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“Hey.” He stepped into the alley. The nyk didn’t hear, or didn’t care to hear, probably thinking he was the apex predator in these parts. Saint moved closer. “Hey, nyk.”
The nyk lifted his head, which took some effort, since he had his fangs deep in his victim’s neck. Scruffy and reeking of body odor, he didn’t look like much. Nobody had nurtured this one, and his madness was apparent in his rabid snarls.
The nyk jerked his chin, sniffing the air. He dropped his victim, assuming he’d get back to his meal later. “You take a wrong turn, suit? Manhattan is that way.” He jerked his head, indicating back the way Saint had walked, then started forward.
Was hestalkingSaint? Oh dear.
Saint sighed, then smiled and reached up to remove his sunglasses. He folded them, tucked them into his pocket, and looked up. The nyk saw his eyes, saw them shimmer silver, and his shoulders dropped. He smiled. “Hey man, come to join the party, eh—?”
Saint was on him before the last words could leave his lips. He bit down, pumping enough venom to kill several nyks, then shoved him against a dumpster and licked his fangs clean. “Nyks like you give the rest of us a bad name.”
Whether he heard or not didn’t matter. He turned to dust in seconds, with no time to scream.
Welcome to New York.Saint brushed ash from his hands, already dirtying up his new clothes, and slipped the shades back on.
Strange. Young nyks didn’t risk daylight hunts, even the rabid ones.
The slumped, panting victim caught his eye. He knelt next to the semi-conscious man, rummaged through his pockets, found his phone, dialed 911, and slotted the phone into his hand. “Tell them where you are. You’ll be fine.” He patted him on the shoulder and returned to the street. Manhattan was ahead, according to the nyk, the same direction he’d sensed Octavius.
Sirens wailed nearby, then faded again.
Dread slithered under his skin, as though he were being watched from theinside. Something was wrong, and it was more than just the empty streets and the nyk attacking in daylight.
He stopped on the sidewalk. Jay was safe, just so long as he stayed inside, but if this was the beginning of the end, then Octavius needed Saint. The Brotherhood would need him. Eyes closed, he reached out with his senses, summoning the welcome memory of Octavius’s touch, his taste, his smell, and how his skin gave under the pressure of Saint’s fangs, how he shivered under Saint’s hands. They were so close, he could feel him now, hear his heartbeat.
And he knew exactly where Octavius was.
They’d get their sunset ending, but not before Saint found his little wolf, and knowing Octavius as he did now, he’d probably find him right in the thick of it.
CHAPTER33
Octavius
Society was beginning to unravel,thread by thread. Phones, communications media, emergency services. Atlas appeared to be dead, and without a way of communicating with the system, there was no way to hack back in to undo the damage done. Given days, weeks, months perhaps, he might be able to fix this. But they didn’t have that time. So the Brotherhood did what they’d been doing for thousands of years. They fought nyks.
Eric phoned Zaine to warn there were possible nyk sightings popping up all over the city, in daylight, and then the cell towers died, and most all of New York’s residents found themselves alone, cut off from the rest of the world.
And the Brotherhood went to war.
Octavius traveled in one of two black panel vans, with Zaine and Storm, while Felix, Aiko, and Kazimir traveled in the second. They split up to cover more ground.
They drove by a group of men throwing concrete blocks through a store window. Human crimes weren’t their responsibility. First responders shot by with flashing lights and wailing sirens, but roads were quieter than usual for a Manhattan morning. Some taxi drivers had pulled over, locked out of tracking their fares.
Some of the cell towers came back online and Zaine’s phone pinged multiple messages. “Turn right up here. Eric says there’s reports of a gang ofinsane rioters killing multiple people.”
“Not our problem,” Storm grumbled.
“Yeah, except Eric says one person reported seeing themdrink blood,so right up our street. He also says, uh, and I’m quoting,you need to do something—you can’t hide from this… I’m pretty sure he means us.”
“He’s right,” Storm said, and swung the van down a side street, into the shade of a high-rise, and there they were—five nyks tearing people from their cars and ripping them apart. But these weren’t typical nyks, these were freshly turned and rabid with hunger.
Storm screeched the van to a halt and they all decamped, ready to attack. Storm went in first, using just his claws to rip in to the nyks. Zaine plucked one off a dying human, pumped it full of venom, then discarded it to move on to the next. Octavius wiped out the first he came to without breaking his stride. Four Brotherhood on five rabid nyks meant the assault was over as quickly as it had begun, with all the nyks turned to dust in seconds.
But the damage done before they’d arrived was extensive. The local convenience store burned, its sirens screeching. Windows had been smashed. Flames reflected on the shattered glass in the street, and bodies were scattered all over.
Zaine’s phone pinged again. “We got more. Let’s go.” Back inside the van, he reeled off a list of locations.
“How are there so many nyks?” Octavius thought aloud. “There’s no way we missed this in our backyard.”
