“Where are you going?” she asked in her thin childlike voice.

“Walking. I can’t sleep yet. I’m too wound up.” Nest watched the shadows whirl and spin inside the tatterdemalion’s gauzy body. “How did you get here?”

Ariel didn’t seem to hear the question, her dark eyes shifting anxiously. “It isn’t safe,” she said.

“What isn’t safe?”

“The city at night.”

They had crossed from the hotel and walked into the next block. Nest looked around cautiously at the darkened doorways and alcoves of the buildings. There was no one to be seen.

“I remember about cities,” Ariel continued, her voice small and distant. She seemed to float across the pavement, a ghostly hologram. “I remember how they feel and what they hide. I remember what they can do to you. They are filled with people who will hurt you. They are places in which children can disappear in the blink of an eye. Sometimes they lock you away in dark places and no one comes for you. Sometimes they wall you up forever.”

She was speaking from the memories of the children she had been once, of the only memories she had. Nest decided she didn’t want to know about those memories, the memories of dead children.

“It will be all right,” she said. “We won’t go far.”

They walked quite a distance though, all the way down First Avenue under Pioneer Square’s turn-of-the-century street lamps past shuttered shops and galleries to where they could see the Kingdome rising up against the night sky in a massive hump. The mist thickened and swirled about them, clinging to Nest’s face and hands in a thin, cold layer of moisture. Nest drew her windbreaker tighter about her shoulders. When the character of the neighborhood began to change, the shops and galleries giving way to warehouses and industrial plants, Nest turned around again, with Ariel hovering close, and started back.

They were approaching a small, concrete, triangular park with benches and shade trees fronting a series of buildings that included one advertising Seattle’s Underground Tour when the screams began.

They were so faint that at first Nest couldn’t believe she was hearing them. She slowed and looked around doubtfully. She was all alone on the streets. There was no one else in sight. But the screams continued, harsh and terrible in the blackness and mist.

“Something hunts,” Arid hissed as she shimmered brightly, darting left and right.

Nest wheeled around, looking everywhere at once.

“Where are they coming from?” she demanded, frantic now.

“Beneath us,” Ariel said.

Nest looked down at the concrete sidewalk in disbelief. “From the sewers?”

Ariel moved close, her childlike face smooth and expressionless, but her eyes filled with terror. “There is an old city beneath the new. The screams are coming from there!”

The demon worked its way ahead slowly through the blackness of the underground city, following the scent of the humans and the sound of their voices. It wound through narrow streets and alleyways and in and out of doors and gaps in crumbling walls. It was filled with hunger and flushed with a need to kill. It was driven.