Our Dark Duet

by Victoria Schwab

  He didn’t slow until he was close enough to see the word on the floorboards, scrawled in the soldier’s blood.

  BOO

  August’s gaze snapped to the cagelike room, and then to the window. The darkness beyond was studded with a pair of watching red eyes, the sharp corner of a smile.

  Alice.

  Rez was beside him now, reaching for the soldier’s pulse. He caught her wrist.

  “Get back,” he said, pushing her toward the door, but it was too late.

  The ceiling creaked above them and August looked up just in time to see the glint of metal, the flurry of limbs, before the first monster came crashing down.

  They came from everywhere.

  Not monsters, he realized, but humans, Fangs with blood on their cheeks and steel collars wrapped around their throats and the manic smiles of the drugged and the mad. Some had knives and some had guns, and one dropped down right behind Rez.

  She spun, cracking him across the face as August raised his violin. Bow met strings, but before he could draw a note, a shot exploded through the air, grazing the steel and ripping the instrument from his hand. It went skittering across the floor.

  Rez kicked out, trying to send it back while headlocking a man twice her size, but it was lodged between two broken boards, and before August could reach her or the violin, a hulking man slammed him backward into the soldier, the wall, the window. The soldier slumped, lifeless, and the glass gave way. August nearly fell through, catching himself against the jagged edge. Glass bit into his palms, but drew no blood, and he surged back into the room just as an ax caught him in the chest.

  The blade cut through mesh and cloth before slamming into his ribs. It didn’t break the skin, but it drove all the air from his lungs, and he doubled over, gasping. The Fangs circled him and he slashed out with the sharp spine of his bow as a length of iron chain wrapped around his throat.

  The pure metal turned his stomach. His legs went weak, the chain wrenching him to his knees, and for one horrible second he was back in the warehouse in the Waste, heat screaming through his skin as he burned from the inside out and Sloan stood laughing at the edge of the light and—

  The blunt side of the ax came down on the back of his neck, and he hit the floor hard, the boards cracking beneath him. His vision doubled, the chain at his throat vising, and then they were on him, kicking and beating, the blows shallow, the pain brief, but disorienting.

  “. . . Sunai . . .”

  “. . . just like she said . . .”

  “. . . truss him up . . .”

  August’s hands tightened into fists, and he realized he was still holding the bow, the steel pinned beneath someone’s boot.

  Through the tangle of limbs he saw Rez wrest herself free. She managed a single step toward him, and he tried to tell her to run, to get out, but she wouldn’t listen. She never listened.

  She threw herself at the tangle of bodies, peeling one away from the group. In the instant of distraction, the other Fangs faltered, torn between the two targets. The boot came off his bow and August slashed violently across the man’s leg. He went down screaming and clutching his calf as blood, but also light, bloomed across his skin.

  Music wasn’t the only way to bring a soul to surface—Leo had taught him that. August grabbed the man’s ankle, bone cracking beneath his fingers as the soul sang through him, sharp as electricity and just as violent. Ice water and anger and a single, pealing scream.

  Embrace it, urged his brother, as the world slowed, every detail in the broken room suddenly vivid, from the warped boards to the candlelight.

  The Fang collapsed, his eyes burned black, and August shot to his feet, tugging the chain from his neck as the others scrambled back, clearly torn between whatever they’d been told—given, promised—and simple, physical fear.

  They all recoiled, except for one.

  A single Fang stood in the doorway, holding Rez like a shield, one hand clutching her hair and a serrated blade at her throat.

  “Put down the bow,” he said through bloody teeth.

  “Don’t you dare,” growled Rez.

  Dead weight, repeated Leo.

  August heard the clank of chain, sensed the other Fangs closing in on him again, the violin still wedged between the cracked boards a yard away.

  “Hey, boss . . .” August met Rez’s gaze and saw the glint between her fingers, but before he could stop her, she drove the dagger back into the man’s leg. He howled and let go, but not before slicing her throat.

