This Savage Song (7 page)

He was behind the school, the trees a green line in the distance. The air was cool, and he gulped it in, muttering,
“you're okay, you're okay, you're okay,”
to himself before realizing he wasn't alone.

Someone cleared her throat, and August turned to find Katherine Harker leaning against the building, a cigarette dangling from her fingers.

“Bad day?”

Kate just wanted a moment of peace. A moment to breathe, and think, and not be on display. Charlotte's words were still lodged under her skin.

I heard her mother went crazy. Tried to drive them off a bridge
.

The words brought back not one memory but two. Two different worlds. Two different Kates. One lying in a field. The other stretched on the pavement. One surrounded by rustling quiet of the country. The other surrounded by ringing silence.

She brought her fingers absently to the scar beneath her hair, traced a metallic nail around the curve of her ear. Disconcerting, to be able to feel but not hear the drag of nail on flesh.

Just then the doors burst open, and a boy stumbled through. Kate's hand dropped away from her ear. The boy looked a little lost and a little ill, and she couldn't
really blame him. He'd come from the cafeteria, and that place was enough to set anyone off balance.

“Bad day?”

He looked up, startled, and she recognized him.

Frederick Gallagher. The new junior. Up close, he looked more like a stray dog than a student. He had wide gray eyes beneath a mop of messy black hair, and a starved look about him, bones pressing against his skin.

She watched him open his mouth, close it, open it again, only to offer a single word. “Yeah.”

Kate tapped ash off the cigarette and pushed herself up to her full height. “You're the new kid, right?”

One black brow lifted, just a fraction. “So are you,” he shot back.

The answer caught her off guard. She'd expected him to be a mumbler, or maybe a groveler. Instead he looked straight at her when he spoke, and his voice, though soft, was steady. Maybe not a stray dog, then.

“It's Katherine, right?”

“Kate,” she said. “Frederick?”

“Freddie,” he corrected.

She took a drag on her cigarette. Frowned. “You don't look like a Freddie.”

He shrugged, and for a second they stood there, sizing each other up, the moment stretching, the gaze
growing uncomfortable until his gray eyes finally broke free, escaping to the ground. Kate smiled, victorious. She gestured to the patch of pavement, the border of grass. “What brings you to my office?”

He looked around, confused, as if he'd actually intruded. Then he looked up and said, “The view.”

Kate flashed a crooked grin. “Oh really?”

His face went red. “I didn't mean you,” he said quickly. “I was talking about the trees.”

“Wow,” she said dryly. “Thanks. How am I supposed to compete with pine and oak?”

“I don't know,” said Freddie, cocking his head. Stray dog again. “They're pretty great.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and caught Freddie's glance. It didn't linger. There was a flush in his cheeks, but it wasn't all embarrassment. He really did look ill.

“I'd offer you a chair,” she said, tapping ash on the pavement.

“It's all right,” he said, slumping back against the adjacent wall. “I just needed some air.”

She watched his chest empty and fill and empty again, gray eyes leveled on a low bank of clouds. There was something about those eyes, something present and distant at the same time.

Where are you?
She wondered, the question on the tip
of her tongue. “Here.” She held out the cigarette. “You look like you could use one.”

But Freddie waved his hand. “No thanks,” he said. “Those things'll kill you.”

She laughed, soft, soundless. “So will lots of things around here.”

A rueful smile. “True.”

The bell rang, and she pushed off the wall. “See you around, Freddie.”

“Do I need to schedule an appointment?” he asked.

She waved a hand. “My office is always open.”

With that, she stubbed out the cigarette and went inside.

By the end of the day, Kate was untouchable.

Word had obviously spread—at least through the senior class—about her stunt with Charlotte in the girls' bathroom. Most kept their distance, went quiet when she passed, but a few took a different tactic.

“I love your hair.”

“You have great skin.”

“Your nails are amazing. Is that
iron
?”

Kate had even less patience for the would-be minions than the Charlottes. She had seen people grovel at her father's feet, try to plead and con and worm their way into his graces. He told her once that it was why
he preferred monsters to men. Monsters were base, disgusting things, but they had little interest and less talent when it came to gaining favor or telling lies. They were hungry, but that hunger had nothing to do with ambition.

“I never have to wonder what they want
,” he'd said.
“I already know.”

Kate had always hated monsters, but as half the school steered clear and the other half tried to make advances, she began to see the appeal. It was exhausting, and she was relieved when the last bell finally rang.

“Look,” she said to Marcus when she reached the black sedan. “Not expelled.”

“It's a miracle,” deadpanned the driver, holding open her door.

Shielded by the tinted windows, she finally let the cold smile slide from her face as the car pulled away from Colton and headed home.

Home
, that was a word that took some getting used to.

The Harkers lived on the top floor of what was once the Allsway Building and was now known ostentatiously as Harker Hall, since her father owned it from sidewalk to spire. Marcus stayed with the car, while two men in dark suits held open the glass doors and ushered Kate inside. Classical music wafted through the air like
perfume, fine in small doses, but quickly becoming noxious. The place itself was decadent: the lobby vaulted overhead, the floor a stretch of dark marble, the walls white stone with gold trim, and the ceilings awash with crystal chandeliers.

