Page 5 of Daughter of the Dark

“Yes, gods forbid you take responsibility for anything,” Sami mumbled under his breath. Solana ignored the barb and spun away again, her mind eager to focus on anything else. “I’ll just watch your back, like I always do,” he called after her.

“As long as you don’t get in my way,” she threw over her shoulder.

That was all he would say about it, she knew. Always a single warning, a tense argument that would end that exact same way. Perhaps it was to ease his own conscience so when she died, he could stand over her body and say, I told you so. And she indulged it because she secretly savored the feeling of being cared for. It was selfish of her, but she didn’t intend to stop. She also had no intention of dying on Supay and thus proving him right.

The balmy air was like the press of a lover’s sigh as they stalked down alleyways. The moon was veering toward its end, bathing everything in a light that washed away all color. She paused right outside a small alcove and closed her eyes. Sami’s breathing was slow and steady behind her, but farther down an alley to the right, she heard murmured conversation and low laughter. It’s unnatural, Sami had always said, the way you move when you’re hunting. Reminds me of a predator.

Solana felt like a predator in that moment, chasing after an ignorant and weak prey. The noise Oskar and Nikolas were making was sure to attract every muki in the vicinity, which meant she would end up having to do work she wasn’t paid for. But it would be well worth it for the Medallion.

Palming her dagger, Solana took off at a light run with Sami staying just behind her and to the left, like always. For all her bravado, it was comforting having him at her back. Though she had inherited her father’s propensity for hunting and fighting, she was still human, without eyes in the back of her head or nocturnal senses. Sami was always there, running, fighting, sitting, and she had become so accustomed to his presence that she almost resented it and the truth it illuminated—that she most likely could not do this without him.

Still, she pressed on. Buildings passed by in a blur of shadows. From the corner of her eye, Solana saw a curtain flutter in a small window. A face peeked out and then disappeared. It was nothing to worry about—whatever they witnessed would stay between them—but she did wonder what would happen if word spread that Medallions were more than myth, and she had one in her possession. How many others were just as desperate as her to leave Supay and find out how far this curse extended?

An alley stretched out before them, completely empty save for a pile of trash in a dark corner. Solana stopped and stared, wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her or if the pile truly was moving slightly, like shoulders rising with each breath. It was only then that she realized her dagger was hot in her hand. She had been distracted again, thinking about a future that was still too far to touch.

Slowly, Solana lifted a foot and moved backward. Sami followed suit, his chest close enough to her back that she could almost feel his racing pulse. She had no time to get tangled with a muki just yet. Her priority had shifted to finding Oskar and Nikolas, relieving them of their Medallion, and sending them back to Sonqo humiliated and ashamed, but try as she might, she couldn’t hear their shuffling gaits or idiotic laughter. The world had fallen eerily silent, like a bubble of pressure surrounded them, muffling everything but her own pulse in her ears.

The lip of her boot caught the tip of a small rock and sent it tumbling. Solana froze, breath held. Her dagger, now clenched so tightly the hilt was cutting into her palm, pulsed with searing heat, and she watched as the pile of shadows in the corner languidly unfurled into a tall, gangly shape that glistened as if wet. There were no facial features to identify, no eyes to tell her if it could see, or ears to hear, or mouth to eat, or nose to smell. There were only indents where those features should have been. A smooth, fathomless black that somehow peered straight at her and into her soul.

“Run or fight?” Sami murmured, his voice a vibration against her shoulder.

Solana hated running. She had never run from a muki for as long as she had been hunting them. Even when she had first started, fueled only by stubborn rage and irrepressible grief, she had fought until she bled and had the scars to prove it. Luckily, demon fluids didn’t seem to infect her like they did others, like they had her mother all those years ago.

It felt like being flayed open, but Solana had survived a muki’s talons and teeth over and over. If she left Supay, she would never have to know that pain again.

“We run,” Solana said. She turned to face the opposite direction, standing shoulder to shoulder now with Sami, but stopped short. At the mouth of the alley was another muki, this one shorter and wider, its arms dragging across the ground as it stalked forward. Its corded muscles rippled with every step it took, but this one had eyes and a mouth that were both wide open and gleaming with menace.

It was never clear what shaped their differences or why they transformed into the forms they wore. There hadn’t been enough motivation for Solana to get close enough to study one, but she knew that if she did, she would see a mouth with rows and rows of needle-point teeth meant to shred through flesh and bone without effort, skin that was slippery, and limbs that possessed an insurmountable amount of strength.

Thankfully, they didn’t seem able to climb or open doors, but they were fast and vicious and angry. And Solana and Sami were boxed in. Unless they went up, the only way out was to fight.

“Solana.” Sami said her name with warning. She turned to meet his stare. His dark hair was longer than usual, so that his curls fell onto his brow, and she had the strongest urge to reach up and push them back, worried that he wouldn’t be able to see through the curtain of them. “If we don’t survive this, run that dagger through my heart. Don’t let me become a monster.”

She opened her mouth to beg of him the same, but he kissed her forehead and whirled away before she could. It would have been another lie, anyway. Solana was already a predator whose only craving was vengeance, a monster whose only thirst was blood, and the fight before her would serve to prove that further.

CHAPTER THREE

The muki in front of Solana took another slow step forward, out of the shadow of a faded pink building and into a splash of moonlight. Its nightmarish body rippled, ropy muscles covered with slimy black flesh coiling with tension, skin glistening like a jewel. That was the only warning Solana got. Between one blink and the next, it pounced, nothing but a shift of mist and shade.

Solana ran toward it, dropped to her knees, and extended her blade up, pointing at its belly. The muki leaned out of reach at the last moment and landed in a perfectly executed roll. Solana hastily spun around to meet it again, but it had paused in a menacing crouch, head tilted as if listening.

As if waiting for something.

Behind it, Sami and the other muki circled each other.

The dagger in Solana’s hand vibrated with anticipation, with desire. She could feel it urging her to move and begging to part skin and sinew and bathe in blood, and who was she to deny such want?

Solana launched forward, a roar of fury echoing against the stone walls caging them. The muki bared its teeth in a grim smile and met her halfway. She grimaced as they collided, tucking her chin to protect her head from hitting the ground, but the muki hadn’t thought through the consequences of its actions. How bringing their bodies together meant she was close enough to strike and strike true. Her hand stung as her dagger plunged into the place where the muki’s ribs should have been, as she pulled it out and shoved it back in again and again, the muki looming over her like a dark cloud until its weight fell and almost crushed her.

“Get off,” she grunted with a shove. It reared back, tossing itself to the side and into the wall, its wide, lidless eyes meeting hers with something like shock or awareness. Some emotion far too human that always made her instincts stutter.

Solana shook away the doubt and lunged, sinking the dagger deep into the side of its neck and pushing it clean out of the back. Its eyes shuttered. Whatever emotion she thought was there disappeared, and she was left bracing herself for what always came next.

With one final exhale, the muki fell onto its back, arms and legs splayed wide. She heard Sami and the other muki dancing around each other, but it was distant, buried underneath the weight of emotions that slammed into her and dragged her below the surface of awareness, as if what little remnants of the mortal lives the muki held on to slipped into her.

There was grief and rage, sorrow so potent it threatened to swallow her whole and forced her to claw her way back to the mortal realm. But sometimes there was gratitude, a rush of cold that made her limbs tingle and her chest expand with burgeoning relief. She imagined that was what it felt like to be truly free of Supay, to be released from the clutches of its curse.

It punched into the depths of her soul until she wasn’t sure who she was anymore. Until surviving no longer had any meaning.