Even when she was walking the edge of the ruins, where the demonic infestation had transformed New York City’s Greenwich Village into a maze of rubble inhabited by bloodthirsty predators, the darkness could be an unexpected ally.

The scary things got cocky in the shadows. Careless. They made noise—claws on the concrete, rough skin scraping along crumbling brick, eager breath rasping through thickly scaled lips—things even sighted people could hear if they were really listening.

To a woman who’d been legally blind since the age of six, the sounds of an approaching demon were like gunshots—impossible not to notice, and easy to avoid if you had practice ducking and covering. Which she did. A girl couldn’t grow up on the south end of the island without learning how to run and hide.

Or when to pay attention to the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

“I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes, tops.”

“Wonderful! We can’t wait to—”

“Gotta hang up. Bye.” Sam tapped the bud clipped to her ear, ending the phone call without waiting for Mrs. Choe to say her good-byes.

Ellen and her husband, Chang-su, had lived in the neighborhood for forty years and had raised four children in the wake of the infestation twenty years before—when demons emerging from caves beneath the Atlantic Ocean had found the densely populated, burrowlike habitats they sought in the cities of New York and Boston. The Choes knew there were times when safety dictated the rude termination of a phone call. But they wouldn’t be worried. Demons were easy to avoid if you stuck to the main streets and made a run for it on the rare occasions when the creatures prowled too near to the edge of the ruins.

The descendants of the ancient dinosaurs—monsters that had escaped from caves near the earth’s core during a series of massive worldwide earthquakes near the end of the past century—weren’t particularly quick. They had to rely on their prey being careless and letting them get close enough to employ the demons’ various deadly natural weapons. Sam wouldn’t let them get close. She had these streets memorized, and her ability to distinguish areas of light and dark kept her from running into any large obstacles. Sure, she had her share of spills, but she felt confident she could take care of herself, even on the city streets.

Ah, Stephen. Brother, friend, voice of doom. Why was it always his voice that got going in her head at night, when she was trying to pull off the “brave New Yorker” thing?

Sam did her best to banish her brother’s voice, focusing on where she was going, not where she’d been, increasing her speed until her sandals made tiny scraping noises against the concrete as they chased the white cane tapping ahead. She was on her own now. She had her own place, her own life, and she didn’t need anyone taking care of her, no matter what her brother thought.

The Choes hadn’t been surprised to hear she’d finally gotten her own apartment. But then, they’d never treated her like an invalid or an oddity. To them, she was just another girl from the neighborhood, and the only florist they wanted to handle their daughter’s wedding. Sam was gradually making a name for herself above the demon barricade, but Hand Picked was already the hottest thing going below Fourteenth Street. Arranging flowers based solely on smell and texture created some fairly fantastic-looking combinations.

Obviously Sam had never seen any of her own arrangements, aside from the occasional silhouette when the sun shone brightly through her shop window, but she took her clients’ word for it that they were stunning. Old friends or not, the Choes wouldn’t hire less than the best for their daughter. They’d finally gotten Sin Moon hooked up with a nice Korean boy who owned a house in the suburbs, far from the dangerous community where they’d been trapped when property values plummeted in the wake of the infestation. They meant to stage a wedding celebration worthy of such an event. And they wanted to approve every last detail months in advance.

Hence the centerpiece Sam was presently cradling with her left arm. She’d promised to bring the sample arrangement over as soon as she finished cleaning up the shop for the day, no matter what the hour.

But as the pungent smell of fresh demon waste mingled with the scents of lavender and wild roses, she began to doubt the wisdom of journeying out alone after seven o’clock. Demonic attacks had been on the rise in recent months. Attacks always increased in the spring, when the warmer temperatures brought certain breeds out of their winter hibernation, but this year it was worse than usual.

Somewhere, deep in the ruins, a young girl screamed, startling Sam and nearly making her drop the flowers she’d worked on all afternoon.

“Damn it.” She stumbled to the side, regaining her grip on the basket, but clocking her shoulder on something big, hard, and foul-smelling in the process.

A Dumpster, but one that wasn’t used much. The stink wasn’t fresh, but more the lingering sourness of ancient vegetables mixed with rotted meat and coffee grounds. Gross, but it was probably the best hiding place she was going to find around here.

After using her cane to check the area behind the Dumpster—grateful for once for the smaller demons that had all but eliminated the city’s rat problem south of the barricade—Sam set the centerpiece on the ground and turned back to the ruins. She’d never ventured inside by herself and had dared take the shortcut between her apartment and her brother’s bar only when accompanied by half a dozen of his biggest, burliest friends, but for some reason she had to follow to its source the cold, slippery energy oozing across her skin.

The scream hadn’t come again, but the smell was stronger than ever, as was the certainty that something horrible was happening. A woman had screamed in her dream and there had been blood, so much blood. She’d felt it as if she were in the woman’s skin. It had oozed down her face, hot and wet, slipping between her lips before she could think to shut her mouth.

She’d had her share of portentous dreams, but never anything so violent. She was positive that if she didn’t find the woman who’d screamed before whatever hunted her did, that blood would be spilled and an innocent person would die. For once, she had a chance to do something to prevent the awful thing she’d seen from happening. There was no way she could live with herself if she didn’t at least try.

Still, the rational part of her mind argued that she should call for one of the many demon-control patrols always a scream away in this part of Manhattan. It was their job to keep the streets safe, to make sure the thousands of tourists who came to New York to see the demonic urban habitat didn’t get themselves killed trying to get a picture of some of the more fantastic species.

New York City and Boston were the only two infested cities on the East Coast, and Boston’s habitat wasn’t nearly as visitor-friendly. The Beantown officials had hesitated to blast closed the subway tunnels and allowed the demons to infest a larger portion of the city. So New York pulled the majority of the tourists from Canada and the United States, of which there were thousands every week.

