I had about two seconds to decide who to trust.
On the one side of the door stood a man who had killed the last Progenitor. On the other side of my life stood a boy who had laughed at my terrible jokes since our first week of school, and something on my roof knew his heartbeat.
I unlocked the door.
Cassian stood in the hallway with his coat torn at the shoulder and a long, thin shape wrapped in cloth strapped across his back. His gray eyes went straight past me, to the curtains, to the cold, to the slow scrape moving across the ceiling.
"Invite me," he said. "Quickly."
"Cassian, come in."
He stepped over the threshold, and the air in the room changed, like a held breath finally let go. He crossed to the window without another word, pressed two fingers against the glass, and snatched them back as if burned.
"It is not alone," he muttered.
"What is it?"
"A Hollow." He said the word like something he'd tasted too many times. "It is what is left when the blood takes a man and finds nothing inside to hold on to. Ancient ones sleep beneath the oldest bloodlines. The red moon wakes them as well. They hunger for the First Blood above everything." His eyes flicked to me. "And they like to use the people we love."
My phone buzzed in my hand, and I looked down, even though every part of me knew better.
It was a photograph. Marcus, asleep on his side, one arm hanging off the bed, a glowing phone clutched in his fingers, the same phone that had said Liar. Eat something. Behind his head, the window of his bedroom was open a hand's width.
The timestamp read: Now.
Beneath it, three words.
Come and watch.
"No," I whispered.
"David." Cassian's hand closed on my arm. "It wants you to run. It wants you out in the open, hungry and frightened and alone. That is the entire purpose of the photograph."
"He's my friend."
"I know."
"It's going to kill him."
"I know that too." He didn't let go. His voice was quiet, steady, and without any softness at all, which somehow made it easier to listen to. "So we go together. Do exactly as I say, and do not stop for anything."
Go, said the voice in my head, low and certain. I will show you the way.
I tore my arm free and ran.
I took the stairs four at a time, then five, then stopped counting. My feet hardly touched the steps. Somewhere above me, the roof groaned as something huge and light shifted its weight, and a thin, wet sound drifted down the stairwell, a sound like laughter coming from a throat that had never learned how.
I burst through the front doors into the night.
The blood moon was still up. Even in the middle of the city, between the streetlights, it hung low and swollen over the rooftops, dim and red, and it seemed to be looking directly at me.
"Left," Cassian said, suddenly beside me. I hadn't seen him arrive. "Nine blocks. Do not think about speed. Think about where you want to be."
I thought about Marcus's front door, the crooked mailbox, the porch light that always flickered, and the world stretched.
The streets blurred into long, glowing ribbons. Cars slid past like slow, heavy animals. I leaped a low fence, vaulted a parked van, hit the pavement on the other side without losing a step, and felt nothing in my legs, no burn, no ache, only a wild, clean, terrifying joy.
Careful, the voice murmured. You will like this too much.
I already did.
"The sword," I called over the wind, because I couldn't help it. "Is that the one?"
"Yes." Cassian didn't look at me. "I carry it so I will never forget what it cost."
Marcus's street rose out of the dark. Small houses. Trimmed hedges. Rows of sleeping windows. His house sat near the end, painted a pale blue that looked gray under the moon, with its crooked mailbox and its flickering porch light.
And crouched on its roof, perfectly still, was the thing.
I stopped so abruptly that the road cracked under my heels.
It was tall. Far too tall, folded in on itself like a spider hiding under a leaf. Its skin was the color of wet ash, stretched thin over a body with too many joints, and its limbs ended in long, delicate fingers that curled around the roof tiles, testing them one by one. Its head tilted slowly toward me. It had no eyes. It had no nose. Its face was smooth and blank as an egg, except for a mouth, a long, thin slit that opened a little wider each time it breathed, showing row after row of tiny, perfect teeth.
There you are, said the mouth, and it wasn't in the voice I'd heard on the phone. It was in Marcus's voice. Dude. Dude, are you coming?
My blood turned to ice.
Cassian landed beside me, silent as a falling leaf, one hand already on the cloth-wrapped shape on his back. "Do not listen to it. It takes voices. It has been listening to him all evening."
"He isn't awake."
"He will be." Cassian's head tilted toward the upstairs window. "Hear that?"
I did. A heartbeat, steady and sleepy, and then a sudden jump, a quickening, as someone far above the street sat up in bed.
The window slid open the rest of the way. Marcus leaned out, hair sticking up, squinting in the dark.
"David?" he called, groggy and confused. "That you? What the hell are you doing in my yard?"
On the roof, the Hollow turned its blank face down toward him and smiled with its slit of a mouth.
"MARCUS!" I screamed. "GET BACK!"
The Hollow moved.
I have never seen anything move that fast. One moment it was a folded shape on the roof, and the next it was a long gray blur unfolding like a whip, fingers outstretched, aimed at the open window and the boy inside.
