This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1)

by Victoria Schwab

Corsai fed on flesh and bone, Malchai on blood, and whose it was meant nothing to them. But the Sunai could feed only on sinners. That’s what set them apart. Their best-kept secret. It was the seed of Leo’s righteousness, and the reason all FTFs were required to be shadow free. It was also why, in the early days of the Phenomenon and the mounting chaos, Leo had chosen to side with Henry Flynn instead of Callum Harker, a man with too many shadows to count.

Sunai, Sunai, eyes like coal, Sing you a song and steal your soul.

It was a cruel trick of the universe, thought August, that he felt human only after doing something monstrous.

Leo’s voice came to him, simple and steady. This is what you do. What you are. Ilsa’s rose to meet it. Find the good in it.

It had to be because of the catalysts. The Corsai seemed to come from violent, but nonlethal acts, and the Malchai stemmed from murders, but the Sunai, it was believed, came from the darkest crimes of all: bombings, shootings, massacres, events that claimed not only one life, but many. All that pain and death coalescing into something truly terrible; if a monster’s catalyst informed its nature, then the Sunai were the worst things to go bump in the night.

“What’s so funny?” asked August, pushing to his feet. “What’s a Sunai’s favorite food?” “What?” “Soul food.” August just stared at her. “Get it? Because—” “I get it,” he said flatly.

“How did you find us?” “You tick, I tock,” she said, her voice so soft that only his ears could pick it up. “I would hear you anywhere.”

“It isn’t safe,” he said, holding out his hand. But Ilsa reached up, and touched his cheek instead. “Safe,” she said with a hollow smile. “That is a pretty word.” “Come on,” snapped Kate beside the door. “But—” “Don’t worry, August. I’m not afraid of the dark.” Our sister has two sides. He took Ilsa’s face in his hands. “Please be careful.” They do not meet. “Go,” she said. “Before the cracks catch up.”

“Sunai are the result of tragedies,” he said, “acts of horror so dark they upset the cosmic balance. Leo came from some kind of cult slaughter in the first weeks of the catalyst. This whole group thought the world was ending, so they threw themselves off a roof. Only they didn’t go alone; they dragged their families with them. Parents. Children.”

“I’m what happens when a kid is so afraid of the world he lives in that he escapes the only way he knows how. Violently.”

“I read somewhere,” said Kate, “that people are made of stardust.” He dragged his eyes from the sky. “Really?” “Maybe that’s what you’re made of. Just like us.” And despite everything, August smiled.

Mind over body over bodies on the floor over tallies seared day by day by day into skin until it cracked and broke and bled into the beat of gunfire and the melody of pain and the world was made of savage music, made and was made of, and that was the cycle, the big bang into the whimper and on and on and none of it was real except for August or all of it was real except for him. . . .

“I am Sunai,” he said. “I am holy fire. And if I have to burn the world to cleanse it, so help me, I will.”

He could be the monster, if that kept others human. August had killed Harker so that Kate wouldn’t have to. He hadn’t relished the murder, but it wouldn’t stain his soul, not the way it would have hers. It hadn’t been just about the sinner in the end, it was about the sin itself, the shadow that ate away a human’s light. And August wasn’t human. He wasn’t made of flesh and bone, or starlight. He was made of darkness.