I wasn’t the government’s biggest fan, and making me wait for more than an hour was just another reason I considered throwing away the fancy little metal card that Overseer Two had given me. A few weeks ago, and it would have been Lucas I called first as soon as I got back to New Olympus, firstly for some info, a sit-rep of everything that had been going on, then he would give me shit for leaving unannounced. But this time was different, and so were the circumstances. I’d been gone for two weeks apparently, and the media were making a case about how often I’d been vanishing as of late, about me not taking my job seriously. About the bodies washing up on the Upper West beach.

Not just a couple of bodies, but twenty so far. Dead, most of them

A few of them, apparently (and according to the forums I scoured as I flew back) had still been partly alive when they were found. Barely alive, to be more precise. They would be wishing for death, was the general consensus, because most of them had been gushing with tentacles from large swallowing wounds along their arms and legs, one guy across his back, and a woman from her throat to her hip, like these gnarly tongues of slimy arms that would writhe and thrash and pull. And now it wasn’t only Cassie who had them in her basement, but general hospitals around the city also had to figure out what this little epidemic was doing to people. I would have gone and had a look, but that thing hadn’t reacted too kindly to me the last time we met, so I figured that aggravating them and getting a bunch of nurses ripped apart wasn’t worth it for some pictures.

So yeah, whatever the fuck was going on had just gotten worse since I left. The Mayor, for once, did something smart and issued a partial lock down of the city, but that also meant that her daughter’s goons had more leeway in the streets. Damage Control had been searching through homes—Lower Olympus homes—for anyone suspected of becoming a puddle of organs and slimy purple appendages. The Kaiju Virus is what people were calling it. I know, creative, but the Society itself hadn’t done anyone any favors by keeping their mouths shut. I wasn’t one to vouch for them, but I also didn’t really want to see dead Kaiju kids in alleyways, or missing posters being put up because a mother turned around for just a second and now had to spend lonely weeks searching.

I was pretty much at a crossroads here: either go do this myself, or wait for the SDU.

I could, of course, continue putting out small fires whenever they sparked, but I had been doing that for the better part of two months now and had nothing to show for it. My phone was compromised as far as I knew. Luckily, I hadn’t had it on me when the ceiling collapsed. I had gone back home to grab it, but thought better of it after mulling over everything Cleopatra told me, then I had searched through my closet, underneath my bed, under my desk and even through each and every comic book I owned. Lucas may have been good at what he’d done for so many years, but if I squinted from up here atop this stack of containers, I could see the trail of ants marching into a crack in the asphalt. I found twelve cameras and twenty microphones, a few of each in some of my clothes. Hoodies. T-shirts. Jeans. Shoes. Fuck me, the guy had bugged everywhere in my entire room. And the worst part was that I didn’t even know when he’d gotten the time for that.

The tracker in me was still there, probably still active, too. Gods knew he must have put another one in me somehow when I was unconscious. He wanted to know everything about me, where I was and what I was doing and when. It was by sheer dumb luck that I had been either in my costume for most of the past few weeks, or the outfit that Ava gave me. Home hadn’t been an option lately either. Now he was blind and deaf, and would be coming for a visit sometime soon.

Besides, my powers were running constantly now. My irises hadn’t changed back to blue and my muscles hadn’t started aching yet. If I focused hard enough, I could hear the static in my room from each of the microphones. That was something new for me, something that had been so minute that I thought I must’ve been going nuts trying to find them. My powers weren’t better, they were just more focused. Maybe I wasn’t that much stronger or faster, but if I could squint and see the faint outlines of people through the tiny guard building at the end of the dockyard, then… Well, maybe nearly dying had been a good thing. Not for Lucas, though. The bastard still had answers for me. Gods only knew what Ben had to have gone through from thirteen to nineteen with him.

Maybe that’s why he snapped and got so distant. Lucas broke something inside him.

