Callan’s hand tightened on my shoulder. A warning:Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe.
I turned my head slowly, just enough to see past the edge of his arm.
About fifty feet in front of us.
A woman.
She stood in the middle of the lot, half-swallowed by darkness.
At first, my brain wouldn’t process what I was seeing. It tried to make her normal. Tried to fit her into a category that made sense—a drunk stumbling out of the bar down the road, someone hurt in a car accident, someone who needed help.
But nothing about her was right.
She moved in jerky movements. Her legs carried her forward in uneven, stuttered steps, each one landing wrong. Her knees bent at odd intervals. Too far. Not far enough. One foot dragged behind the other, scraping against the asphalt with a sound that carried across the empty lot.
Her head was tilted sharply to the right, her chin nearly resting against her shoulder. Not drooping. Not like someone tired or hurt. The angle too severe, too deliberate. Like something had wrenched it there, and she’d neverbothered to correct it.
Her arms hung at her sides. Slack. Loose. Swaying with each broken step as if they weren’t attached to anything that controlled them.
Her clothes were dark. Wet.
My eyes adjusted slowly, pulling detail from the shadows, and I wished they hadn’t.
It wasn’t water.
Blood. So much of it that her shirt had gone black with it, plastered to her torso, dripping. It ran down her neck in thick streaks, disappearing into her collar and reappearing below, trailing down her arms to her hands. Her fingers glistened. It dripped from them in a slow, steady patter against the pavement. I was able to hear it. In the silence, in the space between her dragging footsteps, each drop hitting the ground.
Pat. Pat. Pat.
Her left hand was holding something. It took me a moment to understand what. Flesh, ragged and wet, dangling from her fingers, swinging slightly with each step. I couldn’t tell what part of the body it had come from. I didn’t want to know. My stomach lurched violently, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
She took another step. Her foot caught on a crack in the asphalt, maybe, or her own failing coordination—and she stumbled forward. The movement should have been clumsy. Human. Instead, she caught herself in a way that was too fast, too sharp, her body snapping upright with a jolt that didn’t match anything I understood about how people moved.
The piece of flesh slipped from her fingers and hit the ground with a soft, wet plop. She didn’t notice or didn’tcare.
My fingers were buried so deep in Callan’s jacket that I could feel my nails bending against the fabric underneath. Every part of me wanted to run. Every part of me wanted to scream. But his body was a wall against mine, solid and unmoving, and his hand on my shoulder said one thing over and over.
Stay still. Stay still. Stay still.
He wasn’t breathing. I could feel his chest against mine, rigid, locked, held in place by pure will. His heart hammered against my collarbone, the only sign that he was as terrified as I was.
We watched her.
She took another step. Then another. A horrible, broken rhythm—step, drag, step, drag—each one leaving a dark smear on the asphalt behind her. A trail. I followed it backward, tracing the wet line across the parking lot to where it disappeared into the darkness near the far edge of the lot.
Where it started.
Where whatever had happened that left that much blood on a person.
The sirens screamed somewhere behind us, rising and falling, and the woman’s head twitched.
Not turned. Twitched. A sharp, involuntary snap to the left, like a predator catching a scent. Her whole body went rigid for a moment—shoulders locking, fingers splaying wide, that terrible tilted head jerking once, twice, three times in quick succession.
Listening.
Nine
Sloane