Melody had barely finished registering that the creature was looking directly toward her hiding place when the city betrayed her.
Emergency sirens began wailing somewhere beyond the surrounding buildings, their long mechanical cries rolling between the skyscrapers and multiplying through the streets until it sounded like the whole island had started screaming at once. The sound made Melody flinch, but it was distant enough that the giant cat barely seemed to notice.
Then Melody’s phone went off.
The vibration against her hip came first.
A hard, angry buzzing inside her pocket.
Then came the sound.
That horrible emergency alert tone blasted at full volume.
Melody froze.
Her entire body locked up while the electronic screech cut through the dusty street with all the subtlety of someone firing a gun beside her head.
For one utterly stupid second, her brain supplied the phrase Amber Alert.
Seriously? Right now?
The cat’s ears snapped toward her.
“Oh, shit.”
Melody shoved one hand into her blazer pocket so quickly that her fingers caught on the fabric. She yanked the phone out, nearly lost it between her shaking hands, and stabbed wildly at the screen without even reading the warning.
EMERGENCY ALERT
SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. UNKNOWN HOSTILE ENTITIES HAVE BEEN REPORTED THROUGHOUT THE METROPOLITAN AREA. DO NOT APPROACH...
“Yeah, no kidding.”
She hit the side button.
Silence.
Melody stared at the darkened phone.
For perhaps half a second, she convinced herself she had been fast enough.
The roof of the car collapsed.
Metal screamed as several thousand pounds of monster came down on top of it.
Melody threw herself backward as the windows exploded outward. Safety glass sprayed across the pavement and pattered against her blazer, hair, and exposed legs like hard plastic rain. The windshield folded inward while the roof buckled almost to the seats, and one tire burst with a deafening pop.
Melody landed hard on her backside.
Then she looked up.
The monster’s face was directly above her.
Her brain stopped functioning.
It was so much worse up close.
The creature’s feline resemblance had almost made it look beautiful from a distance. Now Melody could see every detail that proved it was anything but. Its muzzle was broad and angular, wrapped in short dark fur streaked with metallic-looking strands. Its nose flared as it inhaled, drawing in her scent. Four enormous canine teeth extended past the edges of its upper jaw, each one nearly as long as Melody’s forearm, while dozens of smaller teeth formed uneven rows behind them.
Several were stained red.
Something stringy hung between two of them.
Melody desperately chose not to identify it.
The creature lowered its head until its face nearly filled the space above the crushed car.
Its eyes found hers.
They were golden.
Not yellow.
Gold.
Thin black pupils contracted as they focused on her, and there was something horribly aware behind them. This wasn’t an animal frightened by an unfamiliar city. It wasn’t confused.
It knew exactly what she was.
Prey.
The part of Melody’s mind that still thought of itself very firmly as Edward was not proud of what happened next.
She screamed.
Not some dignified little gasp.
Not a curse.
A full, blood-curdling shriek tore out of her throat so loudly that it actually hurt.
“AAAAAAAH!”
The sound surprised even her.
The creature answered.
Its jaws opened and a roar slammed into Melody with enough force that she recoiled.
The sound was physical. It vibrated through her ribs and teeth, so deep that she felt it more than heard it. Hot breath blasted across her face carrying the stench of blood, burned meat, and something sharp enough to remind her of battery acid.
Melody gagged.
Her eyes immediately flooded with tears.
The air itself seemed to sting. Heat washed across her cheeks and forehead, prickling against her skin as though she'd leaned too close to an open furnace.
“Oh God!”
She scrambled backward on her hands, shoes slipping against broken glass.
The monster raised one enormous paw.
Each claw slid outward.
Melody stared at them.
She had enough time to realize one of those claws could probably open her from shoulder to hip.
Then something screamed overhead.
Not a monster.
Engines.
Melody jerked her head toward the sky.
Three fighter jets tore through the gap between the buildings.
They were so low that for a moment her mind struggled to understand what she was looking at. Their gray bodies flashed between towers at impossible speed, afterburners glowing behind them while the noise arrived a fraction of a second later and crashed into the street.
The cat whipped its head upward.
Melody covered her ears.
The first jet passed overhead.
Something beneath its wings flashed.
Then the street erupted.
A rapid barrage of gun fire tore across the creature’s flank.
The impacts sounded like someone beating on metal with a jackhammer, except every strike threw sparks, blood, and fragments of black armor into the air.
The cat roared and twisted away from Melody.
More rounds struck the pavement around it, carving chunks from asphalt and punching through abandoned cars. One round hit the front of the crushed sedan, sending a burst of metal fragments over Melody’s head.
She flattened herself against the ground.
“Jesus!”
The jets streaked past.
The monster stumbled sideways.
For the first time, Melody saw it hurt.
Dark blood ran through the fur along its side. Several pieces of the strange armor had shattered, leaving ragged openings beneath them.
The creature spread its wings.
Metal plates unfolded from its torso with a series of sharp mechanical clicks. The wings extended outward and the sudden movement threw dust and loose debris across the street.
It looked upward.
Angry.
Then the jets turned.
Melody watched them banking between the towers and felt something dangerously close to relief.
The military.