  A sound left August then, low and animal, and he forced himself to lunge, not for the killer but for the violin. Hands tore at him but he ignored them, grabbing the instrument and slashing the bow across the strings.

  The first note came out hard and sharp, and the Fangs recoiled, pressing their hands over their ears as if that would save them, but it was too late. They were too late.

  By the second note, the fight went out of them.

  By the third, they were falling to their knees.

  August left the music echoing on the air and ran for Rez. He dropped the violin and sank to the floor beside her.

  “Stay with me,” he said, pressing his hands to the wound at her neck. There was so much blood bubbling up between his fingers, too much, and it slicked his skin, made his fingers slip. So much red, he thought, and none of it light.

  Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

  Her chest juddered up, down.

  “Stay with me.” The words came out pleading.

  August had reaped a thousand souls, but it was such a different thing to feel a life bleed out beneath his hands, powerless to staunch the flow. For all the souls he’d reaped, he’d so rarely seen this kind of death, never felt the way it stole beneath his fingers, life spilling across the floor until that horrible cusp, the instant when it ended. When Laura Torrez stopped being a person and became a body. No transition, no ease, gone and there, there and gone, gone, gone.

  August’s hands slid from the wound at Rez’s throat. Her eyes were open and empty, and red light flickered across her face. Not hers, of course, but theirs. A room of ruined souls waiting to be reaped.

  August eased Rez’s body down and rose to his feet. He moved among the Fangs, bloodstained fingers searching out skin.

  They whispered their sins, but he didn’t listen, didn’t care. Their confessions meant nothing to him.

  He snuffed their lights, reaped their souls, his whole body humming with the sudden influx of power, his senses sharpened to the point of pain, until there was only one left.

  The man who’d killed Rez.

  His lips were moving, his soul a sheen of sweat against his skin, but August didn’t reach out to reap it. Leo’s words swam inside his head, not the stuff of madness, but memory—a memory from the night he’d taught August about pain, and why he so often used it.

  “Our purpose is not to bring peace,” his brother had said. “It is to bestow penance.”

  August watched the man’s soul sink back beneath the surface of his skin, watched his senses return.

  “Why shouldn’t they suffer for their sins?”

  The Fang blinked, straightened, his mouth twisting in a grimace, but before he could speak, before he could say or do anything, August slammed his boot into the man’s wounded leg, and he buckled, clutching at his thigh before August forced him to the floor, fingers closing around the steel collar at his throat.

  “Look at me,” he said, squeezing until the metal bent and buckled. “How does it feel?”

  The man couldn’t answer, couldn’t breathe. He scrambled and scratched and gasped as the red light of his soul surfaced again, pouring through August’s hands.

  It hit him like ice, a cold so sharp it hurt, and it was the pain that brought August back to himself, to what he was doing, what he had done.

  He wrenched backward, but it was too late. The light was gone, and all that was left was the man’s contorted body, eyes burned out and mouth open in a silent sc
ream, red and purple welts rising around the crushed collar.

  August felt sick.

  His body ached with the pressure—the presence—of the souls, and he wished he could retch them up, expel the weight of so many unwanted lives, but it was no use. The souls were a part of him now, fusing to his bones and surging through his veins.

  His chest hitched and he brought his hand to his front where the ax had cut through armored vest and uniform but failed to wound.

  “Alpha pair, report.”

  He looked down at his hands, coated in Rez’s blood. It was drying on his skin, tacky and cold.

  “Alpha pair.”

  August had always hated blood. It was the same color as a soul, but empty, useless the moment it left a person’s veins.

  “August.”

  He forced his mind back.

  “I’m here,” he said, startled by the calm in his voice, steady when something deeper wanted to scream. “We were ambushed.” His gaze went to the broken window where the red eyes had watched from the dark. “Rez is dead.”

