This Savage Song (27 page)

They made it to the house.

Gravel crunched beneath her feet as Kate half led, half dragged August across the field and past the overgrown drive and up the front steps. The blue paint on the front door had faded, the garden plants had all gone wild, and a spiderweb of a crack ran across a pane of glass, but otherwise, the house looked exactly as it had.

Like a photograph, thought Kate, edges frayed, color fading, but the picture itself unchanged.

August slumped against the steps as Kate scavenged under weedy grass for the drainpipe and the small magnetic box with the key hidden inside. She'd knock the door in if she had to, but it had lasted this long, and she didn't like the thought of being the one to break it now.

“Tell me something,” murmured August, echoing her words from the car. His breathing was ragged.

“Like what?” she asked parroting his answer.

“I don't know,” he whispered, the words trailing off into a sob of grief or pain. He curled in on himself, the violin case slipping from his shoulder and hitting the steps with a thud. “I just wanted . . . to be strong enough.”

She found the box and fumbled to get it open. She didn't realize her hands were shaking until the sliver of metal went tumbling into the weeds and she had to dig it out. “This isn't about strength, August. It's about need. About what you
are
.”

“I don't . . . want . . . to be this.”

She let out an exasperated sound. Why couldn't he have eaten? Why couldn't he have
told
her? Her fingers found the key and she straightened, shoved it into the lock, and turned. It was such a small gesture, but the muscle memory was overpowering. The door swung open. She knew the place would look abandoned, but the sight still caught her off guard. The stale air, the surfaces covered in dust, the tendrils of weed creeping up through the wooden floorboards. She almost called out for her mom—the urge was sudden and painful—but caught herself, and helped August inside.

Her feet carried her through the front room. She found the generator box in the kitchen, flipped the switches the way she had a hundred times, the gestures simple, automatic. She didn't wait for the lights to hum
on but went straight for the bathroom with its warm blue-and-white tiles, its porcelain tub.

She snapped the shower on, praying the rain tanks still worked. There was a groaning sound in the pipes, and moments later, water began to rain down, rust red at first, but then cold and crystal clear.

August was there behind her, swaying on his feet. He set the violin case down, managed to get off his jacket and shoes before stumbling forward, catching himself on the lip of the tub. Kate went to steady him, but he threw out a hand in warning. The tallies were burning up his arm and back, singeing through his shirt. He dragged it off, and she saw four hundred and twenty-three white-hot lines blazing across his skin.

She didn't know what to do.

“Go.” The word was a whisper, a plea.

“I'm not leav—”

“Please.”
His voice was shaking, heat rippling his hair like a breeze, and when he looked over his shoulder at her, the bones of his face were glowing white hot, while his eyes were turning darker, black pressing in on the flames. She took a step back, and August climbed into the shower half dressed, gasping as the cold water struck his skin and turned to steam.

She turned toward the bathroom door and heard a voice through the hiss and crackle of the shower,
little more than a breath, but still somehow audible. “Thank you.”

Kate's hand was throbbing as she ran it under the kitchen tap. It looked like she'd put it on a stove. It felt that way, too. All she'd done was take August's hand and not let go.

Anger, madness, joy . . . I don't want to keep going.

That's what he'd said in the woods.

Whatever he was going through now wasn't joy. How long had he been suffering? She'd noticed the temper, when the car broke down, but he'd managed to keep most of the madness to himself. The joy he couldn't. And now . . . the sound of his pained voice clawed inside her head.

I don't want to disappear.

She set the bloodstained spikes in the sink, cut the tap, and wove back through the house. The bathroom was clouded with steam, but August was no longer standing in the shower, and she panicked until she noticed his mop of dark hair cresting the wall of the tub.

I can't keep going toward the edge.

His eyes were closed, his head tipped back, his body dangerously still beneath the shower's stream as the water rose over his hips.

Don't let me fall.

“August?” she said quietly.

He didn't answer. Didn't move. Kate forced herself forward, holding her breath until August gave a small shudder. She exhaled, relieved by the subtle motion. His teeth were clenched, his eyes squeezed shut against the fire.

She watched as he took a breath, and went under.

He didn't come back up.

His bones had stopped glowing, easing the skeletal effect that made her think of Malchai, of monsters. Beneath the water, August looked so . . . human. A teenage boy, his long limbs folded up and his black curls floating around his face. She counted the seconds, watching the last of the breath leave his lips, wondering if she'd need to pull him out.

And then, at last, he surfaced.

He gripped the rim of the tub and dragged himself up, water streaming into his eyes. They were no longer on fire, but they hadn't returned to pale gray, either. They were darker, the color of charcoal, set too deep in his hollowing face.

Kate knelt and curled her fingers over his. His hand tensed beneath hers, but his skin had cooled enough to touch, and he didn't pull away. “Kate,” he murmured, his vision sliding in and out of focus.

“I'm here,” she said. “Where are you?”

August closed his eyes, took a long breath. “Lying on
my bed,” he whispered. “Listening to music while my cat chews on the corner of a book.”

Kate almost laughed. It was such an ordinary answer. His hand was getting hot again, so she let her fingers slide from his and sank back against the tub wall. Behind her, the shower almost sounded like rain, and she dug the silver medallion from beneath her collar, rubbing a thumb absently over the surface.

“Your house,” said August tiredly, and she couldn't tell if it was a question.

“It was,” said Kate, turning the pendant between her fingers.

A small, shuddering sigh from the tub. “Why are there so many shadows in the world, Kate? Shouldn't there be just as much light?”

“I don't know, August.”

“I don't want to be a monster.”

