When I returned, Miles didn’t ask any questions. That felt significant somehow. Either he was committed to his own plausible deniability, or he already knew. Normally, I’d say I was confident he hadn’t been watching me, but considering his background and skill set, it wasn’t a safe assumption.

Before we started to climb, he grabbed me by the arm. “Look. I know you’re trying to limit casualties. It’s part of why I felt comfortable signing on, considering who you’re working with.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sensing some history there. Something about Roderick I should know?”

Miles pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Let's just say I can see the two of us working together in the future. Which isn’t something I’d say about him.”

“This unspoken business, the real reason you took a house in the neighborhood?”

“Pressing me for info isn’t going to get you shit.” Miles looked me point-blank in the eye.

I held my hands up defensively. “Fine. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“I don’t.”

“You were working up to something?”

“Right.” Miles ran a hand through his hair. “It’s fine to give most of these people a pass. They’re obvious amateurs being kept in the dark, getting bossed around by idiots who don’t know how to set up a basic perimeter.”

I studied him. “You want to kill the necromancer.”

“‘Want’ has nothing to do with it.” Miles shook his head. “Remember the one I told you about?”

“The one living in the sewer, yeah. I also remember you saying he didn’t pose much of a threat.”

“No,” Miles corrected, “His creations didn’t pose much of a threat. The necromancer himself was a different story. Shadow hands that came out of walls, tore through flesh like paper. Took down a half-dozen cops and several agents from my department before they got him. Reports from the survivors indicated that they heard the voices of friends and loved ones distracting them, trying to lead them into traps.”

“Kind of buried the lead earlier, didn’t you?” I asked.

Miles shrugged. “Had to know you weren’t going to spook. I’m good, but it’s a numbers game and the numbers aren’t in our favor. I doubt I could do this on my own.”

“Noted,” I said, not thrilled with the turn of events. Miles had been reasonable and even-handed up to this point. Now he was trying to prime me to kill on sight. If what he was saying was true, it was a reasonable stance to take. Even logical.

But it was idiocy to trust a liar without knowing their agenda. Doubly so when you were talking about a fed.

“Let me be clear. We found a loner in a tunnel, luring in the elderly and the impressionable, and he still gave us hell. Imagine how much more dangerous he’d have been if he had organizational support and dozens of people to work on?”

“I get it, enough with the hard sell,” I snapped

“Okay,” Miles said. He didn’t seem particularly confident, but also seemed to realize he’d pushed things too far, and that pushing harder would be counter-productive.

We scaled the outside of the storage building with no issue. Miles used a small red-glowing blade, no bigger than a scalpel, to cut through the glass silently on the upper window, carefully placing the pane inside to give us an entry point on the seventh floor.

The atmosphere changed somehow. It wasn’t directly tied to anything, like the lighting or a smell in the air. Instead, it was a deep feeling of displacement, almost primal, tied into a lizard-brain instinct that something was very wrong.

As we made our way in, the feeling was further supported by the lack of guards. According to Emil, there were plenty in the stairwell, but it seemed like for the most part the floor was abandoned.

“They grabbed more than fifty people.” Miles whispered. Despite his experience, he looked deeply unsettled.

“And?” I replied.

“Where are they?” Miles asked. “Some of them are probably dead, but not all of them. Why aren’t there any voices or posted guards?”

His sudden nervousness was spreading to me secondhand. Every unlocked, orange-painted storage locker that lined the hallways looked like an ambush waiting to happen, every shadow seemed twisted and menacing. Paranoia or not, my instincts rarely failed when something critical was on the line. I forced myself to relax, widening my focus instead of letting it flit from object to object.

That was when I saw it. Ahead of us was an abandoned cleaning cart—the generic gray kind with a bottom and top shelf that you often see in hotels. Its shadow reflected its form, but the angle of the shadow seemed off somehow.

I watched it carefully as we approached, staying close to Miles.

There.

The point of a triangle emerged from the shadow. It curved as it extended out, forming the blade of a scythe. There was an undercurrent of whispers, and Miles paused, his shoulders tense.

And the shadow scythe shot out towards him.

I acted without thinking, shoving Miles forward with both hands and dancing back. The invisible weapon cut a jagged scar through the plaster right next to Miles.

