That was the name they’d chosen for themselves—Liam and Bea and Teo—before Kate ever showed up. Riley hadn’t been a part of it, either—not until she brought him in.
LiamonMe: hahahahahahaha wolves
TeoMuchtoHandle: it’s a cover-up. everyone knows what happened in verity.
Beatch: See no evil → hear no evil → tell yourself there’s no evil
LiamonMe: dunno I had a mean-ass cat once
For a moment, Kate just stared at the screen and asked herself for the hundredth time what she was doing here, talking to these people. Letting them in. She hated that part of her craved this simple contact, even looked forward to it.
RiledUp: Did you guys catch that headline about the explosion on Broad?
Kate hadn’t gone looking for friends—she’d never played well with others, never stayed in a school long enough to make any real connections.
RiledUp: Guy walked into his apartment, pulled the gas line straight out of the wall.
Sure, Kate understood the value of friends, the social currency of being part of a group, but she’d never gotten the emotional appeal. Friends wanted you to be honest. Friends wanted you to share. Friends wanted you to listen and care and worry and do a dozen other things Kate had no time for.
All she’d wanted was a lead.
RiledUp: Roommate was home when it happened.
Kate had landed in Prosperity six months ago with that one duffel, five hundred in cash, and a bad feeling that got worse with every piece of news. Dog attacks. Gang violence. Suspicious activity. Brutal acts. Suspects at large. Crime scenes disturbed. Weapons missing.
LiamonMe: Creepy.
Beatch: Downer, Riley.
A dozen stories all sporting the telltale signs—the kind made by teeth and claws—and then there were the whispers on the opendrive, referencing the same place, the name scraping over skin: Verity.
But short of putting an EAT ME sign on her back and wandering the streets at night, Kate wasn’t exactly sure where to start. Finding monsters had never been a problem in Verity, but here, for every actual sighting there were a hundred trolls and conspiracy theorists co-opting the threads. It was a needle in a haystack where a bunch of idiots were shouting, SOMETHING POKED ME.
But there, threaded through the static, she noticed them. The same voices showing up over and over, trying to be heard. They called themselves the Wardens, and they weren’t hunters, but hackers—hacktivists, according to Liam—convinced that the authorities were either incompetent or determined to bury the news.
The Wardens scoured sites and dug through footage, flagging anything that looked suspicious, then leaked the data to the press and plastered it on the threads, trying to get someone to listen.
And Kate had.
She’d taken one of their leads and run with it, and when it had panned out, she’d gone to the source for more. And that’s when she’d learned that the Wardens were just a couple of college students and a fourteen-year-old who never slept.
TeoMuchtoHandle: yeah, that’s sad. but what does that have to do with Heart Eaters?
Beatch: Since when are we calling them Heart Eaters?
LiamonMe: Since they started eating hearts duh.
She still didn’t want friends. But despite her best efforts, she was getting to know them. Bea, who was addicted to dark chocolate and wanted to be a research scientist. Teo, who never sat still, even had a treadmill desk in his dorm. Liam, who lived with his grandparents and cared too much for his own good. Riley, whose family would kill him if they knew where he spent his nights.
And what did they know about her?
Nothing but a name, and even that was only half true.
To the Wardens, she was Kate Gallagher, a runaway with a knack for hunting monsters. She kept her first name even though the sound of that one syllable made her jump every time, sure that someone from her past had caught up. But it was all she had left. Her mother was dead. Her father was dead. Sloan was dead. The only one who’d say her name with any sense of knowing was August, and he was hundreds of miles away in Verity, at the center of a city on fire.
Beatch: Makes a hell of a lot more sense than Corsai, Malchai, Sunai. Who named those?
TeoMuchtoHandle: no idea.
Beatch: Your lack of professional curiosity is maddening.
The Wardens had nagged Kate for months to meet up in person, and when the time came she’d almost bailed. She’d watched them from across the street, all looking so . . . normal. Not that they blended in—Teo had short blue hair and Bea had a full sleeve of tattoos and Liam, in his giant orange glasses, looked like he was twelve—but they didn’t look like something spit out of Verity. They weren’t Flynn Task Force soldiers. Or coddled Colton kids. They were just—normal. They had lives outside this one. Things to lose.
LiamonMe: Why not just call them what they are, what they do? Body Eaters, Blood Eaters, and Soul Eaters. BAM.
Kate pictured August down in the subway, dark lashes fluttering as he raised his violin, the music pouring out where bow met strings, transfigured into threads of burning light. Calling him a Soul Eater was like calling the sun bright. Technically accurate, but only a fraction of the truth.
RiledUp: Any sign of Kate?
She switched from incognito to public.
HunterK has joined the chat.
Beatch: Heyo!
TeoMuchToHandle: stalker.
RiledUp: I was getting worried.
LiamOnMe: Not me!
Beatch: Yeah right, Mr. I-know-karate.
Kate’s fingers danced over the screen.
HunterK: No need. Still standing.
RiledUp: You really shouldn’t go dark without properly signing off.
TeoMuchToHandle: oooh, riley’s in dad mode.
