I squeeze my eyes shut, unable to keep my breathing even any longer. I’m gasping, hyperventilating. “Please. Ackermann, please,” I beg, not even hating myself for it. If it’s groveling he wants, I’ll give him as much as it takes to save my skin.

Elliott pauses. Then, a sharp inhale. He’s spotted the shapes in the fog too. He yanks me back onto the roof and releases me. “Go,” he orders coldly.

I open my eyes, wobbling as I regain my balance. “Together or we’re dead,” I maintain, though everything in me is shouting to run and not look back.

He sets his jaw and then nods curtly.

Below us, something scrapes. It sounds like claws against glass.

I back quickly away from the edge. We have to get somewhere inside, as far from the fog as possible. Lightning flashes again. In the burst of light, I scan the roof and spot a door at the same moment Elliott does. I get there first, grab the doorknob. The metal is rain-slick and my hand slips off. I try again and realize it’s locked.

“Move,” Elliott says tersely. I get out of the way and he kicks the door hard. Once, twice. It rattles but doesn’t give. He turns to me. “Can you pick the lock?”

I’ve got my back to him now, staring into the rain, waiting for a monster made of shadows to claw its way over the ledge. My heartbeat is a thrum in my ears. “No.”

He curses. “Look for a key, then!”

I tear my attention away from the rooftop, drop to my knees and search the ground blindly. The concrete is smooth, the bricks to either side of the door featureless. No key. Desperate, I stretch my still-bound hands out farther, and something falls out of my pocket and clinks metallically to the ground. It’s my key, the one that opens the padlock in my loft.

“There!” Elliott shouts, and snatches it up.

“No, that’s just to my—” I start, but he’s already turning it in the latch.

Snick. The door unlocks and swings open. I stare dumbly at it for a long moment. That shouldn’t have worked. This key is to my loft, not to this random door on the roof of a building I’ve never seen before.

Then lightning flashes again, and I glance over my shoulder and spot fog spilling across the roof toward us out of the corner of my eye. I stop caring how the key worked. I yank it out of the lock, step through, and slam the door behind me. I slide my hands upward. There: a dead bolt. I flick it shut. Then I turn and hurry after Elliott into the inky stairwell.

CHAPTER FIVE