This Savage Song

by Victoria Schwab

  He slung his bag onto his shoulder. “I told you, Kate. I don’t play for anyone.”

  “I’m not anyone,” she snapped, flushing, suddenly hurt. “I’m a Harker.”

  Freddie gave her a disparaging look. “So what?”

  “So you don’t say no to me, not like that.”

  He actually laughed—a single, icy bark—and shook his head. “You really believe that, don’t you? That this whole city revolves around what you want, because you have money and power and everyone’s too afraid to tell you no.” He leaned in. “I know it’s hard to believe, Kate, but not everything in this world is about you.” He pulled back. “Honestly, I thought you were better than this. I guess I was wrong.”

  Kate recoiled, stunned. Her face burned, and anger flared through her, hot as coals. Freddie turned to go, but her hand hit the locker beside his head, barring his path. “Who are you?”

  Confusion spread across his face. “What?”

  “Who. Are. You?” He tried to knock her hand away, but she caught his wrist and pushed him back against the locker. She’d had enough. Enough games. Enough dancing around the point. “You know what I mean, Freddie.” She brought her metal-glossed nails to the pendant on his shirt. “You really don’t look like a Freddie. Or a Frederick. Or a Gallagher.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Let go of me, Kate.”

  She leaned in. “Whoever you really are,” she whispered, “I’m going to figure it out.”

  Just then another body came crashing, an arm thrown around Freddie’s shoulders.

  “There you are!” said the boy loudly. “Been looking for you everywhere!” The kid flashed Kate an apologetic smile while pulling Freddie free of her grip. She let her hand fall away. “We’re going to be late. For that thing. You know. The party thing.” He tugged Freddie down the hall. “You didn’t forget, did you? Come on . . .”

  The other boy waved good-bye without a backward glance, but Freddie cast a last, unreadable look her way before the two disappeared around the corner.

  Anger rolled through her as Kate stormed out of the school.

  She tapped another pill out of the vial Dr. Landry had given her and tossed it back, berating herself for letting Freddie of all people crack her calm. Stupid, stupid, stupid—but she thought he liked her, thought he got her, let him get under her skin. Idiot. If she’d learned anything from her father, it was that composure was control. Even if it was just an illusion.

  I know it’s hard to believe, but not everything in this world is about you.

  The rage flared fresh.

  I thought you were better than this.

  Who did he think he was?

  I guess I was wrong.

  Who was he?

  Kate reached the lot, but the black sedan wasn’t there yet. She paced and tried to take a few steadying breaths, but it didn’t help. She could feel her nerves rattling like loose change inside her chest. She perched on a bench and dug a cigarette out of the box in her bag, shoving the filter between her lips as she watched the students pour out of the school like ants.

  “Miss Harker!” called an administrator as she reached for her lighter. “We have a strict no-smoking policy on campus.”

  Kate considered the man. She was in the mood for a fight, but the more logical part of her recognized this wasn’t the right one. “Let me guess,” she said, returning the cigarette to its box. “It’s a health . . .”

  She was going to say risk, but something caught her eye.

  They were striding across the lawn, Freddie and the short boy and a girl she didn’t know. The boy and the girl were smiling, and Freddie was doing that the thing people do—the flickering grin and the nod—when they want you to think they’re paying attention but they’re not.

  And then Kate watched as the girl skip-stepped a few paces ahead and turned back, lifting her phone to snap a picture of the boys. At the last minute, Freddie held up his hand in front of his face. He did it with a smile, but there was something to the gesture, and when the girl teasingly tried again, Freddie closed his eyes and looked away. Just like in his school photo.

  It was such a small thing, really.

  But as she watched him deflect, a ghost of panic crossing his face, a single word hissed through her head.

  Monster.

  It was ridiculous—absurd, paranoid—but it was there, and suddenly her thoughts were spiraling past the blurred picture on the Colton Academy page to the lack of photos anywhere on the updrive and the false name and the words scribbled in the margins and his protective parents and the stolen medal and his refusal to play for her and his rebuke and the way he looked at her, as if they shared a secret. Or as if he was keeping one.

  Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal.

  Sing a song and steal your soul.

  Kate reached for her phone. The girl gave up trying to snap photos, and Freddie disentangled himself from the other boy, waved good-bye, and began to walk away. Kate didn’t hesitate. She pulled up the camera on her cell and held the button down, snapping a sequence of shots before he could turn away.

  A car honked behind her. It was the black sedan.

  Kate climbed in, heart racing, fingers clenched around the cell’s screen. She didn’t look, not right away. She waited until the car pulled away from Colton, waited until the world began to blur beyond the windows.

  And then, slowly, she looked at the phone.

  It was a crazy theory, she knew, and she scrolled through the photos, half-expecting to see nothing but Freddie’s face staring back at her. In the first few shots, he was already looking away, and she swiped back through the rapid-fire sequence with nervous fingers, rewinding until the moment when his head was turned enough to show his face.

  Her eyes tracked over the image, sliding over his uniform slacks and his crisp Colton polo to the bag on his shoulder and the dark hair falling across his cheeks and into his eyes . . . but there the illusion ended. Because his eyes weren’t their usual gray.