Even decades after the initial emergence, people were still fascinated by the dangerous, extraordinary-looking creatures. And as long as they stayed in their tour bus, demons weren’t usually a threat—at least, no more so than lions observed from a jeep trundling through the African savanna. The barriers erected in the collapsed subway tunnels and the Fourteenth Street barricade kept the demons contained, and the demon-control patrols took down the rare beast that dared to leave the burrowlike habitat they had created during the destruction of the initial infestation. Demon control also dealt with the homeless and the drunks, and looked into the reports of concerned citizens.

They would take a report, get a police task force down here within a half hour, and—

The scream came again, higher and even more terrified. “And they’ll be too late,” Sam said, setting a swift pace toward the sound before she could second-guess herself. She tripped twice on the uneven pavement before she reached the first bend in the path, and the smell actually seemed to be growing fainter as she walked, but she didn’t think of turning back.

She was the only one who could save this woman. Hell, she might be the only one who could even hear her. Whether it was simply that her ears functioned better than an average person’s because she was missing one of her other senses, or something more paranormal in nature, Sam had always heard things other people missed.

Like the sound of something breathing nearby. Something big. Really big.

Heart thudding in her throat, Sam edged closer to the crumbling buildings on her right, moving into the darkest shadows, where most people would never think to look. Her gut told her that, whatever she’d heard, it wasn’t human, but getting out of the middle of the path couldn’t hurt.

There were human predators here as well. Several of the most violent city gangs called the ruins home. With crime in New York at an all-time high, everything below Fourteenth Street was low-priority to the metro police once typical tourist hours were over. They assumed the freaks who chose to live next door to demon nests deserved what they got, including a bunch of thugs for neighbors.

No one seemed to remember that the prices the government had offered people for their homes in the wake of the infestation hadn’t been enough to pay for the moving trucks out of Manhattan. A lot of the families had been stuck where they were, figuring a home next to demons was better than no home at all.

And, in the beginning, they’d all expected the government to do something about the infested wreckage.

But demons were as ancient as cockroaches and just as hard to get rid of. Then there was the matter of demon tourism. In a global economy ravaged by the recession of the early part of the century, anything that brought money into the city was considered a good thing. Eventually, government officials had stopped trying to eradicate the demon habitat, settling for a half-assed kind of population control accomplished largely by freelance bounty hunters who flocked to the city to hunt amid the ruins.

Bounty hunters who were often just as dangerous as the creatures they hunted.

Whoever or whatever was watching her, its breath slowly getting swift and shallow with excitement, it wasn’t a good thing. It was a bad thing. A very bad thing, and that very bad thing was ready to pounce upon the prey it had spotted in the shadows. It was simply waiting for the right moment, enjoying the fear it could feel rolling from its victim.

Sam tasted the mocha she’d made just before leaving the shop and swallowed hard. Now wasn’t the time to lose control of her stomach. She could do that later, bent over the cool bowl in her cozy apartment, worshiping the porcelain god the way she had on her eighteenth birthday, when her brother had finally allowed her to order anything she wanted from his bar.

God, Stephen was going to go crazy when he found out she’d been wandering around here by herself, acting like some drunk tourist who wanted to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. He’d warned her a thousand times not to go within fifty feet of the ruins. He was going to kill her for getting killed like this.

The thought was almost enough to make Sam laugh, even though the giant, breathing thing was so close she could taste it. Fire and sulfur and the hint of some exotic fruit, mixed with the unmistakable smell of demon waste. It was definitely a demon, but not the one she’d smelled before. The scent from her dream was gone, vanished along with the sound of the woman’s screams.

Whoever she’d heard, the woman was probably already dead. And now, because she was a stupid blind girl who thought she could play the hero, she was going to die, too.

“But I’m going to hurt you first,” she whispered to the thing in front of her as she thumbed open the secret compartment on her cane, flicking the switch that turned the red-tipped end deadly.

Switchblades were illegal in the city, so she assumed switchcanes weren’t something the police would approve of—especially when the woman wielding the knife couldn’t see where she was aiming her deadly weapon—but abiding by the letter of the law wasn’t a priority for most Southies. Sam wasn’t any different. Being blind didn’t automatically mean she was a law-abiding citizen or helpless or sweet.

Or willing to wait for someone else to make the first move.

“Come and get me already,” she yelled, lifting her cane and lunging forward, aiming a few inches below where it seemed the breath was coming from.

An outraged squeal echoed off the bricks, but there wasn’t time to celebrate her hit. Seconds later, her cane was ripped from her hands and the smell of fruit got even stronger as something whizzed by her face. Shit! She’d heard of demons that shot poison quills into their prey to immobilize them before they began to feed. They were alleged to be relatively small for demons, but size didn’t matter when you were passed out cold on the ground and the thing coming for you had sharp teeth and claws.

Sam ducked and felt the air stir above her head. So far, she’d been lucky, but she could avoid a hit for only so long. She had to put some distance between her and the demon before it was too late.

Whirling around with her hands held out in front of her, Sam started to run, praying she remembered the obstacles she’d encountered on the way in well enough to avoid them. Without her cane, she had no way of “seeing” the ground in front of her before she stepped, no way of—

She cursed as she tripped over something round and hard and fell to the ground, the whizzing needles of the demon that hunted her pinging against the concrete near her scraped hands. On instinct, Sam curled into a fetal position, her body still trying to protect itself though her mind knew this was it. She was down, and the thing behind her was coming, and this time there would be no escape.

All of sudden she was six years old again, bound and tied and waiting for the invisible demons the cult had summoned to take what her parents had invited them to take, to steal what they needed to steal. But this time, it wouldn’t just be her eyes. This time, it would be her life.