Chapter 206: What Hunts by Sound

Chapter 206: Chapter 206: What Hunts by Sound

The rain had thinned to a fine, cold mist by the time the boat left the campus district behind, and the dusk had thickened until the flooded streets were nothing but gray water and darker shapes. Killian kept the little motor at a low, steady hum. Nobody had wanted to risk the noise, but nobody had wanted to paddle six blocks in the dark either.

"I’m telling you," Kai said, from the middle of the boat, "the sunburned pigs are going to change everything."

"The pigs are not the crisis," Persephone said from the bow.

"We don’t have sunscreen for pigs."

"We have four hundred farming books and a barn. I think we can improvise a hat."

Ben’s laugh cut off halfway. Victor had gone rigid at the stern, one hand pressed to his temple, the pressure behind his eyes tightening the way it always did before he spoke.

"Cut the motor."

Killian didn’t ask. The engine died, and the quiet that replaced it was thick enough to hear water dripping off Erik’s sleeve.

"What is it?" Erik asked, low.

"Under us. Big." Victor’s jaw worked. "It isn’t afraid of anything. It isn’t even angry. It’s hungry, and it’s been following the vibration since the overpass."

Persephone slid a bolt into her crossbow so fast that Ben, watching, wasn’t sure he’d seen her move at all. "How big?"

"Bigger than the boat."

The stern lifted six feet into the air.

Everyone slid forward in a heap, and then the boat slammed back down with a sound like ripping canvas, air roaring out of the rear pontoon. Something enormous broke the surface beside them, and the water it displaced washed over Kai’s boots.

It might have been an eel once, a moray from the aquarium downtown, but the thing rising out of the flood was the length of a city bus and thick as a car, its skin the slick gray-black of a wet road. Ridged plates ran down its back like scar tissue that had never stopped growing. It had no eyes. Where they should have been the flesh was smooth and unbroken, and around the hinge of its jaw a fringe of long pale filaments swayed and trembled, tasting the shudder of the boat as it settled.

"That," Kai said faintly, "is not a fish."

Persephone’s bolts hit its jaw before he finished the sentence, two shots in the space of a blink, and both skipped off the ridged plating with a sound like hail on a roof.

The creature dropped back under.

"Left!" Victor shouted. "Now!"

They threw themselves right. Jaws the width of a doorway closed on the boat’s side, and the whole rim tore open. Killian slammed a palm against the ripped rubber, and the edges knit together under his hand, the material reorganizing itself atom by atom. Sweat broke across his forehead instantly.

"I can hold the hull," he said through his teeth. "Not for long. Not while it’s biting."

Kai threw a fistful of fire at the surfacing spine. It sputtered against the wet plating and died in a hiss of steam. "Water’s eating it!"

"Then don’t use it on the water!" Erik had one hand flat against the surface, and frost raced outward in a ring, thickening into a pale shelf around the boat. He held back every ounce of the lightning crawling under his skin. Any current he loosed would ride the flood straight into the six of them. "Ben, get us out of its reach."

Ben dropped to his knees and pushed both palms down through the hull. Somewhere far beneath the black water, the drowned street answered him. The asphalt buckled, then rose, a column of stone climbing up from below and lifting the boat clear of the surface in one shuddering surge. Ben’s nose started bleeding, and he kept pushing.

The creature slammed into the base of the pillar. The whole column shivered, and Ben groaned.

"The feelers," Victor said suddenly, pointing. "Every time it lunges, it stops and turns them toward us first. It’s blind. Take the feelers."

Persephone was already gone.

She went over the side onto Erik’s ice at a speed that turned her into a streak of silver hair and dark clothing, crossing the shelf in three strides. The creature’s head rose to meet her, and she was under its jaw before the fringe could finish turning. Her crossbow fired point-blank, once, twice, three times, each bolt punching through a knot of pale filaments. The feelers whipped and recoiled, and the creature shrieked, a thin dry sound like tearing metal, and thrashed sideways.

"Back!" Erik barked. She was back on the pillar before he’d finished the word, breathing hard, blood on her cheek that wasn’t hers.

The blind thing coiled around Ben’s stone column and squeezed. The pillar cracked. Kai vaulted the rim of the boat, axe in both hands, and brought it down on the exposed ridge of its back with everything he had, and the plating split. Heat poured off the wound where his fire, dry and close, finally caught.

"Killian!" Victor’s voice cracked. "The skull. Behind the jaw. That’s where the hunger is, it’s all in one place."

Killian didn’t answer. He’d let go of the hull. He raised his hand and reached past flesh and plating and bone, down into the ordered grain of the thing, and found the seam behind its jaw where the plates joined the skull. He unmade it.

The head opened from the inside. The creature’s mouth gaped wide, and in the gap Erik’s bolt, narrow as a needle, held to a single wet column of air well above the waterline, leapt down its throat and lit it up like a lantern.

