Page 56 of Monster Queen Rising

Then she looks up at Fen, and whatever she sees there, she stops.

"Subject Vex," she says. Quiet. Not cruel. Reading the name off the oldest file she has.

"Fen," he says.

It's the only word he gives her. It's the whole of it.

I don't look away. With one swipe, Fen cuts her jugular.

The room goes quiet again. Fen stands over it a moment, breathing, the shift nowhere in him now, just the man. Then he turns from her and comes back and gets under Crull's arm, and Crull leans into him, and the two of them are steady against each other.

"We go," Fen says.

Crull between us, Fen taking his weight, the bag at my hip, and nothing alive behind us. Fen shoulders the broken service door and we step into the gravel and the cold clean air after the chemical inside.

Thaw's at the truck in the trees, engine running. Harek has Crull on the tailgate before I've crossed the gravel, hands already moving — pressure. The twins come in from the east with the cold-storage cases, Daron first, Dean a step behind with his jaw wrecked from a fear that hasn't finished leaving him.

"Through and clean," Harek says. "He'll keep."

Crull's on the tailgate, the slate gone ashen at his mouth, the round through his shoulder still leaking dark down his arm.

"Nothing wrong with me," he says.

There's a hole through his shoulder.

Dean laughs — once, wet, cracked wide open — and it goes around the field like a thing let loose, every line catching it at once, because it's the first sound any of us has made since ending Linden.

Fen's at my back and hasn't moved off it. I turn into him, the bag between us, my hands still red where they fist in his shirt.

"You stepped back," he says. "Up there. You let me have her."

"She was yours."

His arms tighten, and for a moment he doesn't say anything, and I feel the thing move down the line that he doesn't have the words for out loud. He needed that.

Thaw's got the back door open. "Get him in. Harek rides with him. We roll."

I climb in beside Crull and take his good hand, and Fen shuts us in, and the truck pulls out of the trees. Behind us the building stands dark against the moonless sky, every window black now, the forty-year study closed.

Chapter twenty-one

Fen

I want her.

My hands are shifted. It comes up with the wanting now, the same as it comes up with a threat, and there is no threat in this house.

Only her, down the hall, with the door left unlatched.

Crull is on the porch. His line is low and steady and closing. Thaw has the drives. The house is asleep.

Nothing is coming tonight.

There is a light under Madison's door. She is up. She is always up now.

I go past.

I stand outside Jen's door and my hands will not open.