“Okay.” I had to tear my eyes away from his mouth. Focus, Lela. This is your job now. “The sightings were about six blocks that way,” I blurted, pointing toward Hope Street. My body temperature dropped to a slow burn.

“So what do the Mazikin want?” I asked Malachi as we set out. “If we know that, we might be able to predict what they’ll do here, right?”

“I don’t think their desires are very complicated,” he replied. “In my interrogations of the Mazikin we captured in the dark city, they all said the same thing: they wanted out of their realm. All of them. They consider their homeland a prison.”

“You think they’re trying to relocate their entire population?” The shudder that rolled through me wasn’t caused by the cold, but I hugged myself anyway. “How many of them do you think there are, in all?”

“I asked Raphael once. He said that there were originally only two, so it’s clear they are breeding, and by now there could be hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe a million. And that was many years ago. He wouldn’t tell me much else.”

“Huh. He’s usually so forthcoming.”

“Indeed,” Malachi said with a laugh. He gave me a sidelong glance as his smile fell away. “Lela, in the dark city they were still enclosed by the city walls. But here—”

“They have the whole world,” I said, the idea sitting in my stomach like a boulder. “They could split up and go anywhere. The only thing stopping them from stealing the bodies of a million living humans … is us.”

Malachi took my hand as we walked by a group of guys coming out of the Brown athletic facility. As he stroked his thumb over my fingers, I had to force myself to focus on his words instead of on his touch.

“We may have a bit of time,” he said. “Mazikin are like pack animals. They like to stay together. Only once during my time in the dark city were there two nests at the same moment, and that was because their population had gotten so large. At all other times, they chose one location, one base, and operated from there. It’s likely they’ll do that here while they figure out the quickest way to grow their numbers. Like me, they have much to learn.”

I squeezed his hand and hoped they didn’t learn as quickly as he did. “What do you think is the quickest way to grow their numbers, then?”