Dad mode.
Kate thought of her own father, the cuffs of his suit stained with blood, the sea of monsters at his feet, the smug look on his face right before she put a bullet in his leg.
But she knew what Teo meant—Riley wasn’t like the rest of the Wardens. He wouldn’t even be there if it wasn’t for her. He was a grad student, studying law at the university and interning at the local police department, which was the part that mattered to the Wardens, since it meant access to police surveillance and intel briefings—not that Teo couldn’t hack them, as he’d pointed out a dozen times, but why kick down an open door?
(According to Riley, the police were “aware of the attacks and continuing to monitor developments,” which as far as Kate could tell was just a long way of describing denial.)
RiledUp: *makes dad face* *wags finger*
RiledUp: But seriously. You better not get any blood on my couch.
HunterK: Don’t worry.
HunterK: I left most of it on the stairs.
LiamOnMe: O_O.
HunterK: Any new leads?
TeoMuchtoHandle: nothing yet. the streets are quiet.
What a strange idea.
If she could keep this up, knocking out the Heart Eaters as they took shape instead of cleaning up the wreckage, two steps forward instead of back, maybe it wouldn’t get worse. Maybe she could keep it from becoming a Phenomenon. Maybe—what a useless word. Maybe was just a way of saying she didn’t know.
And Kate hated not knowing.
She closed the browser, fingers hesitating over the darkened screen before she opened a new window and started searching for Verity.
Kate had first learned how to tap into foreign signals at her second boarding school, out on the eastern fringe of Verity, an hour from the Temperance border.
All ten territories were supposed to transmit openly, but if you wanted to know what was really going on in another territory, you had to slip behind the digital curtain.
That was the idea—but no matter how hard Kate looked, she couldn’t find her way home.
True, the quarantine had gone back into effect, the borders that had peeled open so slowly over the last decade slamming shut again. But there was no curta
in to slip behind, nothing coming out of Verity at all.
The signal was gone.
There was only one explanation: the tech towers must have gone down.
With the borders closed and the comm grid out, Verity was officially cut off.
And the people in Prosperity didn’t care. Not even the Wardens—Teo had used the word inevitable. Bea thought the borders should never have been opened, that Verity should have been left to consume itself like a fire in a glass jar. Even Riley seemed ambivalent. Only Liam showed the slightest concern, and it was more pity than a vested interest. They didn’t know, of course, what Verity meant to Kate.
Hell, Kate didn’t know either.
But she couldn’t stop searching.
Every night she checked, just in case, clicked through every bread crumb on the opendrive, hoping for some news about Verity, about August Flynn.
It was the weirdest thing—she’d seen August at his worst. Watched him descend through hunger into sickness and madness and shadow. Watched him burn. Watched him kill.
But when she pictured him now, she didn’t see the Sunai made of smoke or the figure burning in a cold tub. She saw a sad-eyed boy sitting alone on the bleachers, a violin case at his feet.
Kate shoved the tablet away and slumped back on the couch. She threw an arm over her eyes and let the steady beat of the radio fold around her until she sank down toward sleep.
But then, in the lull between songs, the sound of footsteps echoed in the stairwell. She stilled, turning her good ear toward the door as the steps slowed, stopped.
Kate waited for a knock, but it never came. Instead she heard the sound of a hand on the doorknob, the shudder of the lock as it was tried but held fast. Kate’s fingers slipped beneath the couch cushion and produced a gun. The same one she’d used to kill a stranger in her mother’s house, the same one she’d used to shoot her father in his office.
A muffled voice sounded beyond the door, followed by the scrape of metal, and Kate leveled the weapon at the door as it swung open.
For a moment, the shape in the doorway was nothing but a shadow, the hall lights tracing the outline of a figure a fraction taller than she was, with round edges and short hair. No red eyes, no sharp teeth, no dark suit. Just Riley, standing there, juggling a box of pizza and a six-pack of soda and a key.
He saw the gun and threw his hands up, dropping the cardboard and the cans and the key ring to the floor. One of the cans exploded, raining soda on the landing.
“Dammit, Kate.” His voice was strangled.
Kate sighed and set the weapon on the table. “You should knock.”
“This is my place,” he said, retrieving the pizza box and the rest of the soda with shaking hands. “Do you pull the gun on everyone, or just me?”
“Everyone,” said Kate, “but for you I left the safety on.”
“I’m flattered.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, you know,” he shot back, “checking on the squatter in my apartment, making sure she didn’t trash the place.”
“You wanted to see if I bled on the couch.”
“And the stairs.” His gaze flicked from her to the gun on the table and back. “Permission to enter?”
Kate spread her arms along the back of the couch. “Password?”
“I brought pizza.”
The smell emanating from the box was heavenly. Her stomach growled. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Permission granted.”
Rituals were funny things.
People thought of them as either elaborate formulas, magic spells, or compulsions drilled into the subconscious by months or years of repetition.
But really, ritual was just a fancy word for habit. A thing that became easier to do than not do. And habits were simple—especially bad ones, like letting people in.
