Read the beginning of Nova's story, Blacktop & Bone....

Prologue

The thing wearing Tommy Garrett's skin had been dead for three days before it clawed its way up and started walking again. It was a clumsy resurrection. A crude, desperate kind of magic that smeared black grease across the grass, leaving a sour, metallic taste in the air.

The boy had died in a snarl of hot steel and shattered safety glass on the shoulder of Highway 34. His chest had been crushed beneath the steering column of his father's F-150, yet whatever lived inside him now cared nothing for fractures. It wrenched the broken bones back into alignment, using cold sinew like wire to stitch the ruined framework together. Then it dragged the unwilling body out of the ditch, leaving behind a trail of dark, viscous fluid that stank of battery acid and stagnant pond water. It then vanished quietly into the endless, whispering rows of autumn corn.

Nova caught its scent from half a mile away. Not the rot, though that lurked there too, but something ancient and wrong. It was the scent of a soul that had overstayed its welcome, clinging to meat and bone with the ragged fingernails of spite and stolen time.

It was the Death-Scent. To a human, it might have registered as the faint metallic tang of a copper penny on the tongue, or the dry, dusty odor of a cellar sealed since the last hard frost. To Nova, it carried physical weight. A greasy film settled over her skin, coating the back of her throat like ash. It was the unmistakable signature of a trespasser, a soul that had refused the quiet transition of the scythe. Instead, it had chosen to burrow deep into the rotting marrow of its own discarded vessel. It was rotting from the inside out, all the while pretending it still belonged to the living world.

It crept up her nostrils like cold fingers, metallic and wrong, setting her teeth on edge. She had been tracking it since sundown, following the invisible thread only reapers could sense. The Triumph Bonneville T120 purred beneath her as she killed the engine at the edge of County Road 47. She let the bike glide to a silent stop behind a collapsing barn that had not seen paint since the Nixon administration.

The old structure sagged heavily to the west, its graying timbers groaning in the dry autumn wind, its roof half-collapsed under decades of forgotten snow. The scent was stronger here, pooling in the shadow of the rotting silo like spilled oil. It lingered in a heavy, stagnant pocket of air that refused to stir with the breeze. It was a dead spot in the night's natural rhythm. She sat on the idling machine for a long moment, her gloved hands resting on the handlebars. She listened intently as the hot metal of the exhaust pipes ticked, ticked, ticked while they slowly cooled in the damp fifty-degree air.

The Midwest stretched before her in shades of black and blacker still. There was no moon tonight, only stars like pinpricks in a weathered tarp, and somewhere in that ocean of corn, something waited to be killed. The fields unfurled for miles in every direction, a rolling, featureless grid of dry stalks and dusty drainage ditches that swallowed the starlight. It was the kind of space that made ordinary people feel small. The space gave off a silence that made them roll up their car windows and lock their doors, even when no one was around for miles. Nova felt at home in those barren reaches. The dark wasn't an enemy. It was simply a canvas. A stark backdrop where the bright, jagged heat of a rogue soul burned like a flare.

She reached down and flicked the auxiliary switch on the Triumph, cutting off the small running lights and letting the barn’s shadow swallow her whole. Nova swung her leg over the bike, her boots brushing the gravel without a sound. She’s been doing this for years and on her own for eleven years. Eleven years since her mentor had died with a demon’s claw buried in his chest. After all that time, she still felt that sharp, electric kick of adrenaline before a reap.

It wasn’t fear, because she’d carved fear out of herself a long time ago. She’d left it bleeding on a training mat when she was nine years old. Her mentor had told her to get up again and again, until the words lost all meaning and nothing remained but motion, pure and merciless. No, this was something cleaner, something purer. Anticipation, maybe, or simply the body’s old, unshakable recognition that it was about to do exactly what it was made for.

Marcus had always said that a reaper who didn't feel the transition was a reaper growing slow. In their line of work, slow was just another word for dead. He had stood over her like something carved from iron. His silver eyes were cold and demanding, and his voice a low rasp that left no room for excuses or hesitation. "The blade doesn't care if you're tired, Nova," he would tell her, his hand resting on the pommel of his own heavy scythe. "The soul doesn't care if you're cold. You do the work, or the work does you."

She’d taken those words into her bones and hammered them into a rhythm that guided every step, breath, and strike. She reached back, her fingers closing around the leather-wrapped grip of the scythe strapped across her shoulders. The weapon sang as she drew it, a low, resonant hum that shivered through her bones. It was reaper-forged steel, folded a thousand times, and quenched in water from the River that ran between worlds.

