Chapter 5
The Fen’s Asteran Cineplex marquee—or Fen’s Ast ran Cinepl x, with its missing letters—looms over the dilapidated theater.
Beneath a dusky sliver of moon, shrouded in shadows peeling off of knotted trees, the building sags in the middle of the quiet residential block like a haunted house.
I pull my hoodie down over my face a bit as we scan the property for deviants, but my skin doesn’t so much as tingle.
Still, I could have sworn I felt eyes on me when we left the school and on the train ride over.
But maybe that paranoia’s going to cling to me as long as the syrabraxa does.
“If the Brood doesn’t use this place as a hideout, they should,” Elliot muses. “If only for the aesthetic.”
“I don’t think they’re keeping Reid here,” I say. “I don’t sense any demons. Or any deviants at all.”
Sophia shakes the chain-link fence, examining the keypad at the gate and the rundown property beyond. “Even if we hop the fence, they’ve got security cameras. If this is Brood owned, they’ll come in droves as soon as they see you.”
I pull the hoodie lower.
“We could go back,” Elliot suggests. “Bring Penny tomorrow?”
“No. No Penny.” I am steadfast in that. Even if I don’t want to think about what losing a day might mean for Reid’s fate, I will never put Penny in danger again. “We’ll just have to find a way around the cameras.”
“Oh god,” Sophia gasps. “Penny?”
I spin on a dime and see Penny getting out of a taxi, tipping the cabbie with a sunshine smile. “Have a great night,” she chirps.
“Death wish,” Elliot murmurs to Sophia. “I told you.”
“What are you doing here?” I am the kind of scared that ignites quickly into anger. I try to remind myself that I’ve kept my aeon emotions in check with Penny for nearly a decade and just because she knows what I am now it’s no excuse to show her the worst of me. “You shouldn’t have followed us.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but you need my help. I knew you wouldn’t be able to get in.” She eyes the keypad. “It’s like you said about Reid. I can’t let you all risk your lives and do nothing.”
“Yes, you can. That’s exactly what you can do,” Sophia says. “That’s what you are supposed to be doing.”
“That cabdriver could have been working for Finn,” I tell her, keeping my voice as quiet as possible. A light clicks on in an apartment building two doors down, and I try to look unsuspicious. The last thing I need is the neighborhood watch calling the corrupt, Brood-riddled cops down here.
“But he wasn’t,” Penny says. “It was a calculated risk—you guys take those all the time.”
I breathe deeply through my nostrils and remind myself that Penny is brand-new to all of this.
She may understand the words we are saying—demon, underworld, deviant mafia—but she doesn’t have the fear instilled in her that we do from years of hunting.
She has barely seen what demons—let alone vamps and weres—are capable of.
It’s like teaching Hound not to go into the street.
He hears me, he knows he’ll be in trouble, but he won’t truly fear the road until he almost gets hit by a tour bus on its way up to the Chasm.
“Penny,” I tell her. “You need to go back to Harker.”
“Can I at least turn those cameras off for you first?” She motions at the same security system Sophia was studying.
I bite my tongue as Elliot says, “Yes, please.”
Penny presses her thumb into the keypad, and the little green lights on all the cameras across the site click off. She does the same with another keypad above the padlock on the fence and wrenches it open.
“Biometrics,” Elliot muses. “Millionaire stuff.”
“Kind of silly, I know.” But when Penny looks up at Sophia and me, sheer pride bursts in her eyes.
“Thank you,” I relent.
“You really don’t sense anything?” Sophia asks me.
“No, but maybe they’re out of range.”
Sophia folds her arms. “What are you, an AM radio?”
“The place looks dead to me,” Elliot says. “If you really don’t sense anything, maybe Penny should come in with us. She can open any room we need her to with her magic thumb, we can gather as much information as possible, and get out.”
“Probably safer than sending her back alone,” Sophia adds.
Clouded by anxious irritation, it takes me a beat to realize all three of them are waiting for my final say.
But it’s not Elliot’s nor Sophia’s logic that sways me.
It’s the look in Penny’s big green eyes.
The desire to be a part of something. She isn’t here because her boyfriend’s been taken captive, or due to an instinctual hunter calling, or insatiable bloodlust. She just wants to help her friends. To help me.
“I cannot believe I’m agreeing to this,” I say, but Penny’s already grinning from ear to ear.
“We have to be in and out. Lightning speed,” Sophia warns. Penny nods vehemently.