  They were nothing but a smudge of black, a streak of darkness the camera couldn’t catch.

  Have you ever seen a monster up close?

  Kate slumped back against the seat.

  Freddie Gallagher wasn’t an ordinary student.

  He wasn’t even human.

  Who are you?

  Kate’s voice followed him onto the subway.

  You don’t look like a Freddie.

  It trailed him through the city.

  I’m going to figure it out.

  It tailed him on the street.

  August was relieved when he made it to the top floor of the Flynn compound and found the place empty. He dropped his bag onto the bed next to Allegro, and sank into his chair, his thoughts spiraling.

  I know it’s hard to believe, but not everything in this world is about you.

  Why had he said that?

  I thought you were better than this.

  What had he done?

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  A question.

  Who are you?

  Whoever you are . . .

  I’m going to figure it out.

  He tore off the iron pendant and lobbed it at the wall. It hit hard enough to dent the plaster before rolling across the floor. August put his head in his hands.

  Who are you?

  Who are you?

  Who are you?

  There was a knock on his door, and his head snapped up. Leo was standing there, filling the frame. “Get your coat,” he said. “We’re going out.”

  August glanced at the window and was shocked to see the sun had gone down.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Leo held up a piece of paper. “Where do you think?”

  August scrubbed his eyes. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I don’t care. Phillip’s in critical and Harris is out of commission, so tonight you’re with me.”

  He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve his brother’s attention, but he didn’t want it, not now, not like this. Leo ha
d a reputation when it came to hunting.

  “Everyone knows your face,” said August, scrambling. “If I go with you—”

  “They’ll assume you’re a subordinate. Now get up.”

  August swallowed and got to his feet. He reached for his violin case, but Leo stopped him. “Leave it.”

  August blinked. “I don’t under—”

  “You won’t need it tonight.”

  He hesitated. His brother didn’t have any of his instruments, either. “Leo . . .”

  “Come,” ordered his brother.

  August’s hand slid from the violin case. As he trailed Leo through the apartment, he cast around, hoping to catch sight of Henry or Emily, a lifeline, someone to stop them. But his parents were nowhere to be found and Ilsa’s door was shut.

  He didn’t ask where they were going. Away from the Seam and the city center, that much was obvious, into the grid, a tangle of darkened streets, broken buildings never salvaged. A place for addicts and ex-criminals looking to hide from FTF and Sunai alike.

  “You’re quiet,” said his brother as they moved down the street. “What are you thinking about?”

  August hated when Leo phrased questions that way, leaving little room for evasion. His head was a mess, and the last person he wanted near it was his older brother, but the answer still drifted to his lips. “Kate Harker.”

  “What about her?”

  A harder question to answer, because he wasn’t sure. Everything had been going fine. And then something had tipped, the balance had faltered, fallen. Why did everyone have to ruin the quiet by asking questions? The truth was a disastrous thing.

  “August,” pressed Leo.

  “She knows I’m keeping a secret.”

  Leo glanced back. “But she doesn’t know what it is?”

  August fidgeted. “Not yet.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice infuriatingly calm.

  “How is that good?”

  “Everyone has secrets. It’s normal.”

  “None of my secrets are normal, Leo.” He shoved his hands in his coat. “I think I should pull out of Colton.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  Leo stopped. “If you suddenly pull out of school, they’ll figure out why. Your identity will be forfeit. I’m not willing to trade the possibility of trouble for the certainty of it.”

  “She’s not going to stop digging,” said August.

  Leo started walking again. “If she learns the truth, you’ll know. She’ll tell you herself. Until then, you stay in school.”

  “And if she figures it out? Then what?”

  “Then we deal with it.”

  The way he said it made August nervous. “She’s an innocent.”

  Leo shot him a black-eyed look. “No,” he said, “she’s a Harker.”

  Kate didn’t turn the music on when she got home.

  For once she didn’t want to drown out her thoughts. She needed them all, loud and clear. She went straight to her room and locked the door. Set the phone facedown, pulled the tablet from her bag, and booted the updrive.

  Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal.

  The whole ride home her mind had spun over what little she knew about the third breed of monster.

  What little anyone knew.

  Sunai—the word alone seemed to rile the other creatures and annoy her father. But there was more to it than that. The Sunai were rare—much rarer than the Corsai or Malchai—but they still made Harker nervous. It had to be because of the catalysts. The Corsai seemed to come from violent, but nonlethal acts, and the Malchai stemmed from murders, but the Sunai, it was believed, came from the darkest crimes of all: bombings, shootings, massacres, events that claimed not only one life, but many. All that pain and death coalescing into something truly terrible; if a monster’s catalyst informed its nature, then the Sunai were the worst things to go bump in the night.

  It didn’t help that South City probably fed the rumor mill itself. Some said Flynn kept the Sunai like rabid dogs. Others said he treated them as family. Others still claimed the monsters were buried in the ranks of the FTF. Another, more frustrating, theory held that they could change their faces. Control minds. Make people forget they’d met them . . . if those people ever lived to tell.