In the starlight, the blade absorbed the night's suffocating weight. It was a crescent of absolute black that made the surrounding night look pale and thin by comparison. It was a heavy tool, yet it rested in her grip with perfect balance, its ash-wood shaft cured in the dry winds of the Veil until it was lighter than pine, stronger than iron. The blade's metal did not reflect the stars. Instead, it seemed to bend the light around it, drawing the thin, cold rays into its edge, swallowing them whole into nothing.

Nova adjusted her grip, feeling the familiar texture of the worn leather wrap beneath her palms. It was a steady, comforting weight. An extension of her arms, a solid anchor in a world ever more haunted by things she could neither touch nor see.

The Death-Scent thickened as she moved through the corn. Row after row of dried stalks whispering secrets to one another in her wake. The harvest had come and gone, leaving only stubble and stragglers. Now something else had slipped in to hunt among the ruins. The ground lay dry beneath her boots, the soil packed hard and cracked by the late-summer drought. Each step landed on earth that felt tired and hollow.

She kept her movements deliberate. She stepped cautiously into the gaps between broken stalks. Nova tried diligently to avoid the sharp, brittle snap that could carry for miles through the dead quiet of the countryside. The air hung heavy with the smell of dust, dry husks, and an organic curtain trying to smother the sharper, more artificial scent she was tracking. Still, she did not lose the thread. It tugged at her chest in a low, insistent vibration that grew stronger with every yard she put between herself and the county road. It drew her deeper into the field's rustling dark. The stalks brushed against her leather jacket with the sound of dry paper. It left a constant whispering hiss that clung to her like a shadow.

Fifty yards in, she found the first body. It looked like a Collie mix, though with half its face missing, it was hard to tell. The wound wasn't clean. Nothing torn by teeth or claws ever was; this was worse than ordinary animal savagery. The edges of the flesh were wrong, puckered and gray, as if something had tried to stitch the dog back together with thread spun from cobwebs and bad intentions. The creature's ribs gleamed through a long, jagged tear in its side; there was no blood on the dry leaves beneath it. The fluid had been drained, or perhaps it had simply dried away. Left behind was a leathery husk already beginning to shrink and stiffen in the cold.

The stitches themselves were thick and uneven, made from a coarse, dark fiber that looked unnervingly like human hair. They were tied in clumsy, brutal knots that pulled the dead skin into grotesque, puckered folds. It looked as if the creator had been in a hurry or simply lacked the steady hands needed for delicate work. It was a mockery of life. A crude anatomical sketch scrawled in meat and bone.

Nova crouched and studied the corpse without touching it. The Death-Scent rolled off it in faint, secondary waves. This wasn't what she was hunting. It was only what her quarry had practiced on. She straightened, scythe held low and ready, then kept moving.

The wind died for a moment. In the sudden hush, she heard the distant, rhythmic thrum of the highway. Here, deep among the rows of corn, the rules felt different. The air was colder, the shadows reached farther, and the line between the living and the dead was as thin and brittle as the dried husks crunching beneath her feet.

She drew a slow, deep breath, and then focused her senses on the sharper, more concentrated scent ahead. It was close now, no more than a hundred yards away. She could feel the rogue soul's vibration in her teeth, a high, needling buzz that set her jaw on edge.

The corn peeled back into a clearing, a farmer's makeshift turnaround for heavy equipment. In the center stood what had once been Tommy Garrett. He was etched against the pale starlight, his posture stiff and unnatural. He resembled a mannequin dropped from a height, and left where it fell.

One shoulder hitched sharply higher than the other, his head hung at a slight, awkward tilt, as if the muscles in his neck could no longer bear the weight of his skull. He wore a red-and-white varsity jacket. Its wool was darkened by dried fluids. The letters "LC" on the chest were partly swallowed by a long, jagged tear. It had been crudely stitched back together with the same dark, hair-like thread she'd seen on the dog. He wasn't moving, yet he wasn't still either. A faint, rhythmic twitch traveled through his right leg. She watched the tremor move in a cold, mechanical way that made his boot scrape softly against the dry dirt every few seconds, with a steady, methodical persistence.