Lucas, though, hadn’t been the only one with secrets. From the amount of times I used to break my phones doing the superhero thing at the start, I’d had a few extra stashed away in bags all over the city. I knew he must’ve found some of them, because I’d put tiny black threads along the zipper to make sure I knew if someone had opened them. From the ones I had found, eight had been tampered with. A few had been stolen, I figured from broke vigilantes or homeless people, but the impossible few he couldn’t get to—say, on top of a skyscraper—were still secure. See? I had planned some of this out, even if by pure luck. So those phones were the ones I was using now.

And it was on those same phones, specifically a tiny plastic flip phone only really good enough for calling, that I got in touch with Overseer Two. Now, the tiny screen lit up bright blue.

Proceed, the message said. Lucas Freeman is now under surveillance.

I took a deep breath and sighed through my teeth. Okay, I’m actually doing this. The breeze was bitter against my skin and the smell of the lapping waters churned my gut, but turning my back on him was what made me sick the most. He had betrayed me first before I probably even had the chance to say my first words. Lucas had a plan for me the second I was born, and with dad gone and mom partly out of the picture, he’d weaseled his way into my life. I hated having to do this, because a part of me always hoped that we’d figure things out and maybe be equals some day.

Turns out I was just a tool for him to use and manipulate for his own gain this whole time.

One less person I could talk to, laugh with, argue against and ask for advice. I stood, the wind in my hair and the stink of the city in my nose. I swallowed past the lump in my throat, and this time it got stuck sitting in my gut. All I could do now was wonder if he’d ever been genuine to me and mom for the past eighteen years of my life, or if he’d just stuck around because he knew what it would get him in the future. I unclenched my hands, wiped them against my jeans, and looked up at the sky. Stringy clouds blotching out stars, planes and satellites skimming across the sky from one horizon to the next, and somewhere hidden in all of that darkness were problems far, far greater than I would ever like to think about getting closer each day. It was easy for me to leave, just pack up and start a new life in South East Asia for all I cared, because who could stop me?

The only problem was the regime devouring the vastness of space that kept me here.

I was almost a prisoner on this planet, maybe for my own good. The humans were never supposed to be so much of a problem for me. They were meant to be the easier side of the family, the ones that would listen, that would not be a big problem because I was here to save their lives.

But right now, it felt like I couldn’t trust anyone to even make me something to eat.

You don’t become a superhero to make friends, you do it to save the world. Shrike: Black Bird, issue number seventy-eight. If there was one thing Lucas had been right about, it was that.

Coming home tonight was a little different from every other time. I had stood in the alleyway for five minutes, debating whether I should climb the firescape and wait for Lucas to find me, or wait in the darkness of the sky to see if he would actually go inside my room unannounced. It would mean the beginning of the end of whatever existed between us. In the space of one summer, I would be losing the man who taught me how to fly, even though he never could, and my mother.

But the city needed Olympia, and I wasn’t going to change beside a mound of garbage in an alley so dark that the lights passing through wispy curtains barely made a dent in the shadows.

So I climbed, pulling the rusted ladder down and hauling myself up toward the top of the short building. The slim black cat wasn’t waiting for me tonight, and neither was anyone else as I pushed open the window and swung my legs inside. My room hadn’t changed much since I last saw it in what felt like months. Dennie must have come in and made my bed, stacked my comics and even did some of my laundry. I had to, of course, dismantle the entire room to find all the bugs, but the sentiment still mattered. I owed the old man an apology and an explanation. I was supposed to have gotten his medicine and groceries, but had vanished for several weeks. That would come later. First, I drew the blinds and let whatever light slipping through them illuminate the tiny room. Then I did one more sweep of the place, pausing mid-air to listen for the hum of static. Two more underneath a weak floorboard, and another one behind my wardrobe embedded in the wall. I crushed them between my fingers, and sprinkled the bits into the empty trash can beside my desk.

