Page 142 of Tracking Snow

My heart cartwheels painfully. I’m relieved to see him. Excited. Angry. Hurt. Each conflicting emotion beats with a force so intense I feel it’ll break free of my ribcage.

White eyes.

It's One, and he’s still in that same damn hoodie. The hood is down for once. His curls are crushed flat on one side, the way hair dries when a body sleeps where it falls. The sweater looks like it’s been washed, but dark blood stains the fabric around the bullet hole. The sleeve tattered from Brexley’s fangs has been shoved up over a duct-tape bandage wrapped around his forearm.

He steps over the broken threshold, his jaw flexed and set with determination. Smoke drifts across his face. Glass cracks under his shoes. He walks into the bar without hurrying, without looking left or right, while HAMs rush past him on both sides.

Everything else turns syrup slow. None of them touch him. None of them block him.

He moves straight toward me with dangerous intent. My fingers tighten around my dagger, as I watch him walk through the HAMs like he came with them.

Is he here to finish me off? Finish off this place and take the few friends I have, even though they are human? It’s too much to bear that I or they support magic-kind.

"Snow." Rap sees him too.

"I know," I say, but my voice is too thin.

Another woman rushes me. I turn, slash her jacket open, and drive my elbow into her nose. Blood flows hot over my wrist. A man swings a pipe. I duck, spin under it, and bury my dagger in his thigh.

The Seven keeps coming, slow and steady. A bottle flies past his head and shatters against the bar. Flame crawls up the polished wood. He doesn’t even glance at it.

His focus is still completely fixed on me, and it feels like the devil is coming for my soul.

My dagger lifts between us, but it feels useless, pathetic, even. The Seven already has my soul, and the realization claws through my chest, sharp and suffocating.

He disappears. A hot rush of air moves the hair at the back of my neck. And he reappears right in front of me along with a loud smacking sound. Panic punches through my chest.

One is so close the smoke breaks around his shoulders, so close I can see the bloodshot veins threaded through the white of his eyes.

For one suspended second, I can’t hear the fire. I can’t hear Rap. I can’t hear the glass breaking under anyone’s feet. His eyes flicker all the colors, except black...or red, before returning to white.

There's only him. Only them.

His breath against my face. The blank, terrible set of his mouth. His arm posed up over my shoulder. I follow its trajectory.

He's holding a pipe Wrecking Ball tried to bring down on my skull. It hovers inches away.

Oh.

One twists, dragging the pipe with him instead of trying to hold it.

Wrecking Ball’s momentum follows.

Before the big man can pull back, One is behind him.

A foot hooks Wrecking Ball’s ankle. A sharp strike hits the back of his knee. His leg folds under him, and all that weight goes down wrong.

His skull cracks against the edge of a table.

He drops.

One is already gone.

White flashes tear through the room. A wrist is redirected into a jaw. A crowbar swings wide and catches another HAM in the teeth. Someone charges, misses, and hits the brick wall face-first when One is suddenly somewhere else.

Bodies fall from their own speed, their own weapons, their own bad aim.

I see Rap laid out on the floor near the bar. Blood runs down her face from her hairline.