He was seventeen, she knew because, as always, she had done her research. Thomas James Garrett, a senior at Lewis Central, was a quarterback with a 3.2 GPA; college scouts were already circling like hawks. He had died three days earlier when his truck rolled on Highway 34 while he was driving drunk. He had clawed his way out of the wreck and wandered off, only to die in the mud. His lungs had filled with his own blood while the headlights of his overturned Ford flickered weakly, then sank into darkness in the ditch.

For forty-eight hours, the local police combed the ditches and creek beds. Their flashlights knifed through the dark as their voices called out a name that no longer belonged to anyone. They found his wallet, his cell phone, and a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey. However, Tommy himself remained swallowed whole by the night.

By the time the search parties had organized, the thing now standing in the clearing had already claimed the body. It dragged it deep into the sleeping fields, where the frail beams of flashlights could not pierce the dark.

The thing puppeteering Tommy's corpse turned to face her. Nova saw what had crawled inside after the boy's soul had fled. Its eyes were black from lid to lid, wet and gleaming like oil slicks under the moon's cold light. The skin on its face had split open in a dozen places, and had been stitched back together with what looked like human hair. The stitches formed a patchwork mask that barely held the wrecked, sagging shape of a human face.

When it smiled, the stitches drew tight, and she saw where the lips had been crudely sewn to the gums. The teeth behind them were stained with dried blood and a thick, tar-like seep that oozed from the corners of its mouth. Its nose had been broken in the crash, flattened against the left cheekbone, yet the entity had made no attempt to set it. It left the face lopsided and monstrous, as if even care had turned away. It looked less like a person than a scarecrow stuffed with wet rags and bad intentions. It was a walking blight, the living shape of the rot slowly gnawing at the edges of the county.

"Reaper," it said. Tommy Garrett's voice slithered out, crooked and wrong, like a recording played backward. "I can smell you. You smell like... endings."

The sound was dry and hollow, a rattling hiss that seemed to crawl up from the bottom of his chest rather than from his throat. It was air forced through dead, brittle pipes. A grim mechanical imitation of speech that carried none of the warmth or living inflection of a human voice.

The entity tilted its head farther, the bones in its neck popping with a sharp, brittle crack. It didn't seem to mind the pain, or perhaps it simply didn't register it because the host body's nervous system was too degraded to carry the signal. It took a step forward, dragging its left leg slightly. Its boot carved a shallow furrow through the clearing's dry, powdery dirt, as if scoring the earth.

Nova didn't bother responding. Talking to them never helped. They were already dead, simply lacking the courtesy to lie down. Early in her training, she had learned that the things that crawled into empty shells were rarely capable of telling the truth, and never capable of mercy. They were scavengers and parasites feeding on the fading residue of a life already ended. They used the deceased's vocal cords to mock the living, and hold the inevitable at bay.

She shifted her weight, her boots biting into the hard-packed earth. Her fingers tightened around the scythe's grip. The blade seemed to hum in answer, a low, eager thrum that trembled deep in her palms. It wanted the work, and to carve through the thin, greasy thread holding this horror together. It wanted to hurl whatever remained back into the dark where it belonged.

She moved in a sudden blur. The scythe swept around in a horizontal arc. Its blade sang a low death song, yet the thing wearing Tommy recoiled with inhuman speed.

It wasn't quite fast enough. The edge caught it across the chest. The flesh and stitches holding it together split apart, black, viscous ooze spraying across the dirt in a foul, glistening arc. The fluid was thick and cold, reeking of old iron and stagnant water.

Where it struck the dry grass, the brittle blades shriveled and turned a pale, sickly gray. The entity didn't bleed like a living man. There was no bright arterial spray, and no frantic pumping of a heart struggling to keep the system alive. There was only the slow, heavy seep of corruption keeping the meat moving. Dark grease that stained the white wool of the varsity jacket and dripped onto the dry earth with a dull, leaden patter.

The thing staggered back two steps, its boots skidding in the slick patch it had made. Its black eyes were locked onto Nova with a sudden, vicious intensity. It shrieked, the sound clawing its way from Tommy's ruined throat and rising into registers no human voice was ever meant to reach. Then it lunged at her, its fingers stretched unnaturally long. It had bones jutting past the fingertips in jagged, needle-sharp points like crude white knives.

The sound struck like a physical blow that rattled through Nova's ears and threatened to knock her off balance. It was the sound of a soul being torn apart. A raw, discordant cry that had no place in the natural world. She ignored it as her training took over. She stepped cleanly inside the creature's reach.

