Chapter 1. The Anchor Awakens (2)

The tentacle hit the shield and burst into black rain."Come on," she told herself, and her voice came out wrecked. "Come on, Lynn. You're going to get an A in this."The tear tore wider.The purple wound split to twice its size, and the black mist gathered itself into a face — not a human face, a mouth built from a hundred tentacles, smiling at her the way a cat smiles at a mouse. The pressure of it hit her like weather. The gold light guttered. Behind her, the baby was crying again, and the whole plaza had gone quiet in that particular way crowds go quiet when they've stopped believing in rescue.Oh, Lynn thought. Okay. This is it.Her gold light flared to its absolute limit and then broke. The Recoil slammed her down onto the pavement, knees first, into broken glass, and the world went gray at the edges. She could hear the baby crying. She could hear her own heart, getting slower, which was a sound she had never really considered before. She thought, absurdly, of the midterm. She thought of Zoey's pizza. She thought of the plant she was going to buy for the apartment she was going to have.And then the dark came.Not from the tear. From behind her.A pale hand reached over her shoulder. A fingertip touched the air, once, gently, and the smiling mouth froze. The whole tear froze — black mist crystallizing into black ice, falling in slow glittering sheets over the plaza, catching in her hair like snow that didn't melt. The pressure vanished. The silence that followed was the cleanest thing Lynn had heard all night.The hand withdrew.Lynn looked up from the ground and saw a man.She had seen handsome men. Movie handsome, poster handsome, the guys at school who could have been handsome in a catalog. This man was not any of those. He stood inside the falling black snow like he'd been standing there all evening, black hair to his waist, skin pale enough to be translucent, and eyes — his eyes were red. Not the red of a warning light. The red of wine held up to a lamp, dark and old and patient. He wore a perfectly cut black coat with a silver crest pinned at the collar, and he looked like he had stepped out of a nineteenth-century portrait and was extremely unimpressed with the lighting.He looked down at her. His expression said: boring fireworks."Stand up," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, bored. "The kneeling look is doing nothing for my reputation."Lynn's brain shorted out and restarted. She grabbed her own wrist, where the gold light was still crawling under her skin like a fever, and her second thought was the one that actually landed: she recognized the way he smelled. Blood-sweet and shadow-cold. The forbidden shelf had described that smell. Her mouth went dry."You're —" she said. Her voice cracked. "You're a blood kin. The Covenant says vampires hunt guardians.""

The Covenant also said the Earth was the center of the universe," the man said. "You believe everything they tell you?"She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. The tear, forgotten, tried to shiver back to life behind him, and he sighed — actually sighed, like a man asked to do a chore — and raised one finger. Dark light curled around it, and he pressed it down like he was stubbing out a cigarette. The tear flattened. Gone. The air smelled like burnt protein and ozone, and then like nothing at all.He brushed a speck of nothing off his sleeve, then walked over to her and crouched down, bringing his face level with hers. Lynn tensed, gold gathering in her palms on pure instinct. He ignored it completely.He reached into his coat and produced a napkin. Folded, clean, and printed with the logo of a pancake house. On the corner, in ballpoint pen: "You're welcome.""Your face is bleeding," he said.Lynn stared at the napkin. "You carry pancake-house napkins on you?""I own the place." He said it the way other people said "I have a dentist appointment." "Blueberry pancakes with double cream are the least I owe a midnight savior."She stared at him. The world, she decided, had officially lost its mind.He stood up, and for a moment he looked down at her with those wine-red eyes, and something in his face changed. The boredom cracked, just for a second, into something older and much less safe."Remember this, Anchor girl," he said, and his voice had gone low and careful, every word deliberate. "If the whole world wants you dead, I'll burn the whole world down.""…What?""Go home." He was already turning away, walking toward the corner. "Tonight's San Francisco is mine. Good night."He walked slowly, and the dark spread under his feet like a carpet, and the streetlights died and relit one by one as he passed them. Lynn watched him go, watched the black snow melt on the pavement, and one thought surfaced from the wreckage of her evening:She should be terrified.But her heart was pounding too hard to tell her what kind.Her hand was still closed around the napkin. She unfolded it with fingers that would not stop shaking, read the pancake-house logo and the two ballpoint words, and folded it again, carefully, and put it in her pocket like evidence. She did not know yet that she would carry it for a very long time, through fires and falls and the end of the world, like a coin saved for a ferryman.There was a crystal of black ice on her sleeve. It had not melted. It sat there, dark and patient, and when she brushed at it, it did not smudge — it simply lay in her palm, cold as a coin, until she dropped it on the pavement and it shattered into nothing, leaving a faint scorch mark on the concrete.The streetlight above her flickered.

And somewhere behind her, very far away, she could have sworn the sky made a sound like a held breath.The walk home took her an hour and a half because she kept having to stop and sit down. Her knees were shredded. Her hands were shaking. Sirens had swallowed the station by the time she limped past it, and the whole block was cordoned off with tape, and a cop with a clipboard was taking statements from people who all described the same monster in wildly different ways. Nobody looked at Lynn twice. Nobody mentioned the girl who had glowed. When she glanced back once, the cop was staring at his clipboard with a strange, flat look, and the witness beside him was mid-sentence, and neither of them seemed to remember what they'd been doing. The Covenant's people got there fast. They always did.She made it back to her dorm just after midnight. Zoey was dead to the world, sleeping mask on, snoring with the dedication of a professional, and on the desk sat a half-eaten pizza box and a note in Zoey's handwriting: "u worked late AGAIN? saved u a margherita. don't thank me, thank pizza."Lynn shoved the pizza in the fridge and fell onto her bed and stared at the ceiling. A fever dream, she decided. A hallucination brought on by caffeine and academic despair. In the morning none of it would be real. The gold light was a trick of the streetlamps. The vampire was a man in a costume. The monster was a flock of birds. The scorch mark on the ceiling was a water stain, and the text message was a wrong number sent by a sleep-deprived stranger with a very specific sense of humor.Her phone buzzed.Three thirty-three in the morning. Unknown number. One message."Good night, Anchor girl. There was a shadow on your ceiling watching you. I dealt with it. Also: three PM tomorrow, the management office. Your new landlord."Lynn sat bolt upright.In the corner of the ceiling, just above the door, there was a scorch mark. Small. Fresh. The shape of something that had been there, and then had not.She stared at the scorch mark. She stared at the phone. And she remembered the Sisters, their gray faces, their patient voices, the lesson they had drummed into her since she was old enough to hold a crayon: the guardian awakens at twenty. The guardian is martyred at twenty-one. No exceptions. The ledger closes itself.She was twenty.Lynn put the phone down, screen-down, on the desk. She picked up the cold slice of pizza and bit into it, hard, and chewed, and chewed, and somewhere around the third bite she started laughing, and it came out a little bit broken."My destiny," she said to the ceiling, soft and sharp and final, "I'll shred it myself."She took another bite."But first, at three o'clock tomorrow, I'm going to meet the psychopath landlord."