Emily's entire body trembled beneath the teacher's desk where Nathan had shoved her seconds before the classroom lights died.
Outside, the hallway had gone completely, unnaturally silent.
No footsteps echoing against tile. No teachers shouting down corridors. No distant laughter bleeding through walls the way it always did between classes at Westbrook High.
Just darkness and breathing.
Heavy, rhythmic breathing that didn't belong to either of them.
Nathan stood between her and the classroom door, his shoulders rigid, every muscle in his body coiled like something ready to snap. The faint gold glow in his eyes was stronger now, casting a thin, molten light across the floor in front of him. Emily pressed herself smaller against the back of the desk and tried to keep her own breathing quiet, even though her lungs were screaming.
The symbols on her palm still burned. A slow, persistent heat, like a coal that hadn't finished dying. Her mind wouldn't stop spinning.
Who was Nathan, really? What had he done to me when he grabbed my wrist? And why does the voice in the dark know my name?
The classroom door creaked open.
Emily clamped a hand over her mouth.
Two figures stepped inside.
At first glance, standing in the darkness, they looked completely human. Same height. Same build. Same clothes as any other student who might have wandered in off the hallway. Emily felt a single, pathetic second of relief.
Then the emergency light above the door pulsed red.
Their faces caught the light.
Their eyes were entirely black.
Not dark brown. Not the kind of darkness that came from low lighting or shadow. Black like something had reached inside two human skulls and scooped out everything that was ever supposed to be there, leaving only empty, lightless holes behind.
The sound that nearly escaped Emily's throat would have gotten them both killed. She swallowed it whole.
The creature on the left tilted its head toward the desk where she was hiding.
"Found her."
Its voice was the worst part. Not one voice. Several layered on top of each other like a recording played back at three different speeds. The sound of it made her teeth ache.
Nathan moved before she could process what was happening.
He grabbed the nearest metal chair and hurled it with a force that had no business coming from a seventeen-year-old boy. The chair connected with the first creature's chest hard enough to crack the whiteboard it slammed into behind it.
The creature barely rocked backward.
Emily's stomach dropped straight through the floor.
The second one lunged.
Nathan caught it by the throat mid-air and drove it down into a row of desks with both hands. Wood exploded on impact, splinters scattering across the tile. The creature hit the ground, and the desks collapsed beneath it like they were made of cardboard.
Emily stared.
No human being could do that. Not a football player. Not a trained fighter. Not anyone who was supposed to exist inside the ordinary world she had been living in an hour ago.
What are you? She thought, staring at the back of Nathan's head. What are any of you?
The first creature recovered faster than it should have. It surged forward again, and this time there was something in its hand, a blade that caught the red emergency light as it swung hard toward Nathan's shoulder.
He turned a half-second too late.
The blade connected.
Blood hit the classroom floor in a dark spray.
"Nathan!" Emily screamed.
He staggered, one hand flying to his shoulder, dark blood pushing between his fingers. His jaw was tight, his breathing controlled, but Emily could see from the way he shifted his weight that it was bad.
The creatures looked at each other.
And then they smiled.
Emily was on her feet before she made the decision to stand up.
Nathan turned. The look on his face stopped her cold. Not the careful composure he wore in the hallways at school, not the unreadable expression he'd used in the classroom earlier. This was raw, urgent, and unmistakably afraid.
"Emily, run."
The closer creature covered the distance between them before either of them could move. A hand locked around her throat and drove her back against the classroom wall so hard the impact rattled the framed periodic table off its hook. Pain detonated through her spine.
She clawed at the hand with both of hers. It didn't shift. It didn't tighten either. It just held her in place with the patient, effortless grip of something that had never needed to try hard at anything.
Up close, she could see the skin on its face. Thin. Pulled too tight. Cracks running along the jaw and temples like dried-out earth after a drought.
"You don't remember who you are yet," it said with its many-voiced mouth. "That makes this so much easier."
Black edges crowded the corners of Emily's vision.
The symbols on her palm stopped burning.
They ignited.
The heat shot up her arm like electricity finding a wire, and then her mind went somewhere else entirely, fast and violent and without her permission.
Fire eating the school from the inside out, orange and unstoppable. Students frozen mid-scream in the parking lot with their eyes turned skyward. And Nathan, on his knees in the middle of it all, looking up at her like she was the only fixed point left in a world coming apart at every seam.
And threading through all of it, one sentence repeated over and over in a voice that sounded disturbingly like her own.
The Seeker has awakened.
Then the urge to scream erupted from deep inside her lungs.
The shockwave came out of her like a second heartbeat, a single, concussive pulse that had no name and no explanation. Every window in the classroom blew outward simultaneously. The creature holding her left the ground entirely and punched through the hallway wall like it weighed nothing, leaving a ragged hole where the plaster used to be.
Silence crashed back in.
Emily slid down the wall and hit the floor on her knees, both hands braced against the tile, shaking so hard she could hear her own teeth.
Nathan was staring at her. Not with fear but in recognition of someone seeing something they had been waiting a very long time to see.
"You finally used it," he breathed.
Emily looked at her hands. They looked completely normal now. The symbols were gone.
"What am I?" she whispered.
The fire alarm detonated overhead before he could answer. Red lights strobed across the ceiling and walls. And from somewhere down the hallway, from multiple directions, the sound of fast, purposeful footsteps converging on the classroom.
Nathan went pale.
"They're already here."
"Who?"
He grabbed her wrist, and this time there were no visions, just the hard, urgent pressure of someone out of time.
"The ones who hunt girls like you," he said. "Before they figure out what they can do."
The remaining window frame burst inward.
A figure dropped into the classroom from outside and landed in a low crouch in the broken glass, tall and masked and unhurried in the way that only truly dangerous things ever were. One hand held a knife still wet with something dark.
Slowly, the figure straightened and looked directly at Emily.
Then spoke four words.
"Bring me the Seeker."