Chapter 15 Kai
THEY WERE HALFWAY TO THE train station when the streets of Cadence descended into chaos as people fled from the pale white things roaming around, yelling about ghosts. Except Kai knew they were no ghosts.
Jae stared in horror at the two corpselike, vacant-eyed creatures ambling down the street. “What in the name of the Tides…”
The sound of an engine cut off the rest of their sentence as a motorcycle blew past them, then came to a screeching halt. Vera jumped off and bounded toward them, face as white as the two monstrosities she kept eyeing.
“So, uh, bad news,” she said. “The Reanimator escaped from the Institute.”
“What?” Jae exclaimed.
“All I know is Artem Orlov was the one in charge of transferring her sometime before dawn. I saw him come in—with Virgil, which I thought was odd. She must have escaped while they were transferring her.” Vera motioned to the reanimated corpses. “Clearly, she’s been busy.”
“That’s not her doing,” Kai said grimly. “At least, not really.”
Jae blanched. “Kai, what did you do?”
Kai bit back on the shame Jae’s expression called up inside him—and anger at himself for not having brought it up earlier in the commons, but what was he supposed to have said?
Hey, sorry to throw yet another wrench in our plans, but I brought back reanimated corpses from Freyia’s nightmare and, though I did manage to get rid of most of them, some got away from me and are now terrorizing the streets of Cadence?
He’d thought at the very least the nightmares would have disintegrated into dust by now; it had been long enough. As he stepped closer to one of them, he did see it was slowly starting to fade. Sleep, he thought as he touched the thing of nightmare. It vanished before his eyes.
He turned to the other one and froze, recognizing the red hair, the scornful expression.
Bleak realization hit him. Because if Lizaveta Orlov’s corpse had been in the Reanimator’s nightmare—clearly more memory than dream alone—then maybe Artem really was at the center of all this.
“We need to find Brysden. Now.”