Actual military.
Of course.
This was New York.
Whatever had happened to the world, the government wasn't just going to sit around and let giant monsters wander through Manhattan.
For half a second Melody almost believed everything might be fine.
Maybe the monsters were terrifying, but humans had fighter jets.
Tanks.
Missiles.
Nuclear weapons if things got really bad.
Fantasy monster or not, physics still seemed perfectly willing to let bullets punch holes through it.
One of the returning jets leveled out.
Something separated from beneath its wing.
Melody saw it.
A missile.
There was a surreal moment where her brain calmly identified the object even though every other part of her had entered complete panic.
The missile's engine ignited.
It accelerated directly toward the monster.
Melody looked at the cat.
Then at the missile.
Then at how close she was to the cat.
“Oh.”
Her survival instinct finally contributed something useful.
MOVE.
Melody lunged away.
She didn't think about direction.
There was no plan.
She simply pushed off the pavement and ran harder than she had ever run in either life.
Three steps.
Four.
She cleared the ruined car.
The missile struck.
The world turned white.
Heat hit Melody first.
It washed over her back with such intensity that she thought her clothes had caught fire.
Then the explosion arrived.
The shockwave picked her up.
There was no other way to describe it.
One moment her shoes were touching pavement.
The next she was airborne.
Melody saw the street spin beneath her, flashes of orange fire and blue sky swapping places so quickly that her stomach had no time to react. She struck something metal with her side.
A railing.
Pain exploded through her ribs.
The impact folded her around it before momentum carried her over the top.
She landed in a narrow strip of grass beside one of the neighboring buildings.
The ground knocked what remained of the air from her lungs.
Melody tried to breathe.
Nothing happened.
Her body seized while her mouth opened uselessly.
For one terrifying second she thought she had somehow forgotten how breathing worked.
Then air finally rushed back into her chest.
Pain came with it.
Sharp.
Immediate.
Deep beneath her left breast and around her side.
“Ah... fuck.”
Melody curled slightly and instantly regretted it.
The movement made the pain worse.
Every breath felt like somebody was pushing a knife between her ribs.
“Okay.”
She inhaled shallowly.
“Okay, something is definitely broken.”
The world around her sounded distant.
Muted.
A high ringing filled both ears, smothering everything else beneath it. She could see flames moving beyond the railing, but the crackle barely reached her. People were still running farther down the street, their mouths open in screams she could only faintly hear.
Then something wet struck the grass beside her.
Melody looked at it.
A piece of flesh.
She stared.
Another chunk landed several feet away with a heavy slap.
Then something metallic struck the sidewalk hard enough to bounce.
“Oh.”
Monster pieces were raining from the sky.
Melody lifted one trembling arm over her head just as another wet fragment slapped against the side of the building behind her.
A blackened strip of hide landed across the railing.
Blood dotted the grass.
Bits of fur floated down through the smoky air.
Whatever the missile had done, it had been considerably more effective than the cannon fire.
The smell arrived next.
Burned meat.
Hot metal.
Fuel.
Smoke.
And something stranger underneath all of it, almost sweet, like ozone after lightning.
Melody gagged and rolled onto her back.
The sky above her was still broken.
Blue-white light continued streaming through the enormous tear, beautiful and impossible, while military aircraft cut across it in the distance. Trails of smoke crossed between buildings. Shapes moved high above, some too large to possibly be aircraft.
Another explosion flashed somewhere several blocks away.
Melody couldn't hear it properly.
She only felt a faint tremor through the earth beneath her.
Her ears were still ringing.
She slowly pushed herself upright.
Bad decision.
Pain tore through her ribs again.
Melody whimpered and grabbed her side.
“Okay. Slow.”
She rested against the cold metal railing and tried to breathe without moving anything unnecessarily.
Something brushed against the back of her hand.
Fur.
Melody stopped.
Every muscle in her body tightened.
She turned her head.
The monster was staring at her.
Its face was less than two feet away.
Melody's heart seemed to physically flip inside her chest.
She jerked backward so violently that her ribs screamed in protest, and another terrified sound escaped her throat before she realized what she was seeing.
The creature wasn't standing there.
Its head was lying on the opposite side of the railing.
Only its head.
The missile had apparently separated it from the rest of its body.
One enormous golden eye faced Melody.
She stared directly into it.
Nothing happened.
The pupil remained wide and unfocused.
The face that had seemed so intelligent only moments earlier now looked strangely empty. Its jaw hung partially open against the concrete, exposing those enormous teeth, but there was no breath pushing through them.
No rumbling purr.
No growl.
No awareness.
It was dead.
Melody pressed one hand against her chest.
“God.”
Her heart hammered painfully beneath her palm.
“You're dead.”
She said it mostly because she needed to hear herself say it.
The creature remained motionless.
Melody let herself breathe.
Then she noticed the light.
At first she assumed it was simply the strange blue-white glow from the sky reflecting off the monster's armor.
But the light moved.
Tiny sparks shimmered beneath its fur.
They rose slowly from the severed head like glowing dust, drifting several inches upward before sinking back into the corpse. More appeared around the broken sections of armor and between the creature's teeth.
