Chapter 372: A Visitor in the Night.

Sherry, May and Becky were running.

The dark was spreading behind them, out across the street from somewhere I couldn’t see — a low black tide moving under the lamps, swallowing the pavement as it came.

"We just need to reach the apartment." May’s voice came out unsteady, her eyes going fast and hard, reading something written on the air that nobody else could see. "That’s all. Just the apartment."

Breath tore in and out. The street behind them stayed empty.

"Let me cover you."

Becky stopped.

"Don’t be stupid." Sherry’s head turned a fraction and her stride never broke. "Becky, he’ll—"

May didn’t let her finish. She caught Sherry’s hand and dragged her forward, fingers locked, both of them already pulling distance.

The streets were empty. The lamps were going out and coming back on down the whole length of the road, one after another, like something was passing underneath them — a black pulse travelling the wires.

The two of them ran.

Becky held her ground.

She put her hand flat on the ground and the pavers came up in a wave — stone lifting, cracking, rising in a hard crest toward the dark.

Black mist arrived in front of her.

Vince came out of it with his hand already closing on her throat, and then he was through the mist and she was off the ground — feet kicking empty air, her body rigid in his grip, the wave of pavers collapsing uselessly behind her.

I saw every part of it and I couldn’t move.

Webs. Across my chest and my arms and my face, thick as rope, layered so deep I couldn’t find where one stopped. I threw everything into my right shoulder and the whole structure moved with me and gave nothing back.

He was still in Mute’s body. But the hair was purple now, cut the way he’d worn it before Mary Stam put a stake through his heart.

"SHERRY."

She slipped.

She went down hard — knees, then hands, the impact jarring up through her arms — and she’d heard me. Somehow, across all of it, she’d heard me.

She turned mid-stumble and her eyes found mine before she hit the ground. Wide. Knowing.

My eyes went off her to May stopping and coming back for her, and then to Vince, already going out into the air in a hard black blur.

"MAY—"

He was with them before I got the word out.

May turned her head and he missed by nothing at all — the kind of miss that only ever happens near her, the air itself seeming to shove him a fraction off line. His hand closed on empty space where her throat had been a second before.

I started tearing.

Both hands, everything I had. I got my fingers through one strand and pulled and it came away and there were forty behind it. I pulled again and the whole mass gave two inches and closed back over my chest, tighter. I put my head forward into it and the webs came with my head, sticking to my face, my mouth, my eyes.

Vince drove into May and took her up into the air and put her into a wall. The impact was wet and final. When he came off it there was nothing left on the brick but a print of blood — the shape of a body, smeared and dark, already running.

He was with Sherry before I could get a breath in.

The punch went into her stomach.

It took her off her feet and put her into the air, and the blood came down the inside of her thigh and out of her mouth at the same time — a bright red line running from the corner of her lips, and a thicker, darker flood already soaking the fabric between her legs as she hung for a second in the air before gravity took her.

"NOOOOOO—"

A knock.

***

My eyes opened.

I didn’t move.

I lay there under the bulb with my chest going like I’d run the whole street myself — hard, fast, each breath scraping — and my arms still locked at my sides as if the webs were still there. For a second my body hadn’t caught up. The mattress was damp under my back with sweat.

Melissa was asleep across me, her head on my chest and her hand on my shoulder and one leg through mine, neither of us with anything on. Her breasts rested warm and soft against my ribs, the weight of them rising and falling with my breathing. Her hair tickled my collarbone.

She said something into my chest that wasn’t a word. Her breathing moved against my ribs, slow and even.

She didn’t wake up.

Down the corridor Sophia was making a sound like a sob, caught and held and let go, over and over — thin, frayed, the sound of someone still fighting it and still losing it by degrees.

It was a dream.

Was it?

It had the same shape as the burning street. Exactly the same shape, and the libra gave me that one.

And the thing my head kept going back to wasn’t the wall or the mist or the purple hair.

It was the blood down the inside of her thigh.

They reach the capital tomorrow.

And I am underground behind a door I can’t open, with a woman asleep on my chest.

I have to get out of here.

The knock came again. Twice. Hard. Metal on metal.

I eased Melissa off me and onto the mattress. She made a small sound and turned into the warm space I’d left, curling toward the heat, and stayed under. Her hand stayed open on the sheet where my shoulder had been.

I got up, crossed the room naked, the stone cold under my feet, and opened the door carefully. It made almost no sound — just the soft slide of the latch.

Then I stepped into the corridor and pulled it shut behind me with nothing on. The air was colder out here. The bulb in my room cut off as the door closed.

Monica’s room was quiet. Asleep, or good at pretending to be. No breathing I could catch through the wood.

Sophia’s was worse than it had been when I went to bed — the sobs closer together now, shorter, the sound of someone running out of air to fight with.

And on the other side of the entrance, someone was breathing unevenly.

I could hear it from where I stood, through steel — ragged, wet, the kind of breathing that comes after running or after pain.

I walked toward the door.