I didn’t feel too comfortable changing in this room, but I wasn’t supposed to. Lucas knew I was here, and also knew that he couldn’t see or hear what I was doing as well as he used to. I had told Overseer Two to track wherever he went, watch him without Lucas ever getting wind of it, because that was the only way I could tell who’s side they’d be on—he had told me that Lucas would never do anything like want to harm me or use me, so I told him that I’d give his people a front row for the proof they needed. I didn’t know how many people Lucas had in his pocket, but I also knew that Overseer Two wouldn’t risk losing me over him, not after I had told him very clearly and thoroughly that today might be the last time he would hear my voice. If it was the city he wanted saved, or the world, then Lucas Freeman wouldn’t be catching buildings and killing villains. Anyone in the SDU, in my opinion, could do Lucas’ job. Hell, Lucas wasn’t even the first person to wear all-black and stalk around the night for something to do. People called him a rip-off.

And people only ever really respected him because he was the only Normal amongst the Olympians. But if we’re all being honest, they probably only kept him there to appease the masses.

Like a pet. A dog that didn’t bark when my dad told it not to, but bit behind his back.

I had to keep telling myself this to make sure I didn’t freeze when I saw him. I was angry and disgusted with him, but it had never crossed my mind that we would one day have to fight.

Because I was used to killing supervillains, not people who had tied my shoelaces.

And speak of the devil.

I had just gotten done putting my boots on when a figure appeared outside my window. I sat on the edge of my bed, waiting for him to move. He was an outline highlighted by the bursts of flickering street lights behind him, almost as if he had appeared from thin air, no sound at all from him climbing the ladder or walking down the alleyway, stepping over puddles and around the bags of garbage just beneath the fire escape. I had never been able to hear him coming. It had been a novelty at first, something cool that fit the bill—but now I remained silent, just as he was doing standing outside my bedroom, his coat snapping in the wind, and his musk of regret in my nose.

Are you gonna stand there all night, bastard, or pretend you wanted to see me?

Lucas didn’t give me the answer for the next five minutes. It was a waiting game that I couldn’t afford to play, but one I indulged him in. The only way he would be able to see me was through the cameras I hadn’t found yet. The lights were off and the blinds closed shut. I would be an outline for him to vaguely make out. On the other hand, I could even see his face through the window, how his hands were balled so tightly in his pockets that his fingernails were cutting into his palm, and then Lucas breathed out through his mouth silently—frustrated, angry, but nothing he can do about it because he still had some kind of agenda in mind. So he glanced one way and then the next, his stubbled jaw caught in the watery yellow lights, and the emptiness of his eyes no better. I stood slowly, hovering just off the floor by millimeters as he rasped his knuckles against my window three times, each one a little harder and forceful, almost demanding me to listen.

To obey and to rush over to the window so I could let him inside my bedroom.

So I made him wait, made him knock six more times—bang, bang, bang—getting so hard it almost sounded like he was trying to break in. The last few were with the side of his fist instead of his knuckles, and that rattled the window pane so suddenly that it cracked and splintered a little.

Then I took my time pulling aside the blinds and acting surprised that he was there. Gods, the look on your face when things don’t go your way. I pushed open the window and smiled at him.

“Been a while since you were last here, old man,” I said. “What the hell do you want?”

Lucas, whatever the case or the situation, was still dangerously intelligent. With his black coat hanging off his shoulders, and the increasingly worse mess that was his hair, he looked like the kind of man who stalked around alleyways waiting to drag someone into the dark and sift through their guts with a blunt knife. He reeked of sweat and adrenaline, of the nicotine patches he kept on his forearm in a place he thinks I had never seen before. The rings of grit and restless nights had long since embedded themselves around his eyes, and I couldn’t imagine having to stare at them every morning if he even took the chance to glance in a mirror. Lucas, frankly, looked like shit. That didn’t stop me from hearing his elevated heart rate or smelling the peppered scent of fear on the back of his neck. I didn’t know what he was capable of, and that’s what scared me the most.