Melody narrowed her eyes.
“What is that?”
The particles looked exactly like the ones falling from the tear in the sky.
Maybe not exactly.
These seemed thicker.
Denser.
Like whatever had been scattered throughout the air had somehow accumulated inside the monster.
Melody leaned closer despite every reasonable part of her mind telling her not to touch mysterious glowing alien corpses.
The light pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
It almost looked like it was responding to her.
“That's not concerning at all.”
Her hand hovered above the creature's fur.
She hesitated.
What if it was radioactive?
What if monster blood carried some horrific disease?
What if this was how the creature reproduced and touching it caused eggs to burrow through her skin?
Edward had watched enough science fiction to know that touching unknown biological material was almost always the first mistake.
Then again, Edward had also spent enough of his life playing games to know that when a dead monster started glowing, it usually meant something considerably more interesting.
Melody looked at the light.
“I'm going to regret this.”
She reached through the railing and touched the creature.
The reaction was immediate.
Wind exploded outward.
Melody cried out as her crimson hair whipped across her face.
The blue-white particles surrounding the monster all lifted at once.
Not randomly.
Toward her.
Thousands of tiny sparks erupted from the corpse, spiraling around her hand and racing up her arm. The light passed directly through her blazer as though the fabric wasn't there.
Melody tried to pull away.
She couldn't.
Her palm felt stuck against the creature.
“What the hell?”
More light poured from the corpse.
It came from everywhere now.
The fur.
The armor.
The blood.
Even the detached pieces scattered across the street seemed to dissolve into streams of luminescence that curved through the air toward Melody.
The sensation hit her a second later.
It wasn't pain.
At least not exactly.
It was fullness.
Pressure.
Energy flowed through her arm and spread beneath her skin, racing through veins and muscles before sinking somewhere deeper than anything physical should have been able to reach.
Her whole body tingled.
For one bizarre moment her injured ribs stopped hurting.
Then the feeling intensified.
Melody's back arched.
“Oh!”
Her vision filled with blue-white light.
The railing beneath her hand disappeared.
The ruined street disappeared.
Everything became brightness and motion as whatever had been inside the monster poured into her.
The closest comparison Edward's overwhelmed brain could produce was Skyrim.
Dragonborn.
Absorbing a dragon soul.
He had always wondered what that would actually feel like.
Apparently the answer was terrifying.
It felt like standing in the middle of a hurricane made from electricity.
It felt like inhaling after holding his breath for hours even though he hadn't known he was suffocating.
It felt like something foreign was being poured into a space inside Melody that had been empty her entire life.
The sensation wasn't just entering her body.
It was becoming part of it.
She could feel the energy moving.
Not with her nerves.
With something else.
Something new.
Her eyes watered beneath the brightness.
Melody squeezed them shut.
The roaring wind intensified for several seconds, whipping the grass flat around her and sending broken glass rattling across the pavement.
Then everything stopped.
No fading.
No gradual decrease.
One moment the energy was pouring into her.
The next it was gone.
Melody remained frozen with her eyes closed.
Her breathing sounded incredibly loud.
She slowly opened them.
The monster's head remained beside the railing, but the shimmering light had disappeared completely.
Its fur looked duller now.
The armor had lost the strange reflective quality she'd noticed earlier.
Whatever had been inside it was gone.
Melody swallowed.
Then she noticed the weight in her right hand.
She hadn't been holding anything before.
Now her fingers were wrapped around something solid.
Cold.
Melody slowly lifted her hand.
A dagger rested in her palm.
For several seconds she simply stared at it.
The weapon looked as though somebody had taken pieces of the creature and forced them together into a shape meant for a human hand.
The grip was made from the same black metallic material that had covered the monster's body, although up close it didn't really look like metal. Thin lines ran through it like veins inside bone, catching the surrounding firelight whenever she moved it. The surface was almost perfectly smooth beneath her fingers, yet somehow it never felt slippery, fitting naturally against her palm as though it had been made specifically for her grip.
A narrow guard curved outward above her hand.
Each side ended in a hooked point resembling the tips of the creature's claws.
Then came the blade.
Melody stopped breathing for a moment.
It wasn't steel.
It was one of the monster's teeth.
She was almost certain of it.
The blade curved slightly backward, nearly a foot long from guard to tip, with the natural shape of an oversized feline fang still visible beneath whatever transformation had turned it into a weapon. Its base was dark, almost black where it joined the handle, but the color gradually faded toward ivory along the cutting edge.
Except a tooth shouldn't have had a cutting edge.
This one did.
One side had been formed into a line so thin Melody could barely see where it ended. When she tilted it toward the fire, the edge caught the orange light and reflected it in a narrow silver line.
The opposite side retained small serrations like the natural ridges of a predator's tooth.
Black veins from the handle continued upward into the blade, branching through the ivory material before disappearing near the tip. Every few seconds the veins gave off the faintest blue-white shimmer, the same color as the mana still falling from the shattered sky above Manhattan.
Melody turned the dagger carefully in her hand.
It was beautiful.
Elegant, even.
If she ignored the fact that she was holding what looked like the magically transformed fang of a monster that had almost eaten her less than five minutes ago.