The creature convulsed once and went slack, sliding down the cracked column into the flood.

For a long moment, no one moved.

"Well," Kai said, gasping. "Add it to the list of things the books don’t cover."

Killian was already swaying. He caught himself on the rim, his hands shaking. Ziki.

I detect a core, Master. Large. Near the skull.

He drew it out of the drifting body with a flick of his fingers, a stone the size of a fist that pulsed a deep, bruised gold, and sent it straight through to the space. Somewhere in the far distance of his mind, Ignis let out something that sounded very much like a purr.

I approve of this one, the dragon said.

"Boat," Erik said sharply. The rubber was sagging, the patch peeling at the edges. "Victor."

Victor had gone still again, his eyes unfocused. "More. Small ones, mostly, but a lot. The blood’s pulling them in." He swallowed. "We have a couple of minutes."

Ben let the pillar sink, and the boat wallowed back onto the surface, low and slow. Killian coaxed the motor into a wheeze. They limped the last stretch to the sixth-floor dock in a silence broken only by the drip of water and Kai muttering, under his breath, about eels.

The moment the boat bumped against the platform, Erik tore the wrecked craft loose and sent it through to the space. He opened the way a second time and Hrimnir slipped out, shrinking as he came, coat trimmed to the size of a large husky. "Go," he said. "Up. Now."

They climbed at a run.

The stairwell wasn’t empty. It hadn’t been for a long time. Families had settled onto the landings between the flooded floors and the sealed ones, blankets and lanterns and children crowded into every corner of the concrete. But as the six of them came up out of the dark, dripping, blood-spattered, axe and crossbow in hand, the low murmur of voices died all at once.

A woman pulled a toddler behind her skirt. A man with a lantern flattened himself against the wall. Someone whispered, quite distinctly, "That’s them."

"That’s the one who burst that man," a boy said, staring at Killian.

"Shh!"

Killian’s face didn’t change. Neither did Erik’s. Ahead of them, on every landing, the same thing happened. Eyes dropped. Shoulders folded inward. The memory of the flooded lobby, the men falling, a woman’s voice whispering the word monsters, had traveled up through the building faster than any of them had walked.

"Evening!" Kai tried, cheerful, to no one in particular. The silence that followed made him wince. Ben looked at the floor.

Persephone, who had smiled at strangers her whole life like it was both a weapon and a coat, smiled now, and watched a girl of maybe ten flinch as though she’d bared her teeth. The smile stayed where it was. Her eyes went flat and thoughtful, filing away every face.

The odd one.

Hrimnir’s voice landed in Erik’s mind low and tight as they turned onto the eighteenth-floor landing. Here. Close. I smell it under the rest.

Erik didn’t break stride. Where?

I cannot say. It is thin. Like smoke. Under the fear.

He scanned the crowd. Thirty people, maybe more, gathered in the doorway of the eighteenth floor, faces pale with the same fear he’d been walking through for six flights. A man holding a child. Two teenagers. An older couple. A woman standing very still just inside a half-open door, small and fragile, one hand pressed to her throat, her eyes wide and wet.

He reached for the instinct that had never once failed him, the quiet sense that told him what people were before they spoke. It found nothing. A smooth blankness, like a hand sliding across glass. He looked at the woman a moment longer than he should have, and felt nothing at all, not danger, not unease, not even the ordinary hum of a stranger.

The blankness was what bothered him.

Nothing, he told Hrimnir. I feel nothing.

Yes, the wolf said. That is what is wrong.

Grace pressed herself into the doorframe as they came up, her hand at her throat, her eyes wide and wet, exactly as small as she needed to be.

He looked at her.

Erik’s gaze settled on her face and stayed there, sharp, intent, a beat longer than courtesy required. Her heart lurched. He’d noticed her. He had looked at her twice now, at the gate and here, and he hadn’t looked at anyone else on the landing that long.

Behind him, the last of the group climbed into view. The silver-haired girl came up laughing quietly at something the brown-haired boy had said, her crossbow slung across her back, her cheek streaked with blood. She glanced over the frightened crowd, and her eyes found Grace’s, and she smiled, bright and easy, the smile of a woman who had never once been afraid of anything.

Grace smiled back, shy and grateful, and let her lip tremble.

The girl turned to say something to her companion.

The mask dropped. For half a second Grace’s face went flat and dead, her jaw slack, her eyes fixed and unblinking on the girl’s back, the reptilian stillness she never let anyone see.

Another one. The building was full of them now, people who got to climb those stairs at his side without ever having to ask. Who laughed while they did it.

The girl glanced back. Grace’s face was soft and frightened and small again before her head had finished turning.

Her hand tightened on the doorframe as the group climbed on, up toward the sealed gate, up toward a life she could not reach yet.

He had looked at her. Twice. It was only a matter of time.