I repeat the words to myself over and over as we enter the construction site. In and out. In and out. We’ll find Reid. Nobody is going to get hurt. In and out.
“I can’t believe Peter let you follow us,” Sophia admits, stepping over cobwebs and cinder blocks on our way inside. I hack on a lungful of dust as we spin through the revolving Cineplex doors.
“I left the dorm as soon as he went to the library.”
“He’s going to have a panic attack if he returns and you’re gone,” Sophia says, sliding out her phone. “I’ll let him know you’re with us.”
Penny and I walk past a half-gutted concession stand that still smells like artificial butter. We duck under exposed wiring that hangs overhead like vines in a dense jungle, and avoid disintegrating standee posters of faded action stars and women in too-tight dresses.
At every scuttle of rodent feet my muscles tense.
I’m not one to scare easily—masked murderers have nothing on the stuff I spar with on a weekly basis—but the decay and lack of life in this place lingers on my skin.
Perhaps it’s being somewhere that used to be filled with joy and community and laughter, and now is potentially sheltering all manner of violent activities.
“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” Elliot says, peering down one long hallway dotted with empty theaters.
“Elliot and I will take theaters one through seven,” Sophia says, nodding in the direction of his eyeline. “You guys take eight through fourteen. If we need Penny for anything we’ll call you.”
“Fine,” I say even as my stomach lurches at the thought of separating. Isn’t that horror movie mistake number one? But they’re right. We have quite a few theaters to search.
Penny and I wander through each one looking for trapdoors or hidden stairwells.
She opens a locked back office, which reveals nothing but files and files of yellowed paper on screening profit margins and cleaning expenses.
We scour bathroom stalls under flickering fluorescent lights and feel around behind each massive movie screen, inhaling enough debris to cough out a dust bunny.
“There’s nothing here,” I say after at least an hour. “No Brood, and definitely no Reid.”
Saying it aloud hurts more than I expect it to.
Is this what’s in store for me? The rest of my life looking for someone I’ll never be able to find?
I thought I was tired before—still bruised and banged up and desperately lacking sleep.
But now I’m beginning to miss him too. Knowing that this loss will permeate all of my waking moments.
The knowledge that it’s my fault he isn’t here.
My chest aches so hard I have to lean on a red-cushioned theater chair.
“How about the projector room?” Penny offers, though I can tell she’s just being kind. “Up there.”
“Sure,” I say. But I know it’ll be empty. “I’m right behind you.”
She nods, her blond waves bouncing in the dusky overhead lights as she bounds up the aisle to the room above. I squint up at the glass where she’s headed and see nothing but darkness.
I text Sophia, Nothing on our end. Should we get out of here?
And then allow my eyes to roam the dramatic red carpeting, soaring black walls, and imposing screen before me.
It would make so much sense to conduct Brood business here.
The soundproofing. The multiple rooms…A lot of nefarious activity could benefit from this kind of privacy.
And then I feel it.
Like the lick of a cat’s rough tongue. Unpleasant and soothing at once.
There is something here for you to kill.
Across my body, through my limbs, but nowhere more than down my spine.
I vibrate with sinister need. And somehow, as if the images are being scrawled along my body, my mind fills with icy-white hair and antlers dusted with snow and claws as pale as the dawn slicing through meaty flesh—
Though I’ve never felt it before, I can sense not just that a deviant is near, but who specifically. It’s harrowing and electrifying—something new and disturbing, roiling with magic beneath my skin. The syrabraxa has evolved my senses. Heightened me to a new level of aeon hunter.
Then I remember who I’m here with.
“Viv,” Penny calls. “I think I found something!”
Shit, shit, shit—
With every drop of my hunter speed I barrel back up the aisle toward the projector room. Through the darkened hallway and up a set of stairs, lit only by the moonlight pouring through the slats in the crumbling ceiling. Deacon cannot touch her. If he even breathes Penny’s air—
I burst through the doors and find Penny hunched over boxes and boxes filled with old film. “Okay, I know it looks like nothing, but I think these might be—” She takes in my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Deacon. He’s here. Reid’s brother. We have to—”
But I don’t get a chance to finish the words. The werewolf who prowls through the door after me is so stunningly horrific, my breath dies on my tongue.
Lush, golden-brown fur covers every inch of what must be at least eight feet. And under that, clear, defined muscles cording each limb and curve of his abdomen. A monstrous feat. Michelangelo’s David if he carved flesh-devouring beasts.