Chapter 5

The door held. Barely.

A second hit landed and the crack running down the center of it split wider, splinters raining onto the hallway carpet on the other side. Kael didn't wait for a third.

"Fire escape. Go."

"You said it was faster than us."

"It is. Go anyway."

She went. Glass crunched under her bare feet crossing back toward the window, and she felt one shard bite into her heel and kept moving because stopping wasn't a real option right now. Kael grabbed her jacket off the back of her desk chair without being asked and shoved it into her arms as they passed it, which was such a strange, small, human thing to do in the middle of all this that it almost made her laugh. Almost.

The door took a third hit. This one went all the way through, wood exploding into the hallway light, and something reached through the gap that wasn't a hand exactly, more like a hand remembered by something that hadn't been human in a long time.

"Window." Kael's voice had dropped into something flat and fast, the voice of someone running a plan he'd run a hundred times before. "Now."

She went through first, him right behind her, and the cold outside air hit her chest so hard it knocked the breath out of her before she'd even registered the drop to the fire escape landing. Two stories up, metal grating under her bare feet, and somewhere behind them the door gave completely with a sound like something being unwrapped.

"Down. Fast." Kael had her by the arm, pulling, and she didn't argue.

They hit the alley at the bottom of the fire escape at nearly the same time, her ankle rolling on the landing hard enough that pain shot up her leg, and Kael's hand closed around her wrist before she could fully go down.

"I've got you. Move."

She moved. Limping, breath tearing out of her in ragged pulls, following him down the alley away from her building while something up above them, at her broken window, let out a sound that didn't belong to anything with a throat built the normal way.

They didn't stop until three blocks later, tucked into the shadow of a closed pharmacy, both of them breathing hard, her back against the brick and her legs finally giving out enough that she slid down the wall to sit on the cold pavement.

"Are we." She couldn't get the whole sentence out. "Is it."

"It's not following. Not anymore." He crouched in front of her, checking her over with quick, clinical hands, no hesitation in it.. "Your foot's bleeding."

"I stepped on glass."

"I noticed." He pulled a small kit out of an inside jacket pocket, the kind of thing a normal person didn't carry around, and got to work on her heel without asking permission, which should have annoyed her and somehow didn't.

She watched him work in silence for a minute. Her hands had finally stopped shaking quite so bad.

"You're not going to tell me what that was." Not really a question by the time it left her mouth. More like she already knew the answer.

"No."

"Because."

"Because you'll ask a follow up question I can't answer either, and then you'll ask another one, and eventually we're both standing here at four in the morning while I try to explain something that took me years to understand myself." He tied off the bandage and sat back on his heels, finally looking up at her properly. "You need somewhere safe. Tonight. Not your apartment."

"Ronan's house. I could—"

"No." He said it too fast, and caught himself. "Not until we know what that thing wanted. If it's hunting you, showing up on her doorstep is the last thing you do."

"She's not going to just sit there not knowing what happened to me."

"Who is she." He was watching her carefully now, like the answer mattered more than he wanted it to.

"My guardian. She raised me, after my parents." Her voice caught on the word parents, the way it always did, a splinter she'd never quite worked loose. "She's not really family. Not by blood. But she's the only person who's ever actually shown up for me, so."

Kael didn't say anything for a second. Something moved behind his eyes that she couldn't read, gone before she could name it.

"Then we protect her by staying away from her tonight," he said. "I promise you, the second it's safe, we call her. Okay?"

"Okay." Her voice had gone small. "Then where do I go."

"You have me."

The words landed strange between them, too plain for what either of them meant by them, and she watched something flicker across his face like he'd surprised himself saying it.

"That's not." He stopped. Started over. "I mean I can get you somewhere safe. That's all I meant."

"Okay."

"Okay." He stood, offered her his hand, and she took it without letting herself think too hard about how steady his grip felt compared to everything else that night.

They walked four blocks before either of them said anything else, her limping, him matching her pace without seeming to notice he was doing it, the city going emptier and rougher around them the further they got from campus. Boarded shopfronts. A streetlight that buzzed and flickered every few seconds like it couldn't decide whether to work.

They reached a building that looked like nothing from the outside, brick and boarded windows and a door that didn't have a handle on the exterior. Kael knocked in a pattern too specific to be random, three then two then one, and the door opened from the inside before she could ask how anyone would have heard it.

Marcus stood in the doorway, gray at the temples, tired eyes going straight past Kael to land on her.

"This the girl?"

"This is Lyra."

Marcus's gaze moved over her, quick and assessing in a way that made her feel like evidence more than a person, then flicked back to Kael with something unreadable behind it.

"You brought her here."

"Killed the one in her apartment." Kael's voice stayed flat. "There'll be more."

"That's not what I asked." His voice had gone low, careful, the tone people used right before they said something they'd been holding back. "You brought her here."

Kael didn't answer that directly. He put a hand at the small of Lyra's back and guided her past him into the building, and something about the gesture, small and automatic and entirely unnecessary for someone who'd walked here on her own two feet, made Marcus's jaw tighten in a way Lyra caught even exhausted as she was.

"We'll talk," Kael said over his shoulder. "Not tonight."

Inside, the building opened into something that didn't match its wrecked exterior at all, clean and lit and full of brisk movement, people in dark clothes crossing hallways with the specific efficiency of people who did this for a living. Lyra took two steps into it and stopped cold, because on the far wall, mounted behind glass like a museum piece, was a symbol.

The same one from Kael's blade. The same one from her dream.

Except this one was surrounded by dozens of smaller symbols she'd never seen before, arranged in a pattern that looked less like decoration and more like a family tree.

"What is this place," she said, and her voice had gone very small.

Kael didn't answer right away. When he finally did, he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the wall.

"It's where they keep the records," he said. "Of everyone who's ever carried blood like yours."