Dead weight.
For half a second, the world stopped completely. The rain. The sound. My own heartbeat, suspended between one moment and the next.
My scream came—delayed, tearing out of me in a sound I didn’t recognize as mine, too loud, too long, and impossible to stop once it started.
Finn ripped the knife free. The blade came out with a wet, sucking resistance, trailing something gray and fibrous. He shoved the body off me with one arm—a single, dismissive motion that rolled two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight off my chest like an afterthought. It hit the pavement face-down beside me, the back of its skull cratered and weeping a thick blackness onto the wet concrete.
“Get up.” His voice was hard and flat.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest convulsed in empty, airless spasms, refusing to expand, refusing to cooperate with anything my body needed it to do. My hands shook so badly they barely functioned. The thing’s fluid covered my fingers, my forearms, my face. I could still taste it on my lips.
He grabbed me—both hands hooking under my arms—and hauled me to my feet. My legs buckled, and he caught me before I could go back down, one arm locking hard around my waist, holding me upright through sheer force of will applied to my body from the outside.
“I—I can’t—” The words broke apart before they finished forming.
“Yes, you can.” No softness in it. No comfort. Just certainty, hard and load-bearing, delivered with a grip on my arm tight enough to hurt—and the pain did what his voice alone couldn’t. It cut straight through the static and brought me back. “Move, Libby.”
My body obeyed.
I stumbled, then we ran.
My boots skidded on the wet pavement. My lungs burned. And then, beneath the noise of our footfalls, something changed—
The rain was letting up.
The drops came farther apart. The sound of it thinned. That dense curtain that had swallowed us whole and kept us hiddenwas pulling back—withdrawing by degrees, second by second, leaving us standing in the open with nowhere left to be invisible.
Finn noticed it the same moment I did.
“Faster.”
I didn’t need to be told twice.
My stoop materialized through the dying rain—the same stoop where I’d sat a thousand ordinary mornings, coffee growing cold in my hands. The cracked terracotta planter by the railing, which Lily had painted last spring with careful, deliberate bright yellow daisies, now had half its petals chipped away by weather, time, and the violence of a world that had stopped caring about painted planters.
We hit the steps together, both of us soaked through, shaking, streaked with things that didn’t bear examining in the returning light.
I slammed my fist against the door.
“Open it!” My voice broke, high and desperate, shattering any composure I had left. “Open the door—please—”
Silence.
Nothing from inside. No movement. No footsteps. No voice.
My stomach dropped.
“Fiona!” The scream tore out of me, raw and ragged. I hit the door harder—both fists now, the impact shooting pain up through my wrists and into my elbows. “Lily!”
The seconds stretched.
Behind us, the rain thinned to a drizzle.
The street sounds sharpened with terrible immediacy; every echo carried farther than it had any right to. Somewhere to the south, a shriek rose and was answered, the calls blending, triangulating on some new horror. The hunting calls resumed as the storm surrendered its hold on the city, and the cover dissolved around us in real time.
“Again,” Finn said. He’d already turned, positioning himself between me and the street, knife still in hand, dark fluid running off the blade and dripping onto the stoop without him noticing or caring.
I hit the door hard enough that pain detonated through both wrists.
