She stumbles but catches herself, sprinting the last few feet to the electrical box mounted on the wall near the back corner. I can hear him behind us, those steady footsteps, no rush, no anger. Just inevitability.

  The breaker box door squeals when Tasha yanks it open. I risk a glance back. He's methodically tearing his way through the dividing wall, creating a straight-line path instead of going around. His fingers disappear into the wood up to the second knuckle, grip something I can't see, and pull. The whole section just peels away like wet cardboard.

  "Sam!" Tasha's voice is tight with panic.

  I turn back. She's staring at the breaker panel, at the rows of switches and the main cutoff at the top. Her hand is hovering over it.

  "Hit it," I say.

  She flips it.

  The lights die. The security alarm finally shuts up. Everything goes quiet except for the sound of wood splintering and our breathing and the distant traffic outside filtering through the boarded windows. The setting sun creates these narrow stripes of dusty orange-blue light across the third floor, coming through gaps in the boards, crevices in the curtains. Most of the floor is dark. Shadow. Cover.

  And I can see him.

  Not with my eyes. With my blood sense. That gut shot I landed - wasn't deep, probably barely a scratch through whatever he's wearing under those bandages, but it broke skin. I can taste copper in the air and suddenly his entire vascular system lights up in my head like a three-dimensional map. Arteries, veins, capillaries, all of it pulsing with his heartbeat. He's on the other side of the dividing wall, maybe fifteen feet away, still moving toward where we were standing.

  He stops. The blood-map stops moving.

  Tasha grabs my wrist. I can barely see her in the darkness but I can feel her shaking. There's a back stairwell here, near the breaker, that goes down to the second floor. Not all the way to the exit - we'd still have to cross the second floor landing and take the main stairs down to get out - but it's something. Distance. Space.

  I point at the stairs and she nods. We move as quietly as we can, kicking up dust in swirling eddies, my ribs yelling at me in response. But we're moving away from him, toward the back stairs, and in my head I can track him perfectly. He's still standing there. Listening, maybe? Waiting for us to make a mistake?

  We reach the back stairwell. It's narrow, barely wide enough for one person, and it's completely dark. No windows, no light. Tasha goes first and I follow, one hand on her shoulder to keep track of her, the other trailing along the wall for balance.

  The blood-map moves. Fast. Not toward us - toward the main stairwell. A leisurely, quick little power walk.

  He's not following us down the back stairs. He's going down the main stairwell to cut us off on the second floor. He knows we're going down. How does he know? We're being quiet, we're in the dark, there's no way he can see us--

  "He knows," I whisper to Tasha. "He's going to the main stairs."

  "How--"

  "I don't know. Just move."

  We hit the second floor landing and I can hear him on the main stairwell, those steady footsteps coming down from the third floor. The second floor is more open than the third, fewer partition walls, more space. Less dust in the air because we actually use this floor, because the HVAC runs here, because Jordan cleaned it when they lived here. The high ceilings swallow the light.

  The blood-map reaches the second floor landing. He's maybe thirty feet away, around the corner, between us and the only exit.

  Tasha and I are standing in the darkness near the back corner of the auditorium, in one of the cleaner areas. There's enough ambient light from the street that I can see her outline, see the whites of her eyes. She's looking at me like I'm supposed to have a plan.

  I don't have a plan. I have blood sense and teeth and injuries that won't let me breathe right.

  His blood is moving. Slowly. Searching. He's near the partition booths, the ones we hid behind earlier, checking them methodically. Not rushing. Still professional.

  I could ambush him. Circle around while he's searching, come at him from behind, actually use the darkness like I'm supposed to. He's bleeding, I can track him, he can't track me. Right?

  Except he can. Somehow. He knew we were going to the office. He knew we were going down the back stairs, or at least he knew we were going down instead of staying on the third floor. Tracking, or good guesswork? But right now, we're standing still, and he's moving slowly, like he's not quite sure.

  Stolen story; please report.

  "Don't move," I breathe to Tasha.

  I throw myself at him but he's already moving. His free hand catches my shoulder mid-lunge and suddenly I'm the one being redirected, stumbling past him into empty darkness. My teeth scrape against nothing. By the time I recover and turn around, he's already hauled Tasha up by her hood and tossed her aside like she weighs nothing. She hits the floor hard, gasping.

  I need height. Advantage. Anything. The partition walls are right there, seven or eight feet tall. Jordan always said they could hold weight when they reinforced them.

  I jump, catch the top edge of the nearest divider, haul myself up. My ribs scream at me but I don't care. From up here I can see the blood-map perfectly, can track his movements, can time this right. He's walking toward me. Or at least, where I was a second ago. He throws a blind hand out, sweeping it, not punching, tasting the air for me.

  Nope. Look higher, dipshit. People's elbow.

  I launch myself off the partition, no noise, no yell, no kiai, not even a breath. My entire body is thrown into a twisting tackle, trying to elbow drop him down through the floorboards - and then he turns sideways, grabs me by the waist, and just helps my momentum down into the carpet. A nice escort into rugburn, almost polite. I duck and roll on my shoulder, kipping back up into my feet, and take a wild swing. Something. Anything.

