Chapters (53)
- Front Cover
- Letter from the Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- • One •
- • Two •
- • Three •
- • Four •
- • Five •
- • Six •
- • Seven •
- • Eight •
- • Nine •
- • Ten •
- • Eleven •
- • Twelve •
- • Thirteen •
- • Fourteen •
- • Fifteen •
- • Sixteen •
- • Seventeen •
- • Eighteen •
- • Nineteen •
- • Twenty •
- • Twenty-One •
- • Twenty-Two •
- • Twenty-Three •
- • Twenty-Four •
- • Twenty-Five •
- • Twenty-Six •
- • Twenty-Seven •
- • Twenty-Eight •
- • Twenty-Nine •
- • Thirty •
- • Thirty-One •
- • Thirty-Two •
- • Thirty-Three •
- • Thirty-Four •
- • Thirty-Five •
- • Thirty-Six •
- • Thirty-Seven •
- • Thirty-Eight •
- • ∞ •
- • Thirty-Nine •
- • Forty •
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Excerpt from Be Dazzled
- One
- Two
- About the Author
- Back Cover
Kane might have noticed Sophia look away too quickly if he wasn’t watching a shadow behind her break away from the wall and scamper, huge and spider-like, across a doorway.
“Something’s in here,” he whispered.
“What?”
He pulled her beneath the sill and along the wall, his eyes never leaving the doorway. “Something’s in here,” he repeated. “I saw something move.”
“Kane, relax, it’s probably a bat.”
Just then they both heard a creak on the stairs—the cry of the fifth step. Whoever it was must have known they’d given up their position. The mill shook as something large and fast thundered up the stairs and burst onto the second floor.
Kane and Sophia dashed into the closest room—one with a vaulted ceiling blackened by soot, a floor rotted through, and a heavy metal door. Kane swung it shut and slammed down the latch a moment before something rammed into the other side. The hinges screamed, but the latch held. Again and again something tried to muscle through, the ceiling releasing clots of dust with each impact. Then came the awful sound of metal scraping metal. A key, maybe? Or claws?
“There!” Sophia pulled Kane toward a window leading onto a roof so badly damaged it looked ready to cave in. Together they picked across sagging, broken beams. Inside the building, the shadows boiled—unreal, massive shapes that scuttled through the darkness below, tracking them.
“Kane!”
He caught Sophia’s wrist just as her leg plunged through a rotted portion of the roof, but their weight was too much. In a plume of dust and decay, the roof tilted beneath them, throwing them down so hard Kane’s teeth snapped together.
They were…outside? They’d tumbled over the mill’s back edge. Around them shivered desiccated ferns bathed in thick yellow light. Behind them the structure continued to shake ominously. Kane’s hand found Sophia and they ran, crashing through the forest of scorched saplings as a portion of the mill collapsed completely. Splinters showered their backs.
Kane threw a glance over his shoulder and saw a towering shadow printed upon the rolling cloud of dust and ash, so tall it could have been a tree. But then it turned and, finding them, lunged forward.
Kane focused only on keeping up with Sophia as they shot into the Cobalt Complex’s sprawling maze of ancient buildings, pitted roads, and equipment overgrown with ivy, to the edges where rotten fences held back the forest. They’d hidden Sophia’s car in the neighborhood that backed up against the mill, behind a wall of mountain laurel.
“Well, shit,” Sophia said as she flung herself into the driver’s side. She gulped breaths. “That was—”
The sound of sirens cut into Kane with the finality of a guillotine as a police cruiser rolled out of the shade, stopping before their idling car. Sophia let loose an elaborate string of bad words.