Page 2 of The Monster's Daughter
“Bet you don’t last ten seconds under fire,” I mutter, brushing past him.
They don’t laugh much after that.
The city feels… wrong. The kind of quiet that sets your teeth on edge. Rubble crunches under boots, the smell of burnt flesh clinging to every broken street.
Then, one of the soldiers at the rear goes missing. Just gone.
We stop. Guns come up. “What the hell—?” someone mutters.
Thermal sweeps show nothing. The air itself feels heavy. My skin prickles, instincts screaming. “Eyes sharp,” I whisper, but my voice comes out rough.
Another soldier vanishes into the shadows between two ruined towers. This time, there’s a wet crunch, muffled by distance.
“What the fuck was that?” the smirker demands, his bravado cracking.
I don’t answer. My gut already knows. Something’s hunting us. Something big. Something clever.
The jokes die. The squad tightens. Every shadow looks like teeth. Every flicker of movement turns stomachs inside out. I swallow hard, blood rushing in my ears.
I’m not cracking jokes.
Because this isn’t a battlefield anymore.
It’s a hunting ground.
And we’re the prey.
CHAPTER 2
KAGE
They tell you the city screams, but they never say what the scream tastes like.
Lurax spits at me—ashes in my mouth, the metallic tang of burning wiring, the hollow whine of a hundred damaged servos. The skyline is a serrated toothline of broken glass and twisted pylons. Every step is a negotiation with rubble; my boots find voids that weren't there the breath before and my knees learn to catch me without complaint. I move like a shadow that remembers how to be dangerous, the kind of quiet that predators keep so prey don't hear their hearts ticking.
I'm not looking for survivors. I am looking for Jamie.
Her scent pulls me like a tide: cardamom and dark roasted pepper, jasmine and the old laundry soap she used when she claimed the deli needed "a woman's touch," all of it threaded through with fear and the coppery high of fresh blood. It's a raw, human thing in a sea of smoke and industrial rot, and it lands in my chest like someone punched me right between the ribs.
I follow it down the alley where the market used to be—stalls splintered like broken teeth, banners flapping ragged in the wind. The place where her spice jars used to sit is a smearof color in the dust, red-orange turmeric bright against the gray. The smell is closer now, the panic in it acute, and then I see her.
She's not behind a stall or clinging to a beam. No. She's splayed against the brick of a half-collapsed wall, her hands bare and smeared in someone else's blood. Her face looks thirty years older than it should. Her mouth is an uneven line. The Alliance boys have her pinned like a prize, the kind of grin on their faces that tastes like rot. One of them is lifting his helmeted head and looking up at the sky the way men do when they expect fireworks. The other is laughing, stupid and bright-eyed from something sharp in his veins.
"Jamie," I say, and my voice is a thing that hasn't been used in years. It is not a soft sound.
They don't look at me until they should. Then they hear something like a low bell beginning to toll—my rumble. The nearest one turns and laughs again, because he thinks he has time to mock whomever has decided to interrupt his sport. "What's this, a Grolgath?" he sneers. "You gonna dance for?—"
His head leaves his shoulders before the words finish.
The first cut is clean and terrible, a rip that isn't human and wasn't meant to be carefully measured by swords or lasers. My claws don't care about treaties; they care about pain, and they deliver. The second man fires a reflex shot. It slams into my shoulder armor with a sound like distant thunder. I taste iron in my throat at the noise. I don't stop—I cannot stop. It's a god's thing, the ripping; years of fury and hunger for justice accumulated like sediment, and now it flakes away in one violent motion.
Armor buckles and ceramic plates do their best, but I am a machine of living muscle wrapped in scales and grief. They tear, and they tear, and there is a shower of sparks and the sick twang of fiber struts snapped like the spine of a book. The smaller man goes down with his mouth open as if he's surprised at the waythe world ends. The last one tries to crawl backward and his hand scrabbles in the dirt for purchase. I pin him with a clawed boot and he looks up, the light in his eyes flaring white and then guttering.
"Who did this?" he manages, a thin noise. "We were ordered?—"
"Shut up," I say. My voice is a stone. I don't let him finish being a person. I tear with the efficient brutality of someone who has nothing left to give except what breaks. There are sounds—wet, raw, animal. I'm not a careful man anymore. Careful would have had mercy. Mercy left Lurax the morning the first shell hit the market.
When the noises die, the air is too clean. My ears ring like someone struck a gong inside my skull. Jamie is there on the ground, a smear of spice-colored dress against the cinder, breathing shallow, ragged. She is still warm. I drop to my knees without meaning to, and my hands are all scales and remorse as I cup her face.
