Chapter 28
It’s possible some rain god was listening to me, because it is absolutely bucketing tonight.
Not the cute kind of rain that sprinkles your eyelashes and just the pretty front pieces of your hair but the kind of rain that seeps into the padding of your bra.
That leaves you shivering well after you’ve gotten into a hot shower.
And I’m in heaven.
“Shouldn’t we be staking out farther south?” Sophia asks, whipping her wet hair away from her face. “Where all the criminals are?”
The blond groupie from the armory, a second year I’ve learned is named Ingrid, pouts. “Only if you want to get knifed by one of the White Stag’s thugs.”
I recognize the name as someone Nora’s nonprofit raises money to put behind bars.
“What if I do?” asks Lyra Roth, a second year with gray eyes like mine and even paler skin. “Then Reid will excuse me from Field Training and I can go see the Chasm.”
“I will?” Reid asks, scowling.
Lyra ignores him. “I heard people BASE jump down there.” As we walk, her soaked dark braids tap rhythmically against the battle-axe strapped discreetly beneath her shirt.
“If you BASE jumped into the Chasm, I think I’d have to marry you,” Elliot says, megawatt smile slick with rain.
Lyra flutters her eyelashes at him. Reid ignores them as we stroll around a pristine NTC town house and cross a freshly painted crosswalk, glowing yellow under the sideways-slanting rain.
He looks more like a demon tonight, the glow of the streetlights harsh on his wet brows and cheekbones.
Like someone I’d fight in an empty park or an abandoned bodega.
More dangerous than when he’s in his unassuming athletic sweats, surrounded by eager students and soothing, swaying elm trees.
More dangerous tonight and, somehow, more alluring.
“Maybe our instructor here could go first,” Lyra says. “Wave hello to his old buds.”
The laughs of the other second years rise over the rush of water in the gutters at our feet. But it’s not a cruel sound. More like they’ve been hunting alongside Reid for long enough to stop fearing him and get a kick out of annoying him instead. It makes him even less hateable, unfortunately.
“I don’t think people actually BASE jump,” I tell them. “But there is a bar at the edge.”
“A bar? At the Chasm?” Lyra’s eyes go wide, and I realize that for a lot of these Harker students, even second years, Astera is a place of myth.
The birthplace of the Chasm, the earliest and largest gateway to the underworld.
I’ve always kind of taken it for granted that I grew up hunting at the pinnacle of deviant phenomena.
And even though I’m not in my own neighborhood, it feels good to be back.
It’s been too long since I’ve been in the city. Seen Penny or Hound or even James.
“It’s called Rock Bottom. I’ve never been, but we could go after this.”
“Or we could go clubbing.” When Lyra brushes rain from her eyes, I notice the fading white shimmer of a club stamp on her wrist.
Sophia’s eyes light. “Hell yes.”
“Or you could pay attention to the hunt,” Reid says gruffly.
But Sophia ignores him. “I haven’t gone out in forever. Let me have this.”
“You go out in the city all the time,” I snort.
Sophia frowns. “Well, I didn’t get to do anything fun all summer. I’m making up for lost time.”
“Because you were grounded all summer,” Elliot clarifies.
Lyra looks impressed. “What’d you do?”
Sophia sighs dramatically like the story is too painful to share. Elliot tosses an arm over her shoulders and pretends to cover her ears. “We don’t talk about the swim meet incident.”
“The swim meet incident?” Learning about Sophia’s past is like digging into a multilayered dessert created by a six-year-old. One bite, chocolate. The next, lemon. The one after that? Fritos.
“I came into my abilities like a week before this dumb swim meet Elliot’s younger brother was competing in. The school had a selkie problem. I handled it. End of story.”
Ugh, selkies. According to Professor Crowley, they’re part of the changeling family—which means they like to steal or swap personal items with the mortals they prey on in the hope of disguising themselves and luring unwitting victims into the water.
Elliot smirks. “Sophia ended up topless in front of the entire swim meet crowd, and her parents grounded her until she got to Harker to teach her about responsible hunting.”
“You’re the one who trapped the selkie in the locker room,” Sophia says with a shove.
“Yes,” Elliot concedes. “But I didn’t flash half the water polo team.”
“She took my shirt!”
“Wear a bra!”
Sophia throws his arm off her. “Never!”
Lyra and I snicker with some of the other students, but Reid’s stony expression doesn’t change.
“I fought a selkie on a family cruise as a kid,” Lyra tells us. “She appeared to guests as the entertainment director and coerced them into conga lessons. And then threw them overboard and ate them.”
