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  DEDICATION

  To those lost inside themselves

  EPIGRAPH

  He who fights monsters should see to it that

  in the process he does not become a monster . . .

  if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

  —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Hell is empty,

  All the devils are here.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prelude

  Verse 1: Monster Hunter Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IIII

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIIII

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Verse 2: The Monster in Me Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IIII

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIIII

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Verse 3: A Monster at Heart Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IIII

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIIII

  Verse 4: A Monster Unleashed Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IIII

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIIII

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Elegy

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Victoria Schwab

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PRELUDE

  Out in the Waste stood a home, abandoned.

  A place where a girl had grown up, and a boy had burned alive, where a violin had been shattered, and a stranger had been shot—

  And a new monster had been born.

  She stood in the house, the dead man at her feet, stepped over his body, wandered out into the yard, drew in fresh air as the sun went down.

  And started walking.

  Out in the Waste stood a warehouse, forgotten.

  A place where the air was still full of blood and hunger and heat, where the girl had escaped and the boy had fallen, and the monsters were defeated—

  All except for one.

  He lay on the warehouse floor, a steel bar driven through his back. It scraped his heart with every beat, and black blood spread like a shadow beneath his dark suit.

  The monster was dying.

  But not dead.

  She found him lying there, and pulled the weapon from his back, watching as he spit black blood onto the warehouse floor and rose to meet her.

  He knew that his maker was dead.

  And she knew that hers was not.

  Not yet.

  VERSE 1

  MONSTER HUNTER

  PROSPERITY

  Kate Harker hit the ground running.

  Blood dripped from a shallow cut on her calf, and her lungs were sore from the blow she’d taken to the chest. Thank God for armor, even if it was makeshift.

  “Turn right.”

  Her boots slid on the slick pavement as she rounded the corner onto a side street. She swore when she saw it was full of people, restaurant canopies up and tables out despite the brewing storm.

  Teo’s voice rose in her ear. “It’s catching up.”

  Kate backtracked and took off down the main road. “If you don’t want a mass casualty event, find me somewhere else.”

  “Half a block, then cut right,” said Bea, and Kate felt like the avatar in some multiplayer game where a girl was chased by monsters through a massive city. Only this massive city was real—the capital at the heart of Prosperity—and so were the monsters. Well, monster. She’d taken out one, but a second was heading her way.

  The shadows wicked around her as she ran. A chill twisted through the damp night and fat drops of rain dripped under her collar and down her back.

  “Left up ahead,” instructed Bea, and Kate bolted past a row of shops and down an alley, leaving a trail of fear and blood like bread crumbs in her wake. She reached a narrow lot and a wall, only it wasn’t a wall, but a warehouse door, and for a split second she was back in the abandoned building in the Waste, cuffed to a bar in a blacked-out room while somewhere beyond the door, metal struck bone and someone—

  “Left.”

  Kate blinked the memory away as Bea repeated her instruction. But she was sick of running, and the door was ajar, so she went straight, out of the rain and into the vacant space.

  There were no windows in the warehouse, no light at all save that from the street behind her, which reached only a few feet—the rest of the steel structure was plunged into solid black. Kate’s pulse pounded in her head as she cracked a glorified glow stick—Liam’s idea—and tossed it into the shadows, flooding the warehouse with steady white light.

  “Kate . . . ,” chimed in Riley for the first time. “Be careful.”

  She snorted. Count on Riley to give useless advice. She scanned the warehouse, spotted crates piled within reach of the steel rafters overhead, and started to climb, hauling herself the last of the way up just as the door rattled on its hinges.

  Kate froze.

  She held her breath as fingers—not flesh and bone, but something else—curled around the door and slid it open.

  Static sounded in her good ear.

  “Status?” asked Liam nervously.

  “Busy,” she hissed, balancing on the rafters as the monster filled the doorway, and for an instant, Kate imagined Sloan’s red eyes, his shining fangs, his dark suit.

  Come out, little Katherine, he’d say. Let’s play a game.

  The sweat on her skin chilled, but it was just her mind playing tricks on her—the creature edging forward into the warehouse wasn’t a Malchai. It was something else entirely.

  It had a Malchai’s red eyes, yes, and a Corsai’s sharp claws, but its skin was the bluish black of a rotting corpse, and it wasn’t after flesh or blood.

  It fed on hearts.

  Kate didn’t know why she’d assumed the monsters would be the same. Verity had its triad, but here she had only come across a single kind. So far.

