Centuries old smells

She went to the roof. She lay on her back, shut her eyes, and waited. Lunar gravity took hold of her like a second, alien world, pulling from another direction. When it crested the night sky, the pull was from above and below and the moon’s power made her weightless. She rose, stood on her toes, pocketed her sunglasses and let the moon touch her face.
Then she tore through her territory, her senses so sharp that she could hear screams from decades past, smell blood spilled into the paving stones a century ago. The six scars holding back her kanaf glowed red hot. Every noise and smell and sight pushed into her brain at once, too fast, like Ms. Cross’s driving on the highways.
Pressure built behind her scars. She stripped on a dark rooftop, tearing off mortal cotton, until all that remained were faded, red tennis shoes. Her scars peeled open, split by black strands of razor wire beneath her skin. Countless thin fibers exploded from the slits and filled the air like a black cloud. They flexed and Ryn arched her back at the exquisite sensation of an eighteen-month cramp finally stretched and soothed. With a thought, she wove her kanaf into sheets and smoothed them over her bare skin. She willed them soft and airy as a breeze and reveled in the sleek feel of them covering her—adjusting them to the same shape, color, and apparent texture of her hoodie and dark cargo pants.
She no longer felt naked. The kanaf was as much a part of her as a bird’s feathers.
Unfurling her wings had not released the deeper tension that coiled in her center. It was a spring prepared to release, crushed tighter and tighter by the institution, the school, the humans she couldn’t hurt but who desperately deserved it. There was still one thing she could hunt, though, that mortals wouldn’t miss. She filtered through the overlapping trails of old blood, the layers of killers and rapists and all manner of beasts on two legs until she found a fresh one. One that stalked right now, under the same full moon she did.
Perfect.
Ryn slid down a drainage pipe and vaulted across an alley, angling between two close boards on an upper-floor window. She dropped into the dingy room, which was cold from the gaps that exposed it to January’s elements and delicious in its lonesomeness. Street sounds crept in unfiltered, the walls laced with mildew and the smell of aged wood. There was a taped body outline on the bare floor and an incongruous, wooden rocking chair that creaked in the draft.


Chapter 4, Page 53-54