Sophia nods in thought. “I actually don’t know if that sounds worse than conga lessons.”
But my mind has snagged on something Lyra’s said. She was hunting as a kid? As in, came into her powers early? I study the second year—another aeon? Or maybe she just meant helping her parents or watching them fight…I scan the rest of the small group. Nobody else seems fazed.
“Enough chatter,” Reid interrupts before Lyra can tell us more. “Hunting requires focus.”
“First you make us walk for an hour in the rain,” Lyra whines at him playfully. “Then you deprive us of Astera’s famous nightlife. Now we can’t swap war stories. What’s next on this journey through hell?”
“Don’t knock the rain,” Reid says quietly.
I lift my head to feel it splatter across my face. Inhale the cleansing smell of wet pavement. “Seriously. Throw in a dip in the ocean, and this could be a perfect night.”
After my dad died, I swore the inky-black waters of the sea surrounding Astera would call to me. A twisted way to be close to him somehow. To be where he last was. To feel what he felt as the waves tugged him under.
Ingrid gasps beside me. “The ocean? At night? In this downpour?”
I can’t even hide my smile.
Elliot stares at me like I’m an alien. “You’re into some weird shit, huh?”
Reid’s chuckle sends a jolt of heat through me. It’s such a rare sound, hearing it feels like I’ve won something.
“It’s nice,” I say. “It’s like…”
“Being inside something bigger than yourself,” Reid supplies. “Water around you and above. Darkness so vast you can’t tell where you stop and everything else begins. Sounds like peace to me.”
“Yeah,” I manage. “Exactly.”
“Oh god,” Sophia says. The trees above her rattle, battered by the downpour. “You’re both gonna drown.”
“No night swims tonight.” Reid’s eyes are on the dripping awnings and blurry, rain-flecked streetlights. “Focus on the hunt.”
“Fine by me,” Lyra hums. “It’s been too long since I sliced and diced.”
I cut my eyes sidelong at her. It sounds like something I might say.
For a while we heed our orders. We scan the streets North of the Chasm looking for anything out of sorts. I feel a bit like a cheat, knowing that if there’s a deviant nearby, I’ll sense it long before everyone else.
It’s quieter up here than it is down in Babylon.
The air smells better, the rain bringing out scents of jasmine and fresh coats of paint.
I think that’s the NTC altitude, but also all the trash has been tucked away, so there are no ripening dumpsters like there are down where Penny and I live.
No graffiti, no peeling posters or vandalized signs, no people living on the street.
“How long are we gonna wander this fancy neighborhood until we call it a night?” Sophia asks Reid.
Ingrid nods in solidarity. “We haven’t seen anything in a while.”
“It’s Astera,” Reid tells them. “There’s always something.”
After we’ve passed a wrinkled woman tending to her plants under an umbrella and a socialite Sophia recognizes walking her dogs, I’m inclined to agree until my back breaks out in shivers like a rusted nail is sliding along my spine. When we prowl around the corner, I see her.
Lurking beneath a golden pool of light from a lamppost is a woman watching the rainy street like a bear over a stream rife with salmon. She’s hunting too.
“There,” I say quietly. “At the corner.”
Reid’s voice is just as low as we slow our pace. “What is it, Thompson?”
“A vampire, right?”
“Close. Valentine?”
Sophia cocks her head, assessing. “A demon, I think.”
“She’s a strzyga,” I tell them. “Her proportions are a little off—legs too long, head too large. She’s starting to shift into her deviant form and needs to eat quickly to stave off the transition.”
It’s not their fault. Vamps, lycanthropes, and demons look identical to humans until a hunter catches them in the act of killing or right before it.
Some hunters at Harker have claimed to have a sixth sense about these things, clocking demons from across a crowded restaurant with nothing but a gut feeling, but they’re full of it.
Nobody who’s an aeon would ever out themselves as one.
Reid looks like he’s about to say something, but he doesn’t get the chance.
A wicked crack of lightning illuminates our strzyga right as she zeroes in on her prey.
Under a briefly violet sky, a couple on a moped swish by over rainy asphalt, and she takes off after them, gangly limbs moving at odd angles.
It won’t be long until she’s on all fours.
Thunder rumbles in my bones as we hurtle after her.
I’m the fastest—dodging speeding cars and taxicabs in the pouring rain like a flitting hummingbird—but once we slip down an alley and out of sight of the busy avenue, Sophia’s able to land a few solid shots with her crossbow.
Nothing damaging, though. Not enough to slow the beast. When I catch up to her, I choke on horror.