“You returned without telling me, Rylee,” Lucas said. His voice had been torn apart by strain, maybe shouting or time and those foul cigars he loved to have at home. “That’s a violation.”

I raised an eyebrow as I leaned against the windowsill. “Yeah, said who?”

“Me,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “We work together to make sure people stay safe.”

“I never agreed to be your little sidekick.”

In just a blink, he vanished and reappeared in my bedroom, a tiny white feather burnt at its tip falling to the carpet at his feet. Never seen you do that before. I turned, still choosing to lean by the window, my arms folded so he wouldn’t think that I was afraid of him, but a single thought had crossed my mind as I had flown back home: not once had my father complained about so much as a headache, but the second I met Lucas Freeman, my body had felt like my bones had been put to a grindstone every morning. I didn’t know what he was carrying that made me feel this way, didn’t know if he had some kind of nerve agent or chemical or drug that he would put on my clothes or my skin or got secreted by the tiny tracker. I would just be driving myself insane figuring it out.

All I knew was that I wouldn’t be staying around Lucas for long periods of time anymore.

Or maybe ever, judging how this little conversation went.

Lucas had never come to visit me here, but if he’d been able to just appear wherever he wanted like he just did, then he had been in my room more times than I could probably ever know.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Nice little trick,” I muttered. “Never knew Lucas Freeman was a superhuman.”

He grunted, then said, “Secrets are what run this business, you know that.”

“Like the one that made you decide to come over tonight?”

Silence. We stared at each other. Someone was watching us from a few blocks away, someone in the air maybe. I hadn’t turned around to check, but I felt their eyes. Perceived them.

Whatever Cleopatra had given me had done something to my powers. Maybe Adam putting me through a wall and a pillar did something to them, too. But it also meant I heard his heart stutter.

And Lucas’ heart never stuttered. “I’m here because the city’s gone to shit ever since you took your impromptu vacation,” he said to me. “What were you thinking going there, anyway? You didn’t think to consult me? How many people got hurt that night because of you, Rylee?” His voice hadn’t raised, not a single octave higher. “What did you think was going to happen by doing that?”

“It’s a good thing you put a tracker inside me then, wasn’t it?”

“Without it you would be dead.”

“Me?” I asked, tilting my head. “The Daughter of Zeus, dead ‘cause of some rocks?”

“You know exactly what could have killed you, and it wasn’t that.”

Slipped up there, Shrike. Cleopatra was right, you’re slipping.

There had been one other thing that Overseer Two had told me about, something else that had made me wait in the dockyard for so long. They never told Lucas about the Blackwood op.

So why, in Zeus’ name, had he known when to save me or the thing down there?

Well, in my thinking, it was simple: he watched it happen; watched it almost kill me.

The SDU had been watching him a lot longer than I thought. Overseer Two had told me to trust him, to not think that Lucas had been operating under their noses for so long without them noticing something was wrong. Assets become liabilities when they have minds of their own, he had said, and sure, it was crude, but this was the kind of proof I needed that they weren’t on his side.

“Then why did you almost let it happen?” I whispered. Didn’t bother flying toward him. I walked, my boots knocking against the hardwood. I stopped a foot away from him. “Because if you’re so pissed off about me trying to find out information that you could have given me ‘cause you know what kind of mess I’d probably get into, why did you let it almost happen? Lemme guess, Shrike wants to be the superhero again. To make me feel like shit because a human saved me.” And now I hovered to meet his eyes. “You bailed on me when I needed you, kinda like Ben.”

His eyes hardened. Not so much squinted, but walled up. His shoulders tensed, and if I had just been a normal person, I would have probably been hit by a fist getting tighter and tighter in that pocket in his coat. I could hear his grubby sweaty paw tightening and relaxing, and so I waited for him to make a decision. To breathe out slowly and mask it as a normal breath through his nose.

