I agreed. My stomach roiled. I stopped amplifying and turned to Leon. “What did you do to her?”

“Not this,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. I injured her, but…” He shook his head, grimacing.

A smell of decay filled the air, so strong I almost gagged. Then the demon vanished, her body drawn back Beneath. A wisp of smoke spiraled up from the street. Beside us, the other Harrower also disappeared, leaving only a thin smear of blood to mark where it had been.

The Beneath was never sated, I thought. It hungered always. It fed on its own.

I hugged my arms, feeling a chill in spite of the clinging heat. Around us, dark had finally fallen. The stars had emerged, tiny points of clear light, not the deep red I’d seen earlier. The moon was a slender crescent hanging above, glowing dully orange. All down the street, I felt the hush brought by the Harrowers, the quiet that came as they clouded the senses. But the Harrowers were dead. The street was empty, though it didn’t feel empty. It felt…wrong.

A single word broke the silence.

“Audrey.”

A voice, far off, echoing.

“Audrey.”

I whipped around.

I searched for a face and saw only street. The hush receded. Sound filled the air: nearby traffic, someone’s laughter. I heard a police siren wailing in the distance. A window slammed shut. But I didn’t hear the voice again, or find its source. We were alone. No figures stood nearby, and all the cars were dark.

“Did you guys hear that?” I asked, straining to listen and abruptly afraid, more afraid than I’d been when the Harrowers had appeared. The voice had been familiar. I’d heard it before. It lived in my memories. And, sometimes, in my nightmares.

Leon frowned. “Hear what?”

“Is it another Harrower?” Tink asked. “Please tell me it’s not another Harrower.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s—”

I broke off. I didn’t want to speak it. Turning again, I searched the shadows along the street, the dark spaces between houses. At the end of the block, a screen door was swinging, and I heard the sudden sharp bark of a dog, but there was no other movement. I reached out with my Knowing and sensed nothing. She was gone, if she’d ever been there.

“What are you looking for?” Tink asked.

Black hair, I thought. A silver necklace hanging in the hollow of a throat. A face I knew. The smell of roses. I closed my eyes, letting out a breath.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

But what I thought was:

Iris.

It’s Iris.

As soon as the thought took form, I rebelled against it. No one had seen or heard from Iris since the end of December, more than six months ago. She was gone. She’d been swallowed up by the Beneath. She wasn’t coming back. Even her sister, Elspeth, had stopped asking about her.

I told myself I had merely been imagining things. There had been no sound in the stillness. No voice had breathed my name. It was an illusion, my mind playing tricks on me. A fear called forth from my dreams.

I dreamed of Iris often lately. Not as she had been, that sad-eyed girl I had known, whose grief had clouded the air around her, whose smiles had kept her secrets close. When she appeared, she was all fragments and angles, pieces aligning to form a different picture. She was no longer cousin or Kin or even human. Her teeth were red; her eyes were blank. In my dreams, she rewrote memories. In my dreams, she wore Susannah’s face.

The two of them blended together, one body, one being, a changeling that rearranged itself in every shift of light. They stood in the snow atop Harlow Tower, a knife in their grip, their hair streaming out—now bird-wing black, now bright as flame. A boy lay unconscious at their feet. “The beast within him sleeps,” they taunted. Their laughter shook the air. And then their throat was in my hands, and I was squeezing.

I would wake in a blind panic, soaked in sweat. Slowly, deliberately, I would make myself relax; I would remind myself that not all nightmares were Knowings. But even then I was troubled, afraid. Because Susannah was dead, but Iris might not be. And that was the problem.

Iris knew. She knew about Gideon.

No, I told myself again. She was gone. She was nothing.

Now, with effort, I let my hands fall to my sides. I scanned my surroundings once more, if only to reassure myself. There was movement at the end of the block, but it was only a girl on a bicycle, swerving to miss a soccer ball that had been left in the road. The lights of Minneapolis burned all around us, keeping the dark at bay. In the distance, a car horn honked.

Beside me, Leon and Tink were discussing what to do next. Tink was scowling, rubbing her elbow, which she must have scraped when she’d fallen.

“We’re supposed to report in to Ryan whenever there’s an attack,” she was saying. “Time, location, detailed description of incident.”

Leon blinked at her. Since, in addition to being my Guardian, he was basically Mom’s sidekick, most of his patrols were with her—and she didn’t report to anybody. “Seriously?”

Tink scrunched up her face. “Seriously. So he can chart them.”

“What, you mean he keeps some sort of demon-sighting spreadsheet?” I asked.

“You’re surprised by this?”

“No,” I admitted with a laugh. Mr. Alvarez really could not resist the urge to give homework. I was only surprised he didn’t hand out quizzes on the proper technique for fighting demons. Although, now that I thought about it, maybe he did.

Before I could question Tink on the subject, she pulled out her phone, glanced at it half a moment, and then handed it to Leon. “You call,” she said. “I don’t feel like talking to him.” Without waiting for a response, she turned her back and stalked away. She seated herself on the curb a few feet from us, her legs folded up against her.

I went to sit beside her, kicking a pebble onto the street. It skidded into the air, bounced a short distance, and disappeared beneath a car.

Tink hunched her shoulders. “Do not ask me if I’m okay.”

“Okay.” I hesitated. Tink was afraid, and not without reason. Though her injuries tonight were superficial, there was no guarantee she’d survive the next fight, or the one after that. I gazed at the line of blood on her collarbone, crimson already drying into a thin, flaky brown. The rip in her sleeve had widened, baring her shoulder. She wouldn’t look at me, but what I saw of her face was damp with tears.

When she’d first told me she’d been called, I hadn’t understood her reluctance. At the time, I’d wanted nothing more than to be a Guardian myself. That had changed the night Leon and I killed Susannah. Now I no longer knew what I wanted. I could still be called, but it seemed less and less likely that I would be. My seventeenth birthday had come and gone, and though some Guardians weren’t called until their late teens, fifteen and sixteen were more common.

I leaned back on my hands and stared skyward. “You did it, though,” I told Tink. “You fought. You didn’t run away.”

Her voice was quiet. “I was useless.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, you’re right. I was worse than useless.”

“We’re alive. We’re not hurt. And, hey, you didn’t even pee your pants.” I paused and turned toward her again. “Did you?”

“You are so not funny.” But she laughed, wiping the tears from her face.

Leon crossed the sidewalk to us and held Tink’s phone out to her. “He wants to talk to you.”

She groaned but hopped to her feet and took the phone.

I stood and faced Leon, skimming my eyes over him. There were no cuts that I could see in his clothing or skin, and no bruises beginning to spread—though there was a slight smudge of dirt along his jaw. His dark brown hair was tousled, wisps of it curling haphazardly. He was watching me with a tiny furrow in his brow, his blue eyes troubled. I laughed when I realized he was looking me over much as I was doing to him.