me. Something brushed my arm from the dark; fear prickled up my spine. Then his body was between me and it, shoulder dropping, and the contact broke, and we kept moving.
He looked back once. Then at me. Then at the door. A fraction of a second to make the calculation.
The gunshot detonated inside the confined space. The glass door burst outward in a bright shower of fragments, spiderweb cracks racing to the edges of the panel before the whole thing gave way and crumbled. Cold air rushed in.
“This way!”
His hand locked around my wrist, and we ran.
Out through the broken door and into the daylight. Behind us, the shadows followed us into the street.
Finn cut left without warning, and his hand locked around my wrist hard enough to grind bone and pulled me between two buildings. The alley swallowed us—walls so close I could feel the cold radiating off the brick, the stench of standing water and rot strong and overwhelming. Trash exploded underfoot. Something alive fled through the dark ahead of us, and I didn’t look at what it was.
We ran harder.
“Up—there!”
A fire escape. The bottom rung dangled just above reach, the whole structure dark with rust.
Finn left the ground and hit the metal with both hands—the clang shattered the alley’s silence, and he wrenched downward, his full weight against it, the hinges screaming as decades of rust gave way all at once.
“Go!”
No space between the word and his hands finding my waist. He threw me up. I caught the rung on its way down, fingers slipping through grime before locking on, and I climbed with everything I had, boots sliding against the slick rungs, not thinking about what was behind us, not looking down, but up, just the next rung.
He came up right behind me.