“Ben got himself killed when I tried to stop him.”

“And I’m not worth the honor of a reply to my texts?”

“I’ve been busy,” he said quietly, “doing the job you’re failing at.”

“And the city looks great, doesn’t it, when you’re the one saving the day.”

Lucas raised his chin, breathed in deeply. “It’s not time for whatever problem you’ve got with me to bubble up. People are dying, and you’re arguing, wasting time, when someone could have been saved from turning into a Kaiju. What is it that you want, Rylee? A pat on the back for being impulsive? For going into that building without so much as a plan?” He jabbed a finger into my chest, as if I felt it. “You’re eighteen, but still act the same way you did when you were sixteen. When will you ever realize that every drop of blood you spill is blood spilled for the entire world?”

I swallowed my anger, trying very hard not to let the blood singing in my ears get too loud and too all-consuming. “If you did a better job training me, then we wouldn’t be here. But the third time’s the charm, right? Isn’t that what you tell yourself in your shitty little apartment every night?”

“Even if that was the case,” he said quietly, venomously, “you’d be the worst one yet.”

No, the ball of ice in my stomach didn’t just get colder, heavier—more choking.

“Still,” I said. “I never agreed to be your little sidekick. They were human, I’m not.”

“And that somehow means you can do whatever you want and get people killed?”

I leaned in close enough to see the reflection of my golden eyes in his own empty little balls of gray that were lost deep in the pits of his skull. “No. I just don’t have to listen to you anymore.”

A beat of silence, then: “Zeus’ daughter or not, you’re here on this planet, and look just like everyone else. You eat the same food, talk the same language—bleed the same red blood. Don’t think that you’re better than anyone now, not when the city needs a superhero who actually thinks.”

I tensed my jaw, swallowed past the bitter saliva sitting at the base of my throat. “Then where have you been all these weeks and all those times I needed you most? Where were you?”

“With how volatile you are, telling you that would get a lot of people killed.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, getting closer—he stepped backward. “Don’t trust me?”

His face was illuminated solely by the light streaming through the window, caught in grays and yellows and pale greens from outside. It made him look empty, his eyes ghastly. “Give me a reason that I should. You need to be kept focused, or else you start shaking hands with villains.”

“Oh my Gods,” I whispered. “You told me a few weeks ago that I should stick it out.”

“That’s before I knew you weren’t capable of getting anything useful out of it. That kind of information could have been useful, Rylee. Critical in saving lives and toppling gang hierarchies.”

I couldn’t help it. I smiled. Smiled in fucking disbelief. “And what about you, Mr. Darkness? You couldn’t figure out how to get that information on your own? Because Gods forbid that Lucas Freeman does anything else except feel shitty for getting two teenagers killed!” I jabbed a finger against his chest—another step backward and a grunt of pain. “I do this shit, not you, because you never help me with fucking anything, Lucas. You stopped being useful the day that I graduated high school, but wait a minute, you stole that from me too, because if I’d just stayed that day, then maybe I’d still be in my mom’s house and not here! But you just want things done in your way, the way that’ll keep everything good, and balanced, but that way got Ben killed and so many other kids we’ll probably never know about. So don’t you fucking dare blame me for not being what you want me to be, because if I was, I’d probably be just as dead as any of your boys.”

The next half-moment, Lucas was behind me. And if he was Emelia, then he would have gotten me, but he wasn’t—he was a man, a forty or fifty-something year old man who had been beaten and broken and put back together again several times over. It didn’t matter how much grit he had or determination—the mountains he had climbed, or the swamps and rainforests he had waded through to get to where he was now: a killer in any environment, a hitman that had hunted down the unkillable and brought back their heads for his mantle piece and their spinal cords for his own sick happiness. He was just a human. Just a person. Just a man whose bones I could hear grind and whose muscles I could listen to stretch and contract and then release like a quick trigger. He wasn’t going to punch me. He didn’t swing. His hand just slipped out of his pocket and opened.

