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It was the perfect cover for an army of darkness to funnel through because nobody was paying attention to anybody else’s business.
And while the soldiers wove around an obstacle course of humans they didn’t acknowledge, they headed toward the row of crumbling, vacant brick buildings that had been built in the early nineteen hundreds for manufacturing businesses. The fighters seemed to make a point of keeping their paths uncoordinated and crisscrossing, and they filed into various entrances along the waterfront’s collapsing facilities.
Like they were attempting to escape notice.
Evan’s body wanted to go with the others, like any herd animal corralled through a gate with its kind.
He fought the pull, however, backing off until he tripped over something and landed on a rotted-out wooden pallet. As a rusty nail pierced his palm, he lifted up his hand.
That godforsaken black blood gleamed in the ambient light and he thought of the scarred man who had promised to kill him for reasons he did not understand.
“I don’t want this…” he moaned.
As emotion overtook him, Evan endured another spin of his inner roulette wheel of humiliation: Uncle calling him a pussy. His father telling him he was a waste just before the man died. The lieutenants at Bathe rolling their eyes at him.
Mickey pushing him down in the snow when he’d just wanted to protect his cousin.
It was hard to say exactly when Evan’s pain turned to anger. Later, he’d decide that the shift started as he looked at the ones who were like him, even though he hadn’t chosen this transformation.
There was no going back, was there. No undoing what had been done to him.
He was stuck.
So even though there was that true-north pull in the center of his chest, the fury he felt overrode the instinct to stay with the others.
On a surge of aggression, Evan got up and stood on his own two feet. Then he pivoted around and strode against the tide. As he passed the soldiers, they looked at him. He looked back.
He almost wanted one of them to stop him—and not because he was seeking to have his mind changed.
He wanted to… kill something all of a sudden.
The instinct was so foreign to him, he should have been shocked. He wasn’t. The urge seemed as natural as following the others.
And as he considered the disrespect his uncle had always paid him? It was going to come in really fucking handy.
Before he knew it, he was running, and he paid attention to the pounding of his boots, the resilience in his legs, the calm breath going in and out of his lungs. Emerging free of the bleak landscape under the bridge, he linked up with the alley he and that woman had come down, and he went faster and faster, until the buildings were a blur and so were the burned-out car carcasses and the decaying dumpsters he dodged around.
Without any thought at all, he found his way back to the female soldier’s shitty apartment building, and he knew the way inside the walk-up’s sturdy outer door. It was as if he’d been shown everything before, especially where the hidden locking mechanism was, and what code to punch in so the entry would give way. Once inside, he jumped down the stairwell to the basement instead of taking the steps, and as he landed in a crouch, he held his breath and listened. Then he jogged over to the flat’s door, and started to punch in a code—
The entrance opened.
A man with white hair, white skin, and eyes the color of eggshells looked at him. “What the fuck are you doing—we’re late. He hates when we’re late.”
The accent was British aristocrat. The vibe was sociopath. And the narrowed stare was suspicious.
The old Evan would have stuttered. New Evan’s voice was level as hecaught the door and held it open. “I was told to get clothes and weapons first.”
“You better be fast.”
“I will be.”
The other slayer took off and Evan watched him go. Then he entered the apartment. The first door revealed a bathroom that had a dry toilet with a crack in the bowl, a tub with primordial sludge in its stained belly, and a mirror that reminded him of what the inside of the elevator in the office building had looked like, all frame, no reflection.
Just fragments left of what had once been whole.
He kept going.
Door number three was the winner. The size of the boots lined up against the wall told him it was the right place. Small. A woman’s—