  “Shit.” Phillip, then. Phillip was the only one who swore on the comm. “And the other squad?”

  “Dead,” answered August.

  What a simple word that was, not messy at all.

  “We’ll send a team at dawn, for the bodies.” And then Phillip’s voice was gone, and others were ricocheting across the comm, none of them directed at him. He picked up his bow, his violin—these small, solid pieces of himself—then busied his hands arranging light batons to keep the corpses safe.

  Corpse—another simple word that did so little work, failed to describe something that was once a person, and now was simply a shell.

  Eventually a familiar voice broke the static in his ear.

  “August,” said Emily, “you should return to the Compound.”

  Her voice, as steady as his own. He swallowed back the no, no, no and said instead, “I’m waiting. . . . I have to wait.”

  And Emily didn’t make him say why, so she must have understood what he meant. Violence begets violence, and monstrous acts make monsters.

  The Malchai in the hall came first, rose up like spirits from the bodies of the soldiers. And he cut them down. Then came the Malchai by the smothered candle, rising up beside the word written in blood, and he dispatched that one, too. And then, it came down to Rez.

  Her murder had been the work of an instant, but it felt like forever before the shadows finally began to twitch.

  His fingers tightened on his bow as the night took a shuddering breath, and then, standing among the corpses, stood the monster.

  It looked down at itself in a gesture so human, so natural, and yet so wrong, and then its head came up, red eyes widening right before August drove his steel bow into its heart.

  Half a block from the Falstead, August knew he was being followed.

  He could hear the shuffle of steps, not on the street behind him but somewhere overhead. He didn’t slow until something floated to the ground at his feet.

  It was a patch, three letters—FTF—visible through the blood.

  As he straightened, another drifted down.

  “Hasn’t anyone told you?” said a voice on the air. “It’s not safe to wander after dark.”

  He looked up and saw her standing on a nearby roof, moonlight tracing her pale hair.

  “Alice.”

  She smiled, flashing knifepoint teeth, and sank into a crouch at the edge of the roof. August told his hands to move, to lift the violin, but it hung there, dead weight at his side. She wasn’t Kate, but every time he saw her, his stomach still dropped. Every time, for just a second.

  The Malchai didn’t look like her, not really—all the pieces were wrong—but the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Alice looked like the Kate he’d never met, like the one he’d expected to find at Colton before he met the real girl. The way she’d been described to him—daughter of a monster. All the things Kate wasn’t, all the things she pretended to be, Alice was.

  He had known—hadn’t wanted to think about it, but had known all the same—that something would walk out of that house beyond the Waste, and yet it had still been a shock, meeting her. It was two weeks—maybe three—after Kate. After Callum. After Sloan. He was responding to a distress call, but when he got there, all he found were corpses. Corpses, and her, standing the middle of it all, covered in blood, and grinning, the same grin she was wearing now, a grin that was all monster.

  “Your trap didn’t work,” he said.

  Alice only shrugged. “The next one will. Or the next. I’ve got plenty of time, and you’ve got plenty of people to lose. Such a shame about your friends.” She tossed patches like petals over the edge of the roof, far more than the number of soldiers he’d lost that night. “They’re all so fragile, aren’t they? What do you see in them?”

  “Humanity.”

  Alice laughed softly, a sound like steam escaping from a pot. “You know, I thought, if I used humans, you might try to spare them.” Her red eyes danced over his bloodstained front. “I guess I was wrong.”

  “I don’t spare sinners.”

  Alice’s gaze flicked up. “You spared Kate.” The name like a barb in the monster’s mouth. “You’re sparing me, right now, with your friend’s blood still on your hands. Must not have been a very good friend.”

  He knew she was baiting him, but the anger still rose like heat on his skin.

  As if on cue, red eyes began to flicker around him in the dark.

  Alice hadn’t come alone, but there was a reason she kept her distance, lobbing taunts down from the rooftop. A Sunai’s music was as toxic to a Malchai as a Malchai’s soul was to a Sunai. If August started playing, the other monsters would die, but Alice would get away.