Any other time, and I wouldn’t have caught it.

In this dimly lit room, with Cleopatra’s nectar flowing through my veins, with my powers so warm in my blood that whatever light haze of rain I had flown through to get here had all but been turned into mist, I saw it. The glimmer of golden-brown dust on his palm, so little of it that I could have easily thought it was nothing but dead skin falling from his outstretched palm. So many times he had simply let his hands hang loosely from his sides after pulling them out from his pockets as tight fists whenever I had done something to anger him, and not in some secret way, not in some way that would alert me—anyone on the planet would do the same thing without getting noticed.

Not this time; not anymore.

I grabbed his wrist before the dust could fully vanish off of it, twisted to see, and made him grunt with surprise and pain when I yanked him closer. There. A film of golden dust on his hand.

Just the same as on the docks, smelling vaguely like it always had—saccharine and burnt.

Ambrosia.

I shoved Lucas across my room, and he smashed into my desk, exploding papers into the air and onto the floor. He groaned, tried to pick himself up in the debris that was the weak plywood and the tiny shards of rusted nails, but I hovered above him, making sure he stayed on the floor.

“You fucking liar,” I whispered, balling my hands. “You said you’d take care of me. Remember that, Lucas? When I watched my father die and you told me you’d watch over me?”

“What the fuck are you doing?” he snarled. His blonde hair fell over his face, over his eyes, and there was rage in those pupils—disgust. “Any harder and you would have broken my back.”

I put my fist through the drywall beside his head, lowering to meet his eyes. I was breathing hard, too hard to form a sentence, too hard to think straight—do it, put a hand through his chest and pull his spine right through his fucking ribs—but I couldn’t move any closer to him even if I wanted to. My mouth remained dry, my throat harsh as I swallowed saliva. A heart that hammered loudly in my chest, banging against my ribcage. Do it. I’ve killed people for less. Killed villains just because they didn’t want to tell me who they worked for or their hideouts and fuck me, Rylee, I’ve killed people for stealing from grocery stores before! Pulled them apart and watched their guts flow. Watched as their accomplices shrieked for mercy, but I hadn’t stopped then. Hadn’t stopped me from killing my English teacher turned villain. Hadn’t stopped me from disemboweling the first villain I had ever come across—no, she had just been a petty thief. A woman stealing baby food.

I had only done it because she had been desperate, because she’d had a gun and it wasn’t the first time she had gone through a store and done it. She had a rep sheet in the local papers and a page on lower-tier criminal forums. She was insane, sure, but she had a motive. Food, always just that, and nothing else. A human doing bad things for the right reason. I had told myself it was the gun, it was the thing that would get people hurt. So there came Zeus’ Daughter to save the day.

Lucas had found the gun before I did somewhere at the back of the store. Empty, he had told me, and shown me the hollow magazine. It was supposed to be our secret, my little fuck up.

Something he could use to keep me grounded, keep me listening to his orders, because now look, Rylee, there’s blood all over the floor, and her skull is in the produce aisle. What the fuck did you just do? Go, get home and wash off and do your homework. Don’t tell a soul about this, too.

And now, as I stood over him, I didn’t even know if he’d just taken the bullets out or not.

Because I remembered there being something in that gun, and the man behind the counter hadn’t died because of my outburst or my heroism—I don’t just put bullet-sized holes in people.

You wouldn’t be able to tell from the SDU report he’d drafted and shown me. You wouldn’t have been able to tell, because Lord knows that he’d done the job to make it look like I’d done it. To make that shaken, adrenaline-filled fourteen year old think she just killed a bystander because she hadn’t been listening to his orders or anything he had to say. Listen next time, and be better.

“I should kill you right fucking now,” I whispered.

Lucas breathed through his teeth, glaring death at me. “Who’s gotten into your head?”