  He catches me perfectly. I don't understand - it's almost pitch black in here. I have the layout memorized. But he doesn't even need to guess to see where my wrist is. He just wraps his fingers around my haymaker mid-air.

  Oh no you don't.

  I swing my other hand, hoping he'll catch it, and he does. I hurl myself forward into him, mouth open, and make contact with his shoulder. Teeth rip into leather rip into bandage rip into skin. I close down, and fresh blood wicks into my mouth through his clothes, coppery and disgusting.

  He lets out an undignified grunt of pain, letting go of my hands to grab me by the neck. I don't let go. I bite down harder, and he lets out another, louder grunt, more of a growl, before a force I lack the physics understanding to comprehend rips me off, taking a chunk of leather, gauze, and skin with it. "Motherfucker, stay down!" he grunts, winding me up like a baseball and slamming me into the partition, the impact causing the contents of my mouth to spray out onto him.

  "Fuck my ass, that hurts," he mumbles as I crumple to the ground, coughing up blood. Not my own. I felt resistance from his muscles, but I don't know if I damaged anything important. Just an oozing, wet gouge that lights up like a spotlight in my blood sense. I'm half prepared for him to wind up, maybe kick me in the stomach, but that's not what happens. Instead, I watch him turn back toward Tasha. She's trying to get up, one hand pressed against her ribs where she hit the ground.

  No. Not again. Not her.

  I force myself to my knees. Then my feet. My whole body is shaking but I'm standing and that's what matters. I grow more teeth, along my forearms, my knuckles, anywhere I can manage. Two per knuckle. More chaos. Turning my body into a baseball bat with nails. They push through skin painlessly, except where it intersects with the gross greenish-purplish Lichtenberg figures, but, well, problem for future me.

  "Leave her alone," I snarl.

  He looks at me over his shoulder. I can barely see his eyes through the bandages in the darkness but I feel his gaze. Sizing me up.

  "Persistent little brat," he says, ripping off some of his own gauze from the lowest part of his costume and wrapping it around his shoulder. He doesn't tape it or anything - it just stays held fast. What is up with this guy? "My shoulder's gonna need stitches. You're barely worth the hazard pay."

  He moves toward Tasha and I'm moving too, intercepting, putting myself between them again because I don't know what else to do. I try to aim another bite-missile towards him, but whatever powers he has, he can see me in the dark with them. He catches my flying tackle, gets both of my arms behind me, and presses until breath starts exiting my lungs without my permission.

  "This is what happens," he snarls, forcing my arm down, making me kneel. "Every time. Every lead. Someone you care about gets hurt."

  I try to wrench free but he's got perfect leverage somehow. My shoulder joint protests and I have to stop pulling or something's going to dislocate.

  Tasha is on her feet now, backing away. Good. Run. Please just run.

  But she's not running. She's looking at me, at him, at the stairs twenty feet away. Calculating. Trying to figure out if she can make it.

  "Eventually," he continues, still holding me down with one hand like it's nothing, blood still pooling in his shoulder, "the people around you will ask if it's worth it. If we can't get you to stop, we'll just get everyone you know and love to abandon you."

  "Fuck you," I manage through clenched lips. I squeeze my forearm muscles hard enough to spike new teeth out from my wrists, and he jumps back with a sharp exhale. Not this time, motherfucker! I twist around and grab his wrists. Tasha grabs something off the floor. A piece of wood he ripped out of the wall, maybe two feet long, "Center mass!" I remind her, and she swings it at his liver with everything she has.

  It connects. The sound is meaty and solid. He lets out another noise, and it satisfies the animal in my head. He grabs my forearm and tries to grapple me down again, finding a spot where there's no teeth, not yet. He presses with one hand but I feel it all over my body, like he's able to crush me against the floor from one point of contact. What is this - telekinesis? Why even bother grabbing me?

  The second swing aims for his head. He blunts it with a raised arm, but can't stop all of it from making contact with his skull, snapping in half against his forearm.

  I rip my body free, teeth tearing through his palm as I go. He makes another loud noise, this one accompanied with a "Motherfucker!", and grabs me by the hair. He twists, and I feel force torquing my entire body, hurling me a deadly 170 degrees away in the other direction. If I didn't have blood sense, I'd be totally disoriented.

  Tasha freezes. No combat instinct - a delicate butterfly. He grabs her by the bun.

  "Last chance," he growls, pissed off, no longer in the mood for taking prisoners, but still calm, breathing evenly. Still calm despite the blood running down his hand where my teeth went through, leaking into her coiled hair. He yanks her up, and she lets out another squeal. Held aloft by her hair, squirming, huffing and gasping with pain. "Tell her to stop. Tell her it's not worth it."

  Tasha looks at me, eyes wet. Then back at him.

  "Fuck you," she says. Her voice is shaking but the words are clear.

  There's a pause. Then he makes a sound that might be a laugh. "Alright then."