Kate curled up on one side of the couch, Riley on the other, while some late-night talk show host murmured bad jokes on the TV.
He held up one of the cans he’d dropped. “This’ll be fun,” he said, cracking the tab. He cringed in expectation, then sighed with relief when it didn’t explode.
Kate grabbed a second slice of pizza, trying to hide the pain as the bandages tugged on the skin beneath her sleeve.
“You didn’t have to do this,” she said between bites.
He shrugged. “I know.”
She considered him over the crust of her pizza. Riley was slim, with warm brown eyes, the kind of smile that took over his face, and a savior complex. When he wasn’t at the university or the police station, he volunteered with at-risk teens.
Was that what she was to him? His latest project?
Kate had been in Prosperity for all of three weeks when their paths crossed. She’d spent her nights squatting in abandoned buildings, her days nursing cups of coffee in café corners as she scoured the opendrive for clues.
It was only a matter of time before the café kicked her out—she hadn’t bought anything in hours. Still, she didn’t appreciate it when a guy sat down at her table on the pretense of studying, only to ask her if she needed help.
She’d had her first run-in with a monster the night before, and it hadn’t gone well. But considering that the extent of her experience—schoolroom self-defense aside—consisted of executing a bound Malchai in her father’s basement and nearly getting disemboweled by a Corsai on the subway, she really shouldn’t have been surprised.
She’d gotten away with a split lip and a broken nose, but she knew she looked rough.
She told the guy she wasn’t interested in God, or whatever he was selling, but he didn’t leave. A few minutes later a fresh cup of coffee appeared in front of her.
“How did that happen?” he asked, nodding at her face.
“Hunting monsters,” she said, because sometimes the truth was strange enough to make people go away.
“Uh, okay . . . ,” he said, clearly skeptical. He got to his feet. “Come on.”
She didn’t move. “Where?”
“I have a hot shower, an extra bed. There might even be some food in the fridge.”
“I don’t know you.”
He held out his hand. “Riley Winters.”
Kate stared at his open palm. She wasn’t big on charity, but she was tired and hungry and felt like shit. Besides, if he tried anything unwanted, she was pretty sure she could take him. “Kate,” she said. “Kate Gallagher.”
Riley didn’t try anything—thanks to the aforementioned boyfriend—just gave her a towel and a pillow and, a week later, a key. To this day, she wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. Maybe she’d had a concussion. Maybe he was just persuasive.
Kate yawned, tossing the paper plate onto the table beside her gun.
Riley reached for the remote, switching the TV off.
Kate responded by switching the radio on.
Riley shook his head. “What did silence ever do to you?”
He didn’t know, of course, about the car wreck that had killed her mother and stripped the hearing from her left ear. Didn’t know that when sound was taken from you, you had to find ways to take it back.
“If you want sound,” said Riley, “we could always talk.”
Kate sighed. This was his game.
Ply her with food and sugar until she was blissed out on empty calories, and then, invariably, start prying. And the worst part was some masochistic part of her must want it, must relish the fact someone cared enough to ask, because she kept letting him in. Kept ending up here on the couch with empty soda cans and pizza boxes.
Bad habit.
Ritual.
“Okay,” she said, and Riley brightened visibly, but if he thought she was going to talk about herself, he was wrong. “Why did you bring up that explosion?”
Confusion streaked his face. “What?”
“On the chat, you mentioned an explosion. Man-made. Why?”
“You saw that?” He sat back. “I don’t know. The Wardens have got me looking for things that don’t line up,
and it caught my eye. . . . It’s the fifth murder-suicide this week. That’s really high, even for Prosperity.”
Kate frowned. “You think it’s some kind of monster?”
Riley shrugged. “Six months ago, I didn’t believe in monsters. Now I see them everywhere.” He shook his head. “It’s probably nothing. Let’s talk about something else. How are you holding up?”
“Oh, look at the time,” she said dryly. “Malcolm’s going to get jealous.”
“Thanks for your concern,” he said, “but I assure you, our relationship is stable enough to allow for time with friends.”
Friends.
The word glanced off her ribs, hard enough to leave her winded.
Because she knew a secret: there were two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head. She could fight the first, but the second was more dangerous. It was always, always, always a step ahead.
It didn’t have teeth or claws, didn’t feed on flesh or blood or hearts.
It simply reminded you of what happened when you let people in.
Behind her eyes, August Flynn stopped fighting, because of her. He collapsed into darkness, because of her. He sacrificed a part of himself—his humanity, his light, his soul—because of her.
She could handle her own blood.
She didn’t need anyone else’s on her hands.
“Rule one,” she said, forcing her voice even, light. “Don’t make friends. It never ends well.”
Riley rolled a soda can between his palms. “But doesn’t it get lonely?”
Kate smiled. It was so easy when you could lie.
“No.”
Violence
has a taste
a smell
but most of all
it has
a heat—
the shadow
stands
in the street
engulfed
in smoke
in fire
in wrath
in rage
basking
in the warmth
and for an instant
light glances
off a face
finding—
cheekbones
a chin
the barest
hint
of lips