Chapter 289: Symbiote Threat

I kept walking.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t shown itself yet, and stopping in the middle of an open street while carrying medical supplies and two people who weren’t combat-capable was not the response the situation called for. You keep moving. You assess while you move. You don’t give whatever’s out there the gift of a stationary target.

But the feeling didn’t leave.

It had started as a chill, that moves down the spine from the inside rather than the outside. My Symbiote had reacted to something before my conscious mind had caught up to it, which meant whatever was out there was significant enough to register on a frequency most people didn’t have access to. The fact that Cindy had felt it too, with her brand new radar, told me that I didn’t just imagine it.

Something was out there.

“Cindy,” I called quietly. “Your radar. Tell me what you’re getting.”

She didn’t argue. Her eyes closed briefly, brows drawing together with concentration. Her steps didn’t slow. She was getting good at this faster than I’d expected.

A few seconds passed.

“Nothing inside my current range,” she said, opening her eyes. “Whatever it is, it’s not within the circle yet.”

“Maribel,” I said, moving up slightly. “We need to pick up the pace. Now.”

She glanced at me sideways, reading my expression. “Something’s wrong?”

“Bad feeling. Real one,” I said.

That was enough. She’d seen enough of what I was to know that my bad feelings weren’t the ordinary kind.

“You heard him, Doctor,” she said, turning to Shawn and placing one hand flat on his back to encourage forward momentum. “We’re moving faster.”

“I am carrying the equivalent of a small person in medical supplies and I am not in my athletic prime,” Shawn said, complaining.

“Do you want to keep breathing?” Maribel asked pleasantly.

Shawn looked at me. I gave him one short nod.

He clicked his tongue. “Fine.” He adjusted his grip on the bags and pushed into a faster walk.

We shifted up into a jog without ceremony, Maribel forward, Shawn and Daisy in the middle, me and Cindy covering the rear. I kept my eyes moving. Left side, right side, the upper floors of the buildings flanking us, the gaps between structures where the sightlines dropped away into shadow.

It wasn’t a Hybrid. I’d felt Hybrids before, the proximity warning they generated.

This was different.

I didn’t have a word for it yet. Which was the part that worried me most.

My heartbeat had been climbing steadily for the last minute without a clear cause, and my palms had gone damp, and both of those things were my body telling me something my brain was still processing.

“Ryan!”

Cindy’s voice brought me back from my thoughts.

She was pointing into the gap between two buildings on our left. A narrow channel of shadow between brick faces, deep enough that detail dissolved into darkness about fifteen feet in.

I looked.

Nothing visible.

“It’s there,” she said. “Something moving in the gap. Fast. Coming parallel to us.”

“What? I don’t see anything!” Maribel’s head had snapped toward the gap, hand already moving to her weapon.

“I’m not imagining it,” Cindy said.

“Nobody said you were, run!” Maribel shouted.

The group lurched forward into a full run.

“Give me one of those,” Maribel said, grabbing one of Shawn’s bags with one hand while the other grasped a wooden spike. Her other hand was already reaching for the long knife at her hip.

“I’ve got the other one!” Daisy said, moving up alongside Shawn and pulling the second bag from his hand with both arms, the weight of it immediately visible in her posture but her face carrying nothing except focus.

Maribel threw her a single, appreciative look and accelerated into the lead position, out in front of Shawn and Daisy now, clearing the path.

“What exactly did you see?” She called back.

“I didn’t see it,” Cindy said, running beside me, her breathing elevated. “I felt it. It’s fast. Really fast. And whatever it is—” she shook her head slightly — “it isn’t a Hybrid.”

“What else moves fast enough to—” Maribel started.

“I don’t know yet,” Cindy said.

“Cindy,” I said, “range check. Where is it now?”

She closed her eyes again, and used again her radar.

I watched her face.

Then I saw it. The dark line appearing under her nose, the thin track of red beginning at the edge of her nostril and running toward her lip.

“Cindy! Hey!”

Her eyes opened immediately. She brought her hand up to her nose and felt the blood.

“I pushed too far,” she said, preempting me.

“You just woke it up this afternoon,” I said, and I didn’t manage to keep all the worry out of my voice. “Pull back. You’ll rupture something.”

“But if I can find where it—”

“Cindy.” I looked at her directly, still running. “Please.”

She pressed her fingers to her nose and nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’m pulling back.”

I returned my attention to the street ahead and the world around us and turned inward instead, reaching for what I did have, which wasn’t a radar but wasn’t nothing either. The Symbiote’s senses, less structured than Cindy’s ability but deeper in some ways, more instinctive. I let the ambient noise of the street wash through without reacting to it — distant infected movement, wind through broken windows, the percussion of our own footsteps, and filtered down past all of it, looking for the specific pattern that didn’t belong.

And there.

Footsteps.

Not running, exactly. More like, bounding. The irregular, weighted rhythm of something moving in great leaping strides rather than the continuous contact of a sprint. Each impact was light but the intervals between them were long, the kind of distance you cover in the air rather than on the ground. Fast. Very fast. Moving in parallel to us from the left side and slightly behind.

Getting closer.

I counted the intervals between impacts, tracking the approach.

Then the footsteps stopped.

The absence of them was louder than the sound had been.

I pulled my gaze left and up simultaneously, reading the sudden silence as the pause before a committed movement, the held-breath moment before a thing committed to its—

Third floor window. Left building. Something in the frame, crouched in the space where the glass had been, and then not crouched but launching.

Pure instinct took over.

