sound. A breath. Was she hearing things?
Nick made no move for the car. He was listening intently. He held his breath and didn’t move a muscle.
That’s when Josie heard it. In the distance.
The shrieks.
“Come on!” Nick yelled, all pretense at subterfuge evaporated. He grabbed her hand and hauled her off the sofa. She stumbled over the coffee table as Nick dragged her forward. The shrieks of the Nox intensified quickly, like they moved at light speed. Josie and Nick didn’t make it halfway to the car before the windows at the top of the warehouse exploded.
A coordinated attack, bursting in through several windows at the same moment, as if directed to do so. Screams filled the warehouse and in an instant Josie was surrounded by the sensation of flapping. The air beat around her as countless leathery wings swooped at them. Glass rained down from the roof, and though Josie could feel the broken shards crunching beneath her feet as Nick feebly dragged her toward the car, she could hear nothing but the deafening roar, the piercing screams of the Nox.
Josie felt Nick trip in the darkness, his hand ripped from hers.
She dropped to her knees, desperately searching for Nick as the wings continued to swarm around her. Her hand caught hold of his leg, motionless on the ground. As she blindly felt upward toward his face, she touched thick, leathery skin.
The Nox flinched when she touched it, but the monster didn’t move. It felt smaller than she’d imagined: about the size of a pit bull. It sat there, perched on Nick’s chest.
A predator claiming its prey.
She lashed out at the beast, punching at it fiercely with her fists.
The Nox shrieked, not the ferocious war cry that filled the rest of the warehouse, but a cry of fear and surprise. As if it didn’t know she was there.
Josie paused in confusion. Instead of attacking her, the Nox beat its wings desperately and flew away.
Josie had no time to contemplate her strange encounter with the Nox. She crawled on top of Nick, feeling for his face. Her fingers touched something wet and slick. Blood. She tried to feel for a heartbeat, for movement from his lungs, but the swarm whipped up to a frenzied pitch. The air whistled around her as if the Nox were circling above, preparing for a final attack. Just like in the woods that night. In the chaos, she’d completely lost track of where she was. Could she carry Nick to the car? Could she find it in the blackness? She heaved his shoulder, desperate to move him away from the attacking swarm of invisible beasts that seemed to fill every inch of space in the warehouse. She got to her feet, looping her arms under his, and lifted with every ounce of strength she had left. She staggered backward, dizzy and disoriented. She had to make it to the car. She had to. They were going to die if she didn’t. . . .
Suddenly, the weight of Nick’s body was gone. She felt him lifted upward by an unseen force. She grasped at his arm. The Nox had him. They were carrying him away.
“No!” she screamed. She clung to Nick’s arm, desperate to keep him away from the Nox.
A hand grabbed her wrist, prying it off Nick’s arm.
A
“Nick?” Josie yelled. He was alive. They were going to get out of there together.
“Quiet,” a voice said close to her ear. “Follow me.”
Josie stopped. It wasn’t Nick’s voice, but it was familiar. Harsh and raspy. She’d heard it before, whispering in her ear amid the chaos of a Nox attack.
The man in the woods.
FORTY-THREE
9:05 P.M.
“WHO ARE YOU?” JOSIE REMEMBERED THE SHADOWS she’d seen in the darkened corners of the warehouse ever since Nick had first brought her there. A trick of the eye, an overactive imagination. Not so much. But where had the man come from? Materialized out of thin air? Magically risen out of the ground?
“Quiet!” he barked.
Josie shook herself from her daze. She reached out and felt his shoulder, tall and strong in front of her. He held Nick cradled in his arms.
“This way.”
Not that she had a choice. Stay in the warehouse and be eaten alive by monsters that live in the darkness or follow the mysterious stranger down the rabbit hole.
Mysterious stranger it was.
He led her across the warehouse to what must have been the far corner beyond the parking area. He moved slowly, unhurried, which seemed odd considering the swarm of creatures that continued to circle just above their heads. It took Josie a few moments before she realized they weren’t being attacked. It took her even longer to realize that while Nick had been viciously overcome within seconds of the Nox bursting into the warehouse, she didn’t have so much as a scratch on her.
The Nox left her alone.
What was going on?
The stranger paused, and Josie felt him bend down. Or so she thought. He continued to move forward and as Josie followed, she realized he was going down a set of stairs.
The steps were rickety wood, judging by the way in which each step sagged ever so slightly under her weight. Only a dozen or so, and Josie landed on a firm dirt floor.
“Wait here,” the stranger said. He squeezed past her in the passageway. He was tall—Nick’s height, at least—but broader and heavier. Josie’s eyes strained against the blackness of the space, trying to get a glimpse of the stranger, but other than an outline of a body disappearing up the stairs—even blacker than the blackness around her—she couldn’t make out anything.
She heard a distant thump, and the shrieks of the Nox were instantly muffled. A trapdoor. He really had come through the floor.
“Who are you?” Josie asked again, now that she could actually hear her own voice. Above in the warehouse, the shrieking intensified, punctuated by thumps on the floor.
“They can hear you,” the stranger said, ignoring her question. She could hear him breathing in the darkness. “They get angry when deprived of prey. We should keep moving.”
Josie took a step back. Her foot nudged something on the ground. Nick’s leg where his body lay motionless. “We’re not going anywhere with you,” she said. Her voice sounded small in the darkness.
“Is . . . is he . . .” Josie felt the weight of Nick’s motionless body behind her on the ground. She pressed against his lifeless form, afraid to ask the question on the tip of her tongue.
“He’ll be fine. I think.”
She felt a figure move past her in the darkness. She stepped aside as the stranger grunted against the weight of Nick’s body. “This way.”
Josie placed a hand on either side of the narrow passageway and slowly followed the sound of the stranger’s shuffling footsteps. She stooped, worried she’d clock her head against a low beam, and picked her way cautiously across the uneven ground. The floor was soft dirt, dry and powdery; their footsteps kicked up small clouds of the stuff that tickled Josie’s nose and made her eyes water. It was significantly warmer in the passage than the late spring evening above, and the heat accentuated the stench of mold and damp cardboard that permeated the space.
They hadn’t gone far before a creak from in front of her stopped Josie in her tracks.
“Watch your step,” the stranger said. “They’re rotting away on this end.”
Great. Josie felt with her foot for the first step, then tentatively tested her weight. It was bouncy, but sound, and clearly the stranger had gone ahead of her carrying Nick. Without a second thought, Josie climbed the
