“Zach, Roxy, take the stairs. Hopefully you can confirm a balcony,” Bryce said.
Gina and I planted our feet and held steady. The room was motionless, soundless. If there was a redbill here, it was the quietest I’d ever encountered, that was for sure.
Our eyes continued scanning the dark. I reached up and slowly picked a spiderweb off my chin.
“Balcony confirmed,” Zach murmured over the comm. “No movement.”
Gina stepped forward, and I looked behind us for any stirring. Still nothing.
She signaled me with her hand, and I followed her deeper into the thick beams and abandoned furniture.
Thwap, thwap.
The sound tore through the silence. Gina and I spun toward it. I planted my heels to secure my stance, the slick metal of the trigger under my finger.
A sudden, bright thrashing and whirling engulfed Gina’s head. I jerked back and adjusted my aim, trying to get a bead on the cloud flailing above Gina’s shoulders—until I heard a quick, flustered cooing.
“Pigeon,” Gina gasped. She swatted at the bird, and it tumbled down to the wooden floor then bobbed off, its feathers mussed, vanishing into the gloom.
I pulled the tip of my weapon back up and away from my teammate, my hand instinctively pressing against my breastbone. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. Holy hell…
The two of us stayed there for a moment, catching our breath. In the resumed quiet, we peered around for any other movement.
Zach spoke again. “Moving to western balcony.”
After scouting the rest of the room, Gina gestured toward the staircase. “Attic clear,” she whispered into her comm.
I watched my feet as I followed her, to avoid kicking a table leg or brushing any dust-choked sheets. I glanced around in search of the staircase we’d come up, when Gina stopped abruptly. I nearly walked into her and quickly side-stepped. Then I saw why she’d stopped.
A figure stood directly before the staircase, blocking our only way out.
As I stared, I realized I could barely call it a figure—it was more a blanket of obscurity. No clear shape to the body. An empty space of jet black, only finding form against the slightly subtler grays of the room it stood in.
My eyes strained to trace the outlines of the figure’s shadowed face.
“Hello?” I called out, my voice reverberating through the attic, seeming to fill every jagged crack and crevice.
Silence. Stillness.
That was the only response from the living shadow in front of us.
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I felt a chill, thick and contagious. It spread down my spine, gliding through my extremities with a frigid wake. Still, I gave a small wave, beckoning Gina to follow me forward.
Thoughts tumbled through my mind. It’s not a redbill. That much is obvious. And we’re highly trained. If it’s a squatter, or some psycho, we can defend ourselves.
Not to mention, this was our only way out.
Gina stayed two steps behind me as our boots crept closer to the figure and our exit point. A few feet away, I saw a face begin to take shape amidst the darkness of its boundaries. His boundaries, I realized. And his eyes… My heart froze in my chest. Something about his eyes was so familiar, yet so foreign, that I felt my brow furrow, my mind scrambling to understand. I couldn’t make out their color from here, but there was… something about them.
I felt my body tense suddenly—some primordial instinct that somehow pieced the puzzle together and hardened before my brain had a chance to do the same.
Then his hands were on me.
And despite his impossible speed, I felt it happen in slow motion. Like an almost-lucid dream, one where I was a full participant but couldn’t respond fast enough. My gun clattered to the ground, the sound echoing off the thick, wood-slatted floor. My comm was ripped from my ear and my body was heaved over his shoulder.
In the time it took me to gasp, he crossed the room. So light and fast it felt like we were floating, then, without warning, angling upward. I saw it in a blur—the window. He was scaling the wall to the window. I regained my voice, shrieking frantically into the attic space, and heard Gina’s voice yelling back. A gunshot rang out, but the man didn’t falter. My screams grew stronger as Gina’s grew farther away, and I was plunged into empty space with only the body beneath me to cling to.
We were freefalling. As we plunged toward the ground, he made a sound—a sharp, guttural growl—and a huge shape appeared out of nowhere.
Broad wings and thin, dangling legs. An extended beak that had featured in my nightmares a few hours before. A redbill.
It swooped under us, catching us with a heavy shudder as the man straddled it.
What is happening?
I didn’t have time to ask myself anything beyond that. To think. To wonder. I barely even had time to breathe. Because a moment later, the redbill accelerated to cut through the air like a torpedo. I knew redbills could fly fast. But this—this was beyond comprehension.
The world screamed by in a blur, too fast and jumbled to be anything but a mix of faint colors and the meshing of space and time. My helmet flew off my head, and I gasped, choking on the wind. I felt the skin on my face being pulled backward. My eyes burned. And I clutched his cloak with everything I had.
Until, at some point, I realized we’d slowed. We weren’t clipping through space anymore. I blinked, willing my dry eyes to moisten enough to function. To figure out where we were and what was happening. The surrounding shapes took form just as the redbill landed with a brain-rattling jolt.
Cliff, I grasped. We’re on a cliff. My senses darted in every direction, trying to take everything in. Gray skies splayed out in front of me. Clouds rolled and tumbled in the sky, churning—matching how my stomach felt, tossing and twisting inside me. I heard the roaring of waves as they crashed into the cliff, salt spray cutting up into the air.
The man slid gracefully off the bird. The wind billowed through his dark cloak, causing it to flare behind him. He turned to me, and I remembered what I’d pieced together before he’d grabbed me. Before the power and momentum and speed swept all thoughts from my brain. My eyes flew to his face. To his eyes. Wondering if what my instincts had jumped to in the milliseconds before he snatched me could possibly be correct.
The wind swept through his dark hair, and strands of it skated across the pale, yet strangely shadowed flesh of his forehead. I gasped as my gaze caught his once more. I could see his eyes better now that we were free from the dimness of the church attic. Yes, they were blue. But not just blue. They were an icy, crystalline blue that seemed to shift and melt in his very irises, tinges of silver and gray surfacing with them. Like glacial waters, haunting and bottomless.
I knew what those eyes meant. What they were. The depth—the darkness. The shadows. I knew what they were from every story Bryce had ever shared about his past. I was reminded of them every time I saw the cane Uncle Alan still had to use—an ever-present connection to his days as a ground agent, the dangers he’d faced. I knew them from every whisper between my parents. I knew them from so many of the people who had done everything possible to prevent those eyes from ever seeing a human again.