I didn't think. I simply wasn't where I'd been. The pavement vanished, the night rushed up, and I hit the side of the house at a dead run, then up it, boots scraping the paint, then off the gutter and through the air in a leap that no human body should have survived.
My shoulder slammed into the Hollow in mid-lunge.
The impact rang through my bones like a bell. We hit the roof together, tiles shattering, and it shrieked, high and thin, a sound that made every window on the street rattle. Its fingers dug into my chest. I felt skin tear, felt hot blood soak my shirt, and something inside me woke up.
The world went red.
Not the red of the moon. A deeper red, a red that came from inside me and poured out through my eyes, through my skin, through the air itself. The fingers on my chest let go all at once.
I heard my own voice speak. But it wasn't my voice. It was older, wider, with layers beneath it like a chorus of thousands, and the words weren't in any language I knew.
"Kneel."
The Hollow froze, mid-snarl. Every joint in its long body locked. The slit of its mouth snapped shut. For one heartbeat, that blank egg of a face turned toward me, and I swear it trembled.
Then, as I watched, it bent. Slowly. Painfully. Fighting every inch. One of its long knees touched the roof.
Enough, the voice said gently, inside me. You will tear yourself apart.
The red drained away. I swayed, gasping, as strength poured out of me all at once, and the Hollow's head snapped back up.
It lunged for my throat.
A flash of silver cut across the dark. Cassian came down from the sky with the cloth peeled from the blade, a long, narrow sword that gleamed like captured moonlight, and the Hollow's arm went spinning off into the night, spraying black fluid across the roof tiles. The creature screamed again. It twisted away, scuttling backward over the ridge of the roof, and for a moment the three of us stood frozen, breathing hard, an impossible tableau under the red moon.
"Marcus," I said hoarsely.
I turned.
He was standing at the open window, one hand gripping the frame, staring at me.
At my eyes. At the blood on my shirt. At the torn roof and the black, steaming fluid dripping from the gutters.
At the man standing beside me with a sword.
"David?" he whispered.
The Hollow made a soft, wet, clicking noise from the shadows behind the chimney. When it spoke again, it spoke in Marcus's voice, perfect, cheerful, and a little bit mocking.
Lovely heartbeat.
Then it dropped over the far side of the house and was gone, a long gray shape dissolving into the dark. The street went silent. A dog began to bark. Somewhere, a light flicked on.
I stood on the ruined roof, shaking, as the strength finally drained out of my legs. Cassian sheathed the blade without taking his eyes off the horizon.
I looked down at my chest. Four deep gashes ran through the ruined shirt, and as I watched, the edges crept together, the skin knitting itself shut with a faint, hot itch, until only four pale lines remained. Then even those began to fade. I should have been amazed. Mostly I felt tired, and a little sick, and very aware of how easily it could have been Marcus's chest instead.
"It will return," Cassian said quietly. "It has tasted you now. It will not stop."
"I know."
"David." Marcus's voice came from below me, thin and cracked. "Please tell me this is a dream."
I looked down at my best friend. At his wide, terrified eyes. At the boy who had texted Liar. Eat something and meant it. And I understood, with a sick, sinking certainty, that there would be no more lying about the gym.
Now he knows, said the voice, softly, almost sadly. The question is what you will do with that.
"No," I said to Marcus, and my voice shook. "It's not a dream."
Lights were snapping on up and down the street. A man in a bathrobe stood on his porch two houses away, staring at the sky.
"Down," Cassian said. "Now, before the whole block wakes."
We came off the roof the way I'd gone up, though more carefully. Marcus met us at his front door in socks and a faded T-shirt, trembling all over, and when I reached for his shoulder, he flinched.
That tiny movement hurt more than the claws had.
"Sorry," he said at once. "Sorry. I just—" He swallowed. "Your eyes were glowing, man."
"I know."
"And that thing had my voice." His own voice cracked. "My voice, David. It was using it."
"It won't hurt you again," I said. I wanted so badly to mean it.
Cassian shook his head once, grim. "That is a promise you cannot keep. It has marked him. He is bait now, whether we wish it or not. Alone, he will not survive the week."
Marcus looked from him to me. "Who is this guy?"
"Someone who's helping."
"Someone who has a sword."
"That too."
Cassian almost smiled. "He is clever. Good."
Marcus drew a long, shaky breath, and then did something I never would have expected. He straightened. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, stepped back inside, and returned a moment later with sneakers, a jacket, and his phone.
"Okay," he said. "I'm coming with you."
"Marcus—"
"You've been lying to me since this morning, and I let you, because I figured you'd tell me when you were ready." His eyes were red, but they were steady. "You're ready. Start talking."
He is braver than you gave him credit for, said the voice.
I know, I thought. That's what scares me.
Behind the chimney, in the dark where the Hollow had vanished, something small and wet clicked in the silence. Like a mouth, smiling.