Kate had read a sci-fi novel once about a shimmering future city where everything was glamorous on the outside but rotten to the core. Like a bad apple. She sometimes wondered if her dad had read it, too (if so, he'd obviously never read to the end).

A dark suit fell in step behind her as she crossed the lobby, which was brimming with men and women in lush attire, many obviously hoping for an audience with Harker. One—a gorgeous woman in a cream-colored coat, tried to slip an envelope of cash into Kate's hand, but she never made it past the suit. (Which was too bad. Kate might have taken the bribe. Not that it would have made it to her father.) Instead she kept her eyes ahead until she reached the golden elevator. Only then did she turn, survey the room, and offer the edge of a smile.

“People are users. It's a universal truth. Use them, or they'll use you.”

Another line from Callum Harker's manual for staying on top.

And Callum Harker
had
been on top, or at least on his way up, for a
very
long time. He was a man good
at making three things: friends, enemies, and money (most of it illegal). Long before the Phenomenon and the chaos, before the territory wars and the truce, he was already becoming a kind of king. Not on the surface, no, that title belonged to the Flynns, but all cities were icebergs, the real power underneath, and even in those days Harker had half of V-City in his pocket. So when the shadows started growing teeth, when the neighboring territories shut the borders, when panic drove people out of the city and then the people outside the city drove them back, when everyone was terrified, Harker was there.

He had the vision—had
always
had the vision—and then suddenly he had the monsters, too. And it seemed so simple: go with Flynn and live in fear, or go with Harker and pay for safety.

And it turned out, people were willing to pay
a lot
.

The Harker penthouse was minimalist and sleek: more marble and glass, interrupted by dark wood and steel. There were no servants up here. No suits. Everything about the apartment was cold, full of sharp edges, no place for a family. And yet, they had been one here. They'd lived in the penthouse, all three of them, in those short months after the truce and before the accident. But when she dragged through her memories, searching for
home
, the images were all mixed up, open
fields and distant trees, broken glass and buckling metal.

It didn't matter.

She was here now. She would make it hers.

“Hello?” Kate called out.

No one answered. She hadn't expected a welcoming party, a how-was-your-day-sweetheart. They'd never been
that
kind of family. Her father's private office was attached to the penthouse, but it might as well be its own apartment, its own world. The massive doors were shut, and when she brought her good ear to the wood, she heard only a low and steady hum. Soundproofing. Kate pushed off the doors and turned back toward the rest of the loft.

Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sun was just starting to sink behind the taller buildings. She tapped a panel on the wall, and the lights came on, flooding the space with artificial white. Another tap, and the heavy silence was broken by music pouring out of speakers across the apartment. She kept her eyes on her father's office and held her finger down; the volume rose and rose until the sound vibrated in her chest and made the empty space feel full. Her steps were lost under the beat as she made her way to the kitchen, climbed onto a stool at the counter, and unpacked her bag. The Colton workload was daunting, but she'd spent years at boarding schools that seemed to have nothing better to do than
assign homework. In among her papers was a handout on university preparations titled, “Life after Colton” filled with options, most inside Verity, but a few beyond. The borders had reopened two years ago on a heavily restricted basis—the territory was still a closed zone, under Quarantine Code 53: Other—but Kate imagined a few of the Colton kids had enough connections to get transport papers to go with a university invite.

After all, the other territories
wanted
Verity's brightest minds.

They just didn't want their monsters.

She tossed the booklet aside.

A stack of fresh medallions sat on the marble counter, heavy iron disks with the ornate
V
branded onto the front. Kate spun a pendant absently between her fingers. Iron. It was true that monsters loathed the stuff, but it wasn't the metal that bought safety. It was Harker. Anyone could hang a piece of metal around their neck and hope for the best, but these were special.

The back of every medallion was engraved with a number, and every number was—or would be—assigned to a person; a ledger in her father's office kept track of every soul who purchased his protection from the things that waited in the dark. Not because the monsters feared the metal. Because the monsters feared
him
.

She snapped her fingers, spinning the medallion again, watching the two sides flash past over and over.

No pendant, no protection. That was Harker's law.

As the disc wobbled, she felt something move behind her. She couldn't hear it, not over the pounding beat of the stereo system, but she knew, instantly, in that hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck way, that she wasn't alone anymore.

Her hand drifted under the lip of the counter, and closed around the handgun strapped against the granite. By the time the medallion fell, she was on her feet, the safety off, and the gun raised. She looked down the sight, and found a pair of bloodred eyes staring back.

Sloan.

Six years ago, she'd come home to V-City, to her father, and found
Sloan
at his side. Dressed in a tailored black suit, her father's favorite Malchai looked almost human. He had Callum Harker's height, if not his build, and Harker's deep-set eyes, though Sloan's burned crimson where Harker's shone blue. But if her father was an ox, Sloan was a wraith, the dark bones of his skeleton just visible through the thin vellum of his skin. With his pallor, Sloan looked sick.
No
, thought Kate. He looked
dead
. Like a corpse on a cold day.