  Sunai were sadistic. Sunai were evil. Sunai were invincible.

  And on top of it all, Sunai looked human.

  What little Harker and his men actually knew about the Sunai came from one monster. The only one they’d ever managed to catch on camera.

  Kate logged into her father’s private uplink, and typed the name into the footage search.

  LEO

  He’d been part of the initial fight, Flynn’s right hand when Harker tried to take the city twelve years back. And he wasn’t shy. Kate scrolled through more than a dozen video thumbnails that tracked across the screen, all dating from before the truce. They fell into two categories.

  Leo_Music

  Leo_Torture

  She chewed her lip, hesitating a moment before clicking on one of the videos labeled Music. The footage was more than a decade old, and it was shot from a security camera at an odd angle, but there he was in the frame, not stalking through shadows or down a back alley, but perched on a stool beneath a spotlight. Leo was sitting on stage in what looked like a bar, one foot up and a steel guitar balanced on his knee. Even at this angle, she could tell he was tall and blond and handsome, and aside from his eyes, which raked black lines across the camera every time his gaze drifted up, he didn’t look like a monster at all.

  Kate supposed that was what made him so dangerous.

  There was no sound in the feed, but when he began to play, she still found herself turning her head, good ear toward the screen, wanting to hear the song. And even with the grainy footage and the darkened room, she could see the crowd sit forward.

  Only the room wasn’t so dark anymore. At first she thought the overheads must be switching on, but as she watched, she realized the audience itself was beginning to glow. The people didn’t seem to notice the light, didn’t seem to notice anything. They sat so still Kate thought the footage must be frozen. But it couldn’t be, because Leo’s fingers were still plucking at the guitar strings.

  Movement caught her eye as two people rose from their chairs, not fast, but slowly, as if drifting up through water. The light coming from their skin was different, sickly, and they both moved toward the stage with the simple, steady steps of those in a trance, their lips moving but their expressions empty.

  When they were nearly to the stage, Leo stopped playing.

  He rose from the stool, set aside the guitar, and stepped down off the platform to greet the two glowing forms as if they were fans.

  And then he closed his hands around their throats.

  They didn’t fight back, didn’t thrash, even when he dragged them up so that only their shoes skimmed the floor. She watched as the light beneath their skin flickered, and then began to drift, out of their bodies and into Leo’s, infusing him with that strange glow. She watched as the last of their light guttered and died, watched as their eyes shriveled black in their sockets, and even then Leo didn’t let go. He stood there, eyes closed and head back, looking almost peaceful as the men went limp, turned from living, breathing people into empty shells. At last he let the bodies fall and returned to the stage, where he took up his guitar and walked out.

  The glow from the audience faded, and one by one they began to move again, as if shaking off sleep, slowly at first, and then frantically as they saw the corpses on the floor.

  Kate sat there, chilled. It wasn’t the act of killing that bothered her—monsters and men both did that—and it wasn’t even the chilling serenity on the Sunai’s face. It was the fact that he killed them with a sound. Those men were dead the minute he started playing. Pulled like puppets on strings.

  She thought of Freddie’s violin, suddenly grateful he’d refused to play, even if she wasn’t sure why. Was he trying to spare her? Or just
waiting for Flynn’s signal?

  Her attention flicked back to the screen. She wasn’t like the people in that crowd, walking straight into the hands of death. No, Kate had an advantage, knew her monster’s face, his weapon. Now all she had to do was find his weakness.

  She closed out of the video and was about to exit the page when she remembered the second tab.

  Torture.

  If a Sunai used music to lure its prey, then what was this?

  She pulled her hair back, lit a cigarette, and clicked on the next video.

  “Who are we hunting?” asked August.

  They were standing on the front porch of a row house, its windows boarded, its siding warped. The door had been tagged with red paint that read STAY AWAY.

  As if words had that much power here.

  “Two men,” said Leo, rolling up his sleeves, revealing the short bands of black crosses that ran like cuffs around both forearms. The marks were too few in number, washed away every time he went dark. Leo didn’t turn because he lacked control—that he had in spades—but simply because he liked the way it felt. Like shedding a coat on a hot day. The thought made August shudder.

  “Brothers,” continued Leo. “Responsible for the deaths of six. Gang politics. Drugs. I expect they’ll be armed.”

  “And you had me leave my violin at home?”

  Leo reached into his jacket. August assumed he was fetching one of his own instruments. Instead, he withdrew a long, thin knife, and passed it to August.

  “What is this for?” he asked.

  Leo didn’t answer. He was staring down at his hand, now empty, and August watched as darkness began to roll up his fingers and across his palm. August recoiled instinctively, but only Leo’s hand blackened to shadow. The way he did that, slid between the two forms, that worked only because he’d torn away the walls between. August tried to imagine what Leo must have been like, back before he burned through his humanity, but he couldn’t. He watched as Leo reached out his shadowed hand and gripped the rusted doorknob. The metal crunched like paper under his touch and fell away. The door swung open.

  “Do what I say, little brother,” he said, his voice lower, stranger, more resonant.

  “How do you know they’re here?” whispered August.