He rolled nimbly, coming back up on his feet with his bow at the ready, a notched arrow pulled to his cheek and pointed at me. I barely even looked at him, still concentrating all my attention on the shadows on the floor. Once the scythe missed, the shadows began to multiply in the space between us, spreading across the floor and up the walls like leaping fountains of darkness.

Picking up on what was happening immediately, Miles fired a shot at the mass of darkness on the ground. His arrow passed through the blackness soundlessly and disappeared. The overhead light flickered and went out as the darkness reached the ceiling.

“Run!” Miles yelled. He turned and sprinted in the other direction, shadows chasing after him. I did the same.

”What should I do?” Talia spoke in my mind, urgently.

I made a snap decision. ”Stay with him. This isn’t something we can fight. And if he finds the lux before we do I need to know about it.”

The darkness nipped at my heels as I ran, the hallway growing darker as light after light was consumed by it. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears as I tried to formulate a plan. If the layout of this floor of the storage center tracked with the previous floors, it was effectively a square of four hallways. I really only needed to keep running in one direction to find Miles, though what we’d do after that was beyond me.

Long, forking tendrils of darkness struck out from the surrounding storage lockers, with sparse space between them. I leapt through, using as a guide, managing to contort my body in such a way that each tendril missed. I was so focused on avoiding the shadow that I botched the landing.

My hands slapped painfully against the ground as I barely avoided hitting my head on the concrete.

Thorns cut into my arm and shoulder as Audrey unfurled, vines latching onto a distant door handle and hauling me forward. I regained my balance and continued to run, my sore feet pounding painfully against the stone floor.

The shadow was right behind me. I could feel the ground giving beneath my heels as I ran. Up ahead, where there should have been a conjoining hallway that led to the left—the direction I’d need to go to meet with Miles—was a mass of darkness so perfect it was difficult to look at.

My only other option was a set of red mahogany doors that looked completely out of place from the rest of the environment. Less like an upper-level office, more appropriate to something more sinister. A perfect entrance to a necromancer’s lair.

Lacking any other choice, I barreled through them, shutting the doors behind me and backing away slowly as I watched the outline of the door. The shadow didn’t follow.

It did what it intended to do. Funneled me here.

The sharp artificial lemon scent of disinfectant reached my nose.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to see. The image Miles had painted, along with my recent experience in region six, had primed me for something horrible, something macabre. Vivisected bodies hung by chains above trenches of blood. Fingers and other extremities suspended in jars of fluid.

Somehow, that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I found myself in what looked like the wing of a medical facility. Unconscious patients wearing blue gowns were tucked into high-end hospital beds lining each side, most hooked to monitors that measured their pulse. There were more than ten on each side. All of them had well-defined musculature, meaning they were likely Users.

“Wake up, dammit. Come on.” A voice called out.

I drew my crossbow and held it in front of me, pointing at the ground as I moved slowly, my imagination running wild. Maybe one of the Users regained consciousness and was trying to rouse the others.

What I found was not so simple.

Instead of a panicked User, or a necromancer adorned in black robes, I found a doctor. Or, at least, a man who appeared to be one. He was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope draped over his neck. His dark hair was receding severely and thinning on top, and his blue eyes were exhausted.

I’d never seen him before. But something about the way he set his jaw was familiar.

He was leaning over a User on an operating table. If the monitoring device next to the table was correct, the man had flatlined.

The doctor rushed away in a controlled panic, returning with a long needle in his neoprene-gloved hands.

“Step away.” I pointed the crossbow towards him, aligning the bead on his eye.

The doctor raised his hands in the air, but didn’t move. Sizing me up, he looked back and forth between me and the body on the table.

“Step. Away.” I repeated, giving each word more emphasis.

“Listen to me,” The doctor said. “That man has been dead for more than two minutes. Serious brain damage starts—“

“—At three. I’m aware.” I interjected. “You killed him?”

The doctor held his silence, but guilt, clear as if it were written in neon, clouded his face.

I pointed my crossbow towards the syringe. “What’s in the needle?”

“Adrenaline,” the doctor answered. “My… companion, says you’re here to cast judgment.”

“Shadow monster in the hallway?”

“Yes. And that’s fine. I don’t care what happens to me. God knows I deserve it. Just let me try to save him.”