The jagged bones of its hand skimmed the collar of her leather jacket and left behind a thin, greasy smear of black fluid as she moved and twisted sharply to slip the full force of the blow. The thing was fast. Faster than any human, yet clumsy, too. Its movements were jerky and uncoordinated, like a puppet being hauled by too many strings at once.

Nova spun inside its reach, letting the scythe's momentum sweep her around. She then drove the blade up in a fierce, rising arc, shearing through the thing's left arm at the elbow. The severed limb struck the ground and kept moving. Its fingers scrabbled through the dirt like a frantic spider. It was a grotesque sight, the pale, filthy hand clawing at the dry earth. It dragged itself toward Nova's boots as if it still carried a mind of its own.

She stepped back, grinding the twitching fingers into the dirt beneath her heel with a solid, satisfying crunch. The sound bit through the air, yet the entity did not seem to notice the loss of the limb. It neither looked down nor cried out in pain. It simply shifted its stance and raised its remaining arm into a grim, defensive guard. Its black eyes stayed locked on her face. The stump of its left arm was a dark, hollow circle, its center packed with white, splintered bone. All of it was ringed with thick gray fat and the black fluid that passed for its blood.

"You don't understand," the thing hissed as it circled her, its black eyes nailed to her face like iron spikes. "The Collector is coming. It’s coming for all of you reapers, hunters, and the little soldiers who think they're holding back the dark." It laughed, a wet, bubbling sound that slithered from a throat crammed with things that should never have been there. "You're already dead. You just don't know it yet." The words came with a damp, clicking rattle from its chest, as if something small and hard were knocking around inside its rib cage.

Nova kept her distance, holding her scythe in a guarded arc while her eyes followed the creature's shuffling feet. It prowled for an opening, trying to bait her into a reckless strike that would leave her exposed and vulnerable. She had spent too many hard, dust-bitten years on the road to be shaken by the empty threats of a dying revenant.

She knew the type. They always talked, always claiming to serve some greater power that would tear down the world and raise it again in its twisted, shadow-choked image. It was a common delusion among the damned, a way to drape their own miserable, parasitic existence in the ragged robes of some grand design.

The Collector. Nova had heard the name before, whispered through the cracks between worlds. It carried the Death-Scent like a grim promise of darker things to come. Until now, she had never come face to face with it, nor had she ever reaped anything that claimed to serve it.

In her eleven years on the road, she had encountered all manner of abnormalities. She’d dealt with revenants that refused to move on, ghouls that fed on the cold flesh of the forgotten, and the occasional minor demon that had slipped through a tear in the Veil. Those were isolated incidents. The natural friction of a complex universe where the boundary between life and death was never entirely airtight. Where things sometimes bled through the cracks like spilled shadow. They were individual problems with individual solutions. The Collector, however, sounded like something else entirely. It sounded like something darker, more calculating, and far more deliberate.

It sounded like an organization. A coordinated and deliberate hand moving to disrupt the very foundation of her work. If there was an entity out there actively harvesting souls and keeping them from the River, it was more than a nuisance. It was a grave threat to the fragile balance she had sworn her life to protect.

"Tell me about the Collector," she said. The words came out ice-cold and final.

The scythe hummed in her hands, eager and alive, with barely restrained ferocity. She didn't expect a straight answer, though even a lie could carry a grain of truth if you knew where to look.

The entity wearing Tommy's skin chuckled, a wet, rattling sound that slithered from its open throat and sent a chill through the air. It took another step, slow and deliberate. Its remaining hand twitched as though reaching for an invisible weapon. Starlight glinted on the dark, slick surface of its eyes, reflecting nothing except the cold, indifferent sky above, vast and merciless.

It was a hollow thing, a shell stripped of everything that had once made it human and refilled with a cold, predatory intelligence that did not belong in this world. Nova watched it in taut silence, her muscles coiled like springs. She was ready to strike the instant the creature moved. She had no intention of letting it leave the clearing alive. However, she was willing to wait a few seconds longer if it meant catching even the faintest whisper of the force lurking behind this sudden surge in rogue activity.

Its head tilted it to an angle that would have snapped a living person's neck.

"The Collector takes what's owed, what's stolen. All those souls you reapers think you're sending on?" It giggled in a high, childlike voice, bright and awful, with a singsong cruelty. "The Collector keeps them, hoards them, and wears them like coats. Hundreds of them. A vast, heavy wardrobe of screaming light. You think you're doing something noble by carrying them across the River? You're just a delivery girl, a courier bringing fresh wool to the shearer."