I drove both palms into Shawn’s back and Daisy’s shoulder simultaneously, sending them stumbling forward with more force than was polite, and in the same motion grabbed Cindy’s arm and threw myself backward, pulling her with me, the two of us clearing the space in a single arcing jump.

The impact hit the pavement where we’d been standing.

The sound it made wasn’t the sound of a person landing. It was the sound of something far heavier coming down at a speed that had nothing to do with a controlled descent, a concussive crack, a crunch of breaking concrete, a shockwave of displaced air that hit my face even from the distance I’d managed to put between us.

A hole found itself there. An actual depression in the concrete, edges fractured outward, as if the ground had been struck with something designed to break it.

Shawn hit the pavement several feet ahead with an undignified yelp, bags skidding from his hands. Daisy went down beside him, glasses miraculously staying on her face, managing to turn around.

Maribel had pulled out of her run and turned around before the dust had fully settled.

Then she saw what was standing in the crater and she stopped moving entirely.

“What in the—” Shawn had rolled onto his back and was pushing himself upright, already building toward an indignant comment about being shoved, when his eyes found the same thing Maribel’s had.

She was standing between us and them.

Dark hair, hanging loose and tangled. Skin that was the wrong shade, not pale the way people go pale from cold or shock, but the deep, unhealthy pallor of something that had moved past illness into a different category entirely. Her complexion had an almost grey undertone to it, like the colour had been drawn out from beneath the surface over a long period. Her posture was wrong too, weird.

I knew what she was before I’d consciously formed the thought.

Symbiote Host?

Dullahan inside me responding to something of its own kind, the way a tuning fork responds to its matching frequency. But this one seemed different.

I didn’t meet another Symbiote Host at least another King Host like me so it was hard to tell but something was off about her.

I extended my arm sideways, finding Cindy’s shoulder and pressing her back behind me. Then I looked past the woman at Maribel, who had her knife out and her spike raised and her eyes locked on me for a cue.

“Run,” I said.

She didn’t hesitate. One hand went to Shawn’s arm, one to Daisy’s, and she pulled them both upright.

Daisy looked back at me, her new glasses intact, her face arranged into an expression of worry that she was trying to keep out of her eyes and failing.

I gave her a single nod.

“Go. I’ve got this.”

The tension in the air rose immediately as the woman moved.

One step.

I activated the Time Freeze.

The world locked and her movements froze.

I moved.

I covered the distance fast, already deciding on restraint rather than escalation. I didn’t know who she was. She wasn’t Gaspar at least, she didn’t match Rebecca’s and Daisy’s descriptions so she was another Symbiotic Host?

I needed to know.

I was three feet from her when the tentacle came.

It sliced through the space at my left side with a speed that had nothing to do with the frozen world around it, yellowish, dense, moving with its own independent momentum through time that wasn’t supposed to be moving at all.

I twisted sideways on pure reflex, the edge of it grazing the fabric of my shirt, close enough that I felt the displacement of air across my ribs.

I landed two steps to the right and stared at her.

She was still frozen. Completely still, caught in the Time Freeze exactly as she should be.

But the tentacles weren’t.

What the hell?

Emily had been able to move through the Time Freeze as well I’d attributed that to her being the Queen Host of Dullahan and I think definitely it played a role since contraty to the woman in front of me, Emily could move as well.

But if the Symbiotes themselves, independent of the host body, could continue functioning in frozen time…

The seconds were running out. I could feel the Freeze thinning at the edges, the pressure of resumption building.

I closed my right fist.

The wind blade answered immediately, I felt it coiling through my forearm, the familiar sharp cold of it gathering along my knuckles, ready.

The tentacles shot forward again, multiple this time, coming from different angles.

I moved through them. I ducked under one, drove my right fist into two others, the wind blade shearing through them cleanly with a sound like tearing fabric. They pulled back and reformed.

The Time Freeze broke.

Time resumed and the woman’s momentum snapped back into real speed but I was already there, inside her guard, one hand grabbing the front of her shirt, and I used the full force of the resumption, the sudden return of inertia, and threw her.

She left the ground. Traveled through the air with a velocity that was considerably more than the throw alone would have generated, cleared Cindy’s position entirely, and hit the road surface twenty feet back with an impact that rolled through the concrete in a visible shockwave.

She didn’t stay down.

She came up onto all fours right after.

Her head came up and her eyes found me narrowing dangerously.

This is bad.

“Cindy,” I said, keeping my eyes on the woman. “Move back.”

I heard Cindy shift behind me quickly in hurry.

“Ryan—”

“She’s a Host. She can fight and she will. I need you away from here.” I cut her off before she could speak.. “All of you. Go now.”

Cindy looked at me worried and uneasy.

“I’ll be back,” I said, and I turned my head just enough to catch her eyes for one second. “I promise. I’m not trying to get rid of you, I just need to move freely and I can’t do that if I’m watching your position at the same time. Go.”

Cindy held my eyes for a moment, and she nodded biting her lips.

I looked at Maribel then.

“I’ll follow when I’m done,” I said. “Get them back.”

She held the complicated expression for one more second. Then: “Good luck,” she said , and turned to Shawn. “Move.”

“Best of luck to you, lad,” Shawn said as well.

“Ryan.” Daisy called me timidly. I turned slightly and found her looking at me worried. “Be careful. Please.”

“I will,” I said. “Go, Daisy.”

She went.

Cindy was the last to move reluctantly.

Their footsteps receded.

I turned back to the woman, who had risen fully to her feet now.

I looked at her and narrowed my eyes.

“Who are you?”

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