Before I could say anything, my bedroom door banged open, swinging on its hinges and smacking against the doorframe. Dennie stood in the doorway, a short little shotgun shaking in his bony hands. His eyes frantically searched the room, squinting through the darkness. I paused, my hand still deep in the drywall, the other still tight and raised, ready to do something I wasn’t quite sure of yet. He knows now. I pulled my hand from the wall and stood, and that’s when he stared at me, his blurry vision finally seeing something glowing in the dark. I thought he was going to say something, to say my name or Olympia or to start asking stuttered questions like they always do.

Instead, Dennie slowly hobbled forward, and leveled the gun at Lucas. “I told you to stay away from this building, Freeman. I put shrapnel through your leg last time an’ I’ll do it again.”

“Dennie,” he said gravally. “Didn’t think the old heart of yours was still beating.”

The old man cocked the gun, now beside me, almost slight between us. “Out, ‘fore I pluck a bird and make dinner, and if I catch you back here, I swear, there ain’t a thing that’ll stop me.”

Lucas looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something I’d never seen before.

I’m now a threat to him. Lucas Freeman would now rather see me dead.

And I should have felt good about that, finally free from the fucking guy as he vanished in a wispy scent of foul smoke before I got the chance to grab his throat. But no, I didn’t feel that way.

I felt cold, a little scared, and too much like the girl who’d watched her own mother lock the only front door she’d ever known as she stood lost and confused and alone, surrounded by her entire life out on that wet front lawn. Dennie lowered the gun and looked at me, his face morphing from anger and hate to the softness it always had around his eyes and mouth. I couldn’t look at him, and I didn’t want to. I always figured that Dennie would eventually find out, or maybe he’d known about me for years by now. The guy worked with superheroes when he was young. He was what made part of the Golden Age what it was. He knows what a superhero should be. And a hero, no matter what, shouldn’t have to tense their jaw, bite their tongue, swallow a heavy ball of cold emotion so they didn’t look weak in front of anyone. So as I breathed out, it came out shaky. As I stepped toward the window to start my night, to start looking for a man I should have started searching for weeks ago, a hand stopped me from leaving. A weak hand that felt warm to my skin.

I had to pull my arm away, had to duck underneath the window and stand outside on the weak fire escape.

“Before Ben,” he said behind me quietly, his words like a hook keeping me there, “and before the other one, there was a girl.”

I waited to hear what he had to say, just so I could distract myself from my tightening chest and my twisting gut and the bile in my throat that so very much wanted to rush into my mouth.

“She was the first,” Dennie said. “The first that any of us know about. She was young, and she was talented, and she was damn smart, and she was a natural. A fighter, salt of the earth type.”

“What happened to her?” I muttered. “Dead?”

“No,” he said softly. “Alive in London, has her own pottery shop. Lucas’ sister was always the better one, you know. But he’s a piece of work, always has been. She left because Lucas was supposed to stop a long time ago. She was meant to be the one to keep going. Shrike was her name to begin with, but the cunt stole it from her. It was supposed to be something he did to blow off steam, something he could do to help people, then he started killing, started using her name to make them afraid of every single shadow. Lucas Freeman ain’t no normal man, and she knew that, resented him for that. They fought, and she won—beat him seven ways to hell, and then she left him there in that alleyway to bleed into the same filth that he wanted to sift through every night. He’ll try and come back, Ry, and you’ve gotta tell him to leave. But don’t kill him, never kill him.”

“He’s hurt so many fucking people,” I said, nearly spitting the words. “He deserves it.”

“And didn’t you see it?” he said. “That look in his eyes? He wanted it, a part of him really does want it. He’ll find it cathartic, that bastard, ‘cause he’s so screwed in the head. But you don’t give him what he wants, Olympia, because what kills that kind of man is seeing other people do fine without him, so you've got to go out there and save these people and make him hurt. It’s poison, and that man is dying—make him rot, but don’t let him go quietly.”

Oh, trust me. I won’t.