  Then again, Verity boasted the highest crime rate of all ten territories—thanks in large part, she was sure, to her father—while Prosperity’s sins were harder to place. On the books, Prosperity was the wealthiest territory by half, but it was a robust economy rotting from the inside out.

  If Verity’s sins were knives, quick and vicious, then Prosperity’s were poison. Slow, insidious, but just as deadly. And when the violence began to coalesce into something tangible, something monstrous, it didn’t happen all at once, as in Verity, but in a drip, slow enoug
h that most of the city was still pretending the monsters weren’t real.

  The thing in the warehouse suggested otherwise.

  The monster inhaled, as though trying to smell her, a chilling reminder of which of them was the predator and which, for the moment, was prey. Fear scraped along her spine as its head swung from side to side. And then it looked up. At her.

  Kate didn’t wait.

  She dropped down, catching herself on the steel rafter to ease the fall. She landed in a crouch between the monster and the warehouse door, spikes flashing in her hands, each the length of her forearm and filed to a vicious point.

  “Looking for me?”

  The creature turned, flashing two dozen blue-black teeth in a feral grimace.

  “Kate?” pressed Teo. “You see it?”

  “Yeah,” she said dryly. “I see it.”

  Bea and Liam both started talking, but Kate tapped her ear and the voices dropped out, replaced a second later by a strong beat, a heavy bass. The music filled her head, drowning out her fear and her doubt and her pulse and every other useless thing.

  The monster curled its long fingers, and Kate braced herself—the first one had tried to punch right through her chest (she’d have the bruises to prove it). But the attack didn’t come.

  “What’s the matter?” she chided, her voice lost beneath the beat. “Is my heart not good enough?”

  She had wondered, briefly, in the beginning, if the crimes written on her soul would somehow make her less appetizing.

  Apparently not.

  A second later, the monster lunged.

  Kate was always surprised to discover that monsters were fast.

  No matter how big.

  No matter how ugly.

  She dodged back, quick on her feet.

  Five years’ and six private schools’ worth of self-defense had given her a head start, but the last six months hunting down things that went bump in Prosperity—that had been the real education.

  She danced between blows, trying to avoid the monster’s claws and get under its guard.

  Nails raked the air above Kate’s head as she ducked and slashed the iron spike across the creature’s outstretched hand.

  It snarled and swung at her, recoiling only after its claws bit into her sleeve and hit copper mesh beneath. The armor absorbed most of the damage, but Kate still hissed as somewhere on her arm the skin parted and blood welled up.

  She let out a curse and drove her boot into the creature’s chest.

  It was twice her size, made of hunger and gore and God knew what else, but the sole of her shoe was plated with iron, and the creature went staggering backward, clawing at itself as the pure metal burned away a stretch of mottled flesh, exposing the thick membrane that shielded its heart.

  Bull’s-eye.

  Kate launched herself forward, aiming for the still-sizzling mark. The spike punched through cartilage and muscle before sinking easily into that vital core.

  Funny, she thought, that even monsters had fragile hearts.

  Her momentum carried her forward, and the monster fell back, and they went down together, its body collapsing beneath her into a mound of gore and rot. Kate staggered to her feet, holding her breath against the noxious fumes until she reached the warehouse door. She slumped against it, pressing a palm to the gash on her arm.

  The song was ending in her ear, and she switched the feed back to Control.

  “How long has it been?”

  “We have to do something.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I’m here.”

  A string of profanity.

  A few stock lines of relief.

  “Status?” asked Bea.

  Kate pulled the cell from her pocket, snapped a photo of the gory slick on the concrete, and hit SEND.

  “Jesus,” answered Bea.

  “Wicked,” said Liam.

  “Looks fake,” offered Teo.

  Riley sounded queasy. “Do they always . . . fall apart?”

  The litany in her ear was just another reminder that these people had no business being on this end of the fight. They had their purpose, but they weren’t like her. Weren’t hunters.

  “How about you, Kate?” asked Riley. “You okay?”

  Blood soaked her calf and dripped from her fingers, and truth be told, she felt a little dizzy, but Riley was human—she didn’t have to tell him the truth.

  “Peachy,” she said, killing the call before any of them could hear the catch in her breath. The glow stick flickered and faded, plunging her back into the dark.

  But she didn’t mind.

  It was empty now.

  Kate climbed the stairs, leaving drops of gray water in her wake. The rain had started up again halfway back to the apartment, and she’d relished the soaking despite the cold, letting it wash away the worst of the black blood and gore.

  Even so, she still looked like she’d gotten in a fight with a jar of ink—and lost.

