Chapter 3

The second body was worse than the first.

Kael ducked under the police tape at the edge of the parking structure, badge flashed and pocketed before the officer holding the clipboard could get a good look at it. The Nightguard credentials worked on local law enforcement about eighty percent of the time. The other twenty percent required Marcus being Marcus, which was usually enough. The man could talk a cop out of his own parking ticket while the body was still warm behind him.

Tonight the badge was enough. Nobody wanted to linger here longer than they had to.

The girl's name was Priya Chen, a junior, last seen leaving the library at eleven. Whatever had gotten to her had done it fast. Kael crouched beside the smear of blood on the concrete, not enough of it, which was its own kind of wrong. A body left this much blood meant the rest of it had gone somewhere. Or something.

He didn't let himself finish that thought all the way.

On the concrete pillar six feet away, scratched deep enough to have chipped the paint underneath, was the name again.

VALE.

Same jagged strokes as the dorm room. Same depth, same angle, like whatever wrote it had used the same hand both times without hesitating, without doubt, like it wasn't leaving a threat so much as marking territory. Kael photographed it from three angles and made himself stop staring at it before the wrongness of it settled too deep to shake off before his next conversation with Marcus.

"Two in five days." Marcus's voice in his earpiece sounded tighter than usual. "Same MO, same name, and this one didn't even try to hide the body first."

"It's getting bolder."

"It's getting impatient." A pause, papers shuffling somewhere on Marcus's end. "Whatever it is, it's not hunting anymore, Kael. It's calling her out."

Kael straightened up, joints stiff from crouching too long in the cold. Above the parking structure the sky had gone the flat gray that came right before full dark, streetlights flickering on one by one down the block. He thought about Lyra sitting in that café that afternoon, laptop closed, jaw tight, absolutely certain she was dealing with nothing worse than a stranger staring at her from across a street.

She had no idea two people had died with her name carved into the scene.

"We need eyes on her tonight," he said. "Not from across the street. Close."

"You know what that means if it goes sideways."

"I know what it means."

"Say it back to me." Marcus's voice had gone quiet in the way it only did when he needed Kael to actually hear something instead of just agreeing to make the conversation end. "If she's what we think she might be, and it comes down to her or the mission, you don't get to hesitate. You've got maybe half a second before whatever's hunting her decides the argument for you."

Kael didn't answer right away. Down at the mouth of the parking structure, the coroner's van had backed in, doors opening with a sound like a held breath finally let go. Somewhere past the tape a woman was crying, a friend or a roommate, someone who'd known the girl who was gone now and wasn't ever coming back.

"I hear you," Kael said, which wasn't the same thing as agreeing, and they both knew it.

He left the scene an hour later with a headache building behind his eyes and a decision made that he hadn't run past anyone. He wasn't going back to the safehouse tonight. He was going to find her building, find a spot with a clean line of sight to her window, and sit there until morning if that was what it took.

He told himself it was the job.

The job didn't usually make his chest feel like this.

Her apartment sat above a laundromat three streets back from campus, warm light spilling from a second floor window that had to be hers, the one with the three thin scratches he'd noticed the first day he started watching her and never mentioned to Marcus because he still didn't have a good explanation for them. He found a doorway across the street with decent cover and settled in, breath fogging in the cold, eyes on that lit window like it was the only thing in the city worth looking at.

An hour passed. Then two.

Somewhere close to midnight the light in her window went out.

Kael's whole body went still in the particular way it only did right before something happened, some old instinct honed by years of nights exactly like this one screaming that the quiet had changed shape. He couldn't have said what was different. The street looked the same. The wind hadn't picked up. But something in the air had shifted, gone taut, the way it did in the last second before a wire snapped.

Then the whispering started.

Not his imagination. Not the wind. A murmur threading through the dark that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, low enough that he almost convinced himself he'd made it up, except every hair on his arms had risen at the same moment it started, and Kael had learned a long time ago never to argue with his own body about danger.

He was moving before he finished deciding to.

Across the street, up the fire escape bolted to the side of the building, two stories in the dark with his pulse hammering and every trained instinct in him screaming that he was already too far behind whatever this was. Her window came into view as he cleared the second landing, curtains drawn but backlit by something that wasn't her lamp, something with a cold blue edge to it that no bulb in the world produced.

A shadow moved across the curtain. Too tall. Too wrong in the shoulders.

Not hers.

He put his shoulder into the fire escape railing and swung himself toward her window, boots hitting the ledge hard, and a second before he could touch the glass, before he could even reach for it, her voice tore through from inside.

"KAEL!"

She screamed it like she knew he was already there, like she'd been waiting in the dark for him to come, like the name had been pulled out of her before she even knew she was going to say it.