It drew another wet, rattling breath, its chest swelling as if the motion itself were agony. The skin was stretched so tight over its ribs that she could see the white gleam of bone beneath. "The Collector is building something. Something with weight and terrible purpose that can't be dissolved by a silver blade or a handful of salt. When it's finished, there won't be any more transitions. There won't be any more River. There will be only the collection, the Collector, and the cold."

Nova's tension coiled through her jaw—a soul-hoarder. The words landed like rot in her gut, foul and spreading. It was worse than a demon, worse than any revenant or ghoul. It was something that ruptured the fundamental order. It shattered the ancient cycle of death, rebirth, and whatever came after. It left her job and her calling feeling hollow and almost meaningless. If the souls of the dead were being intercepted and stored away like dry corn in a silo, the entire cosmic machinery was slowly grinding toward a dead, terrible halt.

The Veil was built on the constant, balanced exchange of energy between the worlds of the living and the dead. If that current were blocked, the whole system would choke and back up. The pressure would build until the boundary itself cracked and shattered under the strain. She had spent her entire adult life serving that flow. She sacrificed everything- home, family, even the luxury of a name that meant anything to anyone else. 

The thought that some parasite was out here turning those souls into a collection drove a sharp spike of pure, icy fury through her. It was not an emotion she let show on her face. She felt it in the sudden iron set of her shoulders, and in the way her fingers locked tight around the ash-wood shaft of her scythe.

"Where is it keeping them?" she demanded.

Her voice dropped an octave into a low, dangerous growl that rolled through the dry earth between them like distant thunder. She didn't expect the thing to hand her an address, yet she needed a direction, some place to begin. The Midwest was vast, a sprawling lattice of small towns, abandoned farms, and empty highways. It was a place where a monster could slip through the cracks and lie hidden for decades. It could remain unseen by anyone who wasn't already half-dead from boredom or despair. If she was going to hunt this thing, she couldn't afford to waste time chasing whispers through every wind-scoured county in South Dakota and Iowa. She needed a scent, a sharp, physical trail she could follow on her Triumph until she finally ran the beast to ground.

The entity in the clearing seemed to savor her frustration. Its lopsided smile stretched wider until another stitch snapped in its left cheek. A tiny bead of black grease welled in the gap, then crept slowly down its chin like oil bleeding from a wound.

"Everywhere," the thing whispered. "Nowhere. In the spaces between your precious Veil, The Collector is the rot beneath the world, Reaper. You?" It smiled again, its stitches drawing taut like rusted wire. "You're just another soul to add to the collection."

It laughed with a wet, bubbling sound, like something drowning in its own rot. "He knows you're coming. He knows all of you. He can hear the hum of your steel in his sleep. Every time you reap a soul, you're only ringing his dinner bell." It took a slow, creeping step forward, reached out with its remaining arm as if to brush her cheek. Its long, splintered bone fingers twitched with frantic, hungry life.

Nova moved before it finished speaking. In three swift steps, she swung the scythe in a diagonal arc, striking the thing where the neck met the shoulder. This time, she did not stop. The blade carved through dead flesh, stolen bone, and the ragged stitches. Tommy Garrett's head tumbled free and struck the ground with a wet, ugly thud. The body swayed for three long seconds, then crumpled to the earth.

It crashed hard to the ground, its knees buckling first. The remaining arm twisted beneath its torso before it slammed into the dirt with a heavy, lifeless thud. The head rolled a few feet to the left, then came to rest in a brittle patch of dry grass. Its black eyes still stretched wide as it stared up at the empty, hollow sky.

For a moment, the clearing held its breath, save for the dry whisper of the corn. Black fluid pooled swiftly around the neck, seeping into the thirsty soil, and turning the earth into dark, greasy mud that reeked of copper and old, rain-soaked leaves.

Nova stood over the corpse, her breath slow and steady, while the scythe hummed softly at her side with restless, hungry energy. The Death-Scent was already thinning into the night and fading like smoke. The tether between worlds was cleanly severed as whatever had been piloting the flesh finally loosened its grip. In a few hours, Tommy Garrett would be nothing more than a body again, empty and still. The world would go on spinning in its comfortable, blind denial. It would remain blind to the predatory world surrounding them.