  She reached the third-floor landing and let herself in.

  “Honey, I’m home.”

  No answer, of course. She was crashing in Riley’s apartment—an apartment his parents paid for—while he was off “living in sin” with his boyfriend, Malcolm. She remembered seeing the place for the first time—the exposed brick, the art, the overstuffed furniture designed for comfort—and thinking Riley’s parents clearly shopped in a different catalog than Callum Harker.

  She’d never lived alone before.

  The school dorms had always been two-to-a-room, and back at Harker Hall, she’d had her father, at least in theory. And his shadow, Sloan. She’d always assumed she’d relish the eventual privacy, the freedom, but it turned out that being alone lost some of its charm when you didn’t have a choice.

  She smothered the wave of self-pity before it could crest and headed for the bathroom, peeling off her armor as she went. Armor was a pretty fancy word for the copper mesh stretched over paintball gear, but Liam’s combined interests in costume design and war games did the job . . . 90 percent of the time. The other 10, well, that was just sharp claws and bad luck.

  She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror—damp blond hair slicked back, black gore freckling pale cheeks—and met her own gaze.

  “Where are you?” she murmured, wondering how other Kates in other lives were spending their night. She’d always liked the idea that there was a different you for every choice you made and every choice you didn’t, and somewhere out there were Kates who had never returned to Verity and never begged to leave.

  Ones who could still hear out of both ears and had two parents instead of none.

  Ones who hadn’t run, hadn’t killed, hadn’t lost everything.

  Where are you?

  Once upon a time, the first image in her head would have been the house beyond the Waste, with its high grass and its wide-open sky. Now it was the woods behind Colton, an apple in her hand and birdsong overhead, and a boy who wasn’t a boy with his back against a tree.

  She turned the shower on, wincing as she peeled away the last of the fabric.

  Steam bloomed across the glass, and she bit back a groan as hot water struck raw skin. She leaned against the tiles and thought of another city, another house, another shower.

  A monster slumped in the bath.

  A boy burning from the inside out.

  Her hand wrapped around his.

  I’m not going to let you fall.

  As the scalding water ran gray and rust red and then finally clear, she considered her skin. She was becoming a patchwork of scars. From the teardrop in the corner of her eye and the pale line that ran from temple to jaw—marks of the car crash that had killed her mother—to the curve of a Malchai’s teeth along her shoulder and the silvery gash of a Corsai’s claws across her ribs.

  And then there was the mark she couldn’t see.

  The one she’d made herself when she raised her father’s gun and pulled the trigger and killed a stranger, staining her soul red.

  Kate sna
pped the water off.

  As she taped up her latest cuts, she wondered if, somewhere, there was a version of herself having fun. Feet up on the back of a theater seat while movie monsters slunk out of the shadows, and people in the audience screamed because it was fun to be afraid when you knew you were safe.

  It shouldn’t make her feel better, imagining those other lives, but it did. One of those paths led to happiness, even while Kate’s own had led her here.

  But here, she told herself, was exactly where she was supposed to be.

  She’d spent five years trying to become the daughter her father wanted—strong, hard, monstrous—only to learn that her father didn’t want her at all.

  But he was dead, and Kate wasn’t, and she’d had to find something to do, someone to be, some way to put all those skills to use.

  And she knew it wasn’t enough—no matter how many monsters she slayed, it wouldn’t undo the one she’d made, wouldn’t erase the red from her soul—but life only moved forward.

  And here in Prosperity, Kate had found a purpose, a point, and now when she met her gaze in the mirror, she didn’t see a girl who was sad or lonely or lost. She saw a girl who wasn’t afraid of the dark.

  She saw a girl who hunted monsters.

  And she was damn good at it.

  Hunger gnawed at Kate’s bones, but she was too tired to go in search of food. She turned the radio up and slumped onto the couch, sighing at the simple comfort of clean hair and a soft sweatshirt.

  She’d never been all that sentimental, but living out of a duffel bag taught you to value the things you had. The sweatshirt was from Leighton, the third of her six boarding schools. She had no fondness for the school itself, but the sweatshirt was worn and warm, a little piece of a past life. She didn’t let herself cling to these pieces, holding on just tight enough that they wouldn’t slip away. Besides, the Leighton colors were forest green and cool gray, way better than St. Agnes’s horror show of red and purple and brown.

  She booted up her tablet and logged into the private chat space Bea had carved out in the infinite world of Prosperity’s opendrive.

  Welcome to the Wardens, said the screen.