  She flashed a smile, and there it was again, in the twist of her lips, the shadow of someone else.

  “I’m not her,” sniped the Malchai, and August recoiled at the sudden venom. “You’ve got that look on your face, poor little lost monster. Do you miss her, our Kate?” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know where she is?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “But I hope it’s far away from here. Far away from you. And if she has any sense, she’ll never come back.”

  Alice sneered and, with that, the illusion shattered—what little resemblance she bore to Kate was gone, and all that was left was monstrous. The sight of that true face freed August of any hesitation. He swung the violin up in a fluid arc, the tension collapsing as Alice lunged backward into shadow, and the other Malchai rushed at August in the light, and his bow sliced like a knife across his strings.

  As he walked home, it started to rain. A steady curtain of water that soaked August through and left a dark trail, the blood of friends and enemies, of FTFs and Fangs and monsters, mingled in his wake.

  Somewhere between slaughtering Alice’s Malchai and reaching the Seam, August realized something: it didn’t have to hurt this much.

  For months he’d been playing a part, instead of becoming it, pretending to be strong while all the while harboring a shred of hope that there was still a world where he could feel human.

  “Because you care.” That’s what Henry had said, but Henry was wrong. Henry was human; he didn’t understand that in trying to be both, August succeeded at neither. Leo had understood, had sacrificed humanity to be the monster the humans needed.

  All August had to do was let go. It was time to let go.

  “Stop!” ordered a pair of FTFs as he reached the Seam.

  The violin should have been enough to ID him, but the bow was slick with gore, the instrument streaked red, and, in the rain-slicked night, he hardly passed for human.

  When the soldiers saw his face, they staggered back, apologies caught in their throats as they opened the gate. He continued on, through South City and across the light strip and into the bright warmth of the Compound lobby.

  The clash and thrum of conversation died, the steady thud of movement froze, and in the silence, a hundred pa
irs of eyes turned toward him.

  August had avoided his reflection in every pane of glass, every dark puddle, every steel sheet, but he saw it now, not in a mirror, but in the faces of everyone who looked at him, and then quickly looked away.

  Could they see the light of the souls he’d reaped, the monsters he’d slain? Could they feel the darkness in the lives he’d taken, the hate and violence wicking off his skin?

  He started across the lobby, the heels of his boots leaving damp crescent moons of blood and ash in his wake. No one approached. No one followed.

  Even Henry Flynn, surrounded by captains, took one look at him and stilled.

  You wanted them to see me, thought August.

  So let them see.

  The head of the FTF started toward him, but August held up a hand—a command, a gesture of dismissal.

  And then his eyes found Colin, and he had the grim satisfaction of seeing the boy inhale sharply, stricken by the sight of him. Some small part of August exhaled with relief. It had only been a matter of time before Colin saw the truth, the monster behind the mask. Until he realized August was not—would never be—like him.

  He reached the elevators, the silence heavy on his shoulders. But he felt the shift inside it, the awe as well as the fear. These people looked at him and saw something not less than human, but more. Something strong enough to fight for them. Strong enough to win.

  Stand straight, little brother.

  And for the first time, August listened.

  Sloan stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through a book on war.

  Alice left them scattered all over the penthouse, a trail of crumbs marking her ceaseless movement and fickle attention. He let the book fall shut as she came in. “Where have you been?”

  He didn’t trust it when she wandered off—she was the kind of pet one needed to keep on a leash.

  Alice hopped up onto the island. “Hunting.”

  Sloan’s eyes narrowed. She’d always relished making a mess when she fed, and tonight there was no blood on her hands or face.

  “I take it you failed.”

  A pile of FTF patches sat beside her hand, and she twisted and began absently building a tower, as if they were cards. “I prefer to think of success as a process,” she mused. “He’s not an easy catch.”