“You're not,” she said, the words automatic, but as she said it, Kate realized that she believed it, too. He was a Sunai—nothing was going to change that—but he wasn't evil, wasn't cruel, wasn't monstrous. He was just someone who wanted to be something else, something he wasn't.

Kate understood the feeling.

“It hurts,” he whispered.

“What does?” asked Kate.

“Being. Not being. Giving in. Holding out. No matter what I do, it hurts.”

Kate tipped her head back against the tub. “That's life, August,” she said. “You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn't matter if you're monster or human. Living hurts.”

She waited for him to say more, wondering why
she
no longer felt the urge to talk. Maybe she was finally out of secrets, or maybe she was just getting used to him. When she couldn't take the silence anymore, she got to her feet, stiff from the tile floor, and made her way down the hall to the first door on the left.

Beneath the film of dust, her bedroom walls were yellow—not sunflower yellow, but pale, almost white, the color of the sun, the real sun, not the one kids drew. The bed was narrow but soft, and there were drawings tacked up on one wall.

She rifled through the drawers and found an old journal and a few discarded pieces of clothing, things she hadn't bothered to take with her back to V-City. They were all too small, of course, but Kate had to get out of her ruined clothes, so she continued to her mother's room at the end of the hall.

The door wasn't shut all the way, and it swung open under her touch.

The room beyond was simple and dark, the curtains
drawn, but the sight of the bed, with its nest of pillows, sent an ache through her. If Kate closed her eyes, she could see herself sprawled on that bed, reading, while her mother playfully covered her with those pillows one by one.

She stepped slowly across the floor, over a weed growing up between the floorboards, and sank on the edge of the bed, ignoring the plume of dust. Beneath the dust, it still smelled like her mother, and before she knew what she was doing, Kate had curled up in the sea of pillows, burying her face in the nearest one.

Home, she thought, as the memory reached up and dragged her under.

They'd been back in V-City for four months, and Kate still couldn't sleep. Every night she dreamed of monsters—teeth and claws and crimson eyes—and every night she woke up screaming.

“I want to go home,” she told her mother.

“We
are
home, Kate.”

But it didn't feel right. It wasn't like the stories her mother had told her when she was growing up. There was no happy family, no loving father—only a shadow she hardly saw, and the monster in his wake.

“I want to go home,” she pleaded every time she woke.

“I want to go home,” she begged every time her mother put her back to bed.

“I want to go home.”

Her mother was getting thinner, her eyes rimmed with red. The city was eating her, piece by piece. And then one night, she said, “Okay.”

“I'll talk to your father,” she promised. “We'll work it out.”

The night of the accident, Kate was still dreaming, still trapped in a room of violent shadows, when her mother shook her awake.

“Get up, Kate. We have to go.”

An angry red mark flared on her mother's cheek, a welt with an
H
in the middle, the echo of Callum Harker's ring where it had struck her face. Weaving through the darkened penthouse. A shattered glass. A toppled chair. The office doors sealed shut and sleep still clinging to Kate, tripping up her feet.

“Where are we going?” she asked in the elevator.

“Where are we going?” she asked in the garage.

“Where are we going?” she asked as the car's engine came to life, and her mother finally answered.

“We're going home.”

They never made it.

Kate sat up. Tears were streaming down her face, making tracks in the dust. She scrubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand.

I want to go home.

The words had been hers. Always hers. She'd said them a hundred times. When had they gotten twisted, tangled, confused?

That plea, that night, her father's
H
bruised into her mother's skin . . . what else had she forgotten?

The accident spiraled through her mind, pieces fitting into the gaps. The sudden headlights, as if they'd veered into oncoming traffic—but they
hadn't
. It was the other car that swerved. And then her mother's gasp, her sudden jerk on the wheel as she tried to get out of the way. Too late. The horrible momentum of the crash, the sound of crushed metal and broken glass, and the blinding force of her skull meeting the window. Her mother, slumped against the wheel, broken lungs fighting for air once, twice. The world suddenly so still, white noise in her ears and blood in her eyes and, beyond the broken glass, her father's pet just standing there, his crimson gaze sharp and his mouth curled into a rictus grin.

Kate surged up off the bed, and retched on the old wood floor. She crouched there, forcing air into her lungs. How could she forget so much?

But she remembered now.

She remembered everything. And those memories didn't belong to a different Kate. They were hers. Her
life. Her loss. And one way or another, she would have Sloan's heart.

Shaking, she got to her feet, steadied herself, and rounded the bed. She rolled the rug up with her shoe, fingers skimming the wooden floor until she found the lip of the loose board and shifted it aside. Nestled in the darkness beneath she found the metal case and lifted it free. She spun the lock, lining up the numbers until the case clicked open. Inside she found a clip of cash, a set of border papers, and a handgun. Her mother hadn't wanted to take it, but Harker insisted, so she had put it here, with the other things she didn't need. Kate pocketed the cash, checked the gun's magazine—it was full of silver-tips—and slid it into her waistband, tucked against her spine, before turning to the papers. She thumbed through the stack, hesitating when she saw Alice Harker's face staring up at her. She put her mother's papers back in the box, folded her own, and got up.

In her mother's chest of drawers, Kate found a dark sweater and when she held it up, she was surprised to see how close they were in size. Another reminder of how much time had passed. She set the sweater on the chest of drawers and stripped off August's jacket and the shirt beneath, cringing at the way her stitches tugged as she pulled on the clean clothes, the silver medallion warm
against her bare skin. She closed her eyes and brought the sweater cuffs to her nose, inhaling the fading scent of lavender. Her mother had tucked it into all the drawers to keep the clothes fresh.