The living did not need to know how fragile their world truly was. They never needed to know how thin the line was between their quiet, ordinary lives and the cold, screaming dark crouching just beyond the reach of their headlights.

She wiped the blade clean on the corn stalks, watching the black ichor sizzle and curl into nothing in the night air. The severed arm had finally gone still, limp, and lifeless in the trampled dirt. Before she left, she would burn the body, salt it, then scatter the ashes to the wind.

It was standard procedure, yet the thing's words echoed through her head as she worked. She reached into her weathered leather pack and pulled out a heavy plastic jar of coarse salt and a small brass lighter. A reaper's work wasn't just the strike. It was the cleanup. The meticulous erasure of any physical residue that could serve as an anchor for another rogue entity. With practiced, methodical efficiency, she dragged the torso and limbs into a grisly heap in the center of the clearing. Then she scattered the salt in a thick white circle around the remains. The salt formed a barrier. A stark, unbroken line that grounded the energy, keeping any lingering fragments of the soul from clinging to the earth. When she struck the lighter, the small flame looked tiny and fragile against the sprawling emptiness. It caught on the dry wood and salted flesh with a sudden, hungry roar, turning the clearing into a searing island of orange light.

The Collector is coming. The words echoed in her head like a skipping record. It wasn't a warning she could afford to ignore, especially not tonight.

The Midwest was her territory, her burden, and if something was hunting here, she had to find it before it found her. She thought of Marcus, of his stern, flinty face, and the way he had always insisted that a reaper was a weapon, nothing more. A weapon doesn't ask why it's swinging, Nova, he'd said, his voice cold as forged iron. It just cuts. Start asking questions, start looking for patterns, and you'll end up staring at your own reflection in the blade. Marcus wasn't here anymore. His soul had crossed the River years ago, and he had left her alone in a world that was growing darker, more tangled, and far less forgiving.

She reached the edge of the field, where the Triumph stood exactly where she'd left it. A quiet metallic shadow tucked against the weathered gray timbers of the collapsing barn. She swung a leg over the seat, the leather cold against her thighs, then kicked the engine to life. The bike answered with a low, powerful purr. It gave a deep rumble that broke the hush of the county road as she rolled onto the asphalt. Her headlight cast a long, bright ribbon of light across the empty night.

Nova had been a lone reaper for eleven years, with training that stretched back to age five. She'd sent hundreds of souls on to whatever waited beyond the Veil. She'd never lost one. If something was stealing them, hoarding them, and keeping them from their final rest, then she was failing. It meant the entire system she'd built her life around was compromised. A leaky vessel slowly bleeding its light into the dark. She rode west, the Triumph's engine a steady, reassuring thrum between her knees, her eyes tracing the dark seam of the horizon.

The wind was cold now, carrying the scent of winter, dry leaves, and frozen mud. The wind was a clean, sharp breath that scrubbed the lingering grease of the Death-Scent from her nose. She kept her speed steady while her mind worried over the details of the encounter. She cross-referenced the entity's words with the patterns she'd observed over the last few weeks.

The deaths were mounting, not just here, but in a dozen small towns scattered across the state. It was systematic and organized. The deaths seemed to be advancing in a straight, relentless line toward the heart of the state, drawing nearer with each passing mile.

She lifted her gaze to the stars, to that vast, indifferent universe, and felt something she had not felt in a long time…uncertainty. Somewhere out there in the dark, something was hunting not the dead or the living, but the space between them. That fragile thread of order that kept the world from slipping into chaos.

If the Collector was real and it was stealing what belonged to the reapers, then the rules had turned to smoke. The solitary code she had followed for eleven years might not be enough to save her this time. She would have to find a way to stop it and sever the threads of the collection before the tapestry was woven whole and tightened into fate.

She reached down, her gloved fingers tracing the scythe's grip. She felt the cold, silent promise sleeping in the steel. She was a weapon, yes, yet a weapon was only as good as the hand that held it. Tonight, for the first time in her life, Nova felt the weight of her own hand on the grip, heavy, trembling, and steeped in uncertainty. She twisted the throttle. The Triumph leaped into the dark with raw mechanical fury. The roar of its engine swallowed the dry, whispering secrets of the corn as she rode toward the fading western horizon.

Nova drove past the cornfields as the Death-Scent faded behind her, diminishing with distance. She tried not to dwell on the fact that the things she killed had begun whispering of something out there that was even worse.