I’m not sure why this book has the author listed as Victoria Schwab when most of her other books have her listed as V.E. Schwab, but I really don’t care. This book is just as good as her other stuff, so if you’re a fan of Victoria E. Schwab, I highly recommend checking this one out.
This one seems to take place in a world similar to our own, but in a dystopian version of it in which monsters are real and have taken over parts of the country. As a result parts of the country are basically wasteland and other parts are locked down to try and prevent the monsters from killing too many people.
The monsters are Corsai, Malchai, and Sunai. The Corsai are shadow monsters that claw and eat people and can only be killed by an HUV beam to the head, but since they’re shadow monsters who keep changing form, finding their head to aim the HUV beam at is easier said than done.
Malchai are basically vampires. I’m not sure if they can’t go in the sun like the vampires we know, or if they just prefer not to do so. They have red eyes and can only be killed by putting something sharp through their heart. But their hearts are encased in bone, so a stake is not gonna be enough. You need something strong, and you need to shove it under the bone and up into the heart.
Sunai use music to steal your soul and they can only eat the souls of sinners. When they’re done, your eyes look like they’ve been burned out of your skull. Also they can “go dark,” which means they lose control and wipe out everyone within a certain radius, usually a block or two. They are not born, but tend to be created by acts of extreme violence. Unlike Corsai and Malchai, Sunai look just like humans.
August Flynn is a Sunai who’s not sure how he came into being — he just knows there were a lot of bodies around him when he first became aware of his existence. He looked to be around 10 or so and one of the emergency workers assumed he was a human kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, so they brought him to Henry Flynn, who has taken control of the south part of the city known as Verity. He basically adopted August, which is why August uses his last name as his own. Flynn has also taken in the other two Sunai known to exist, Leo and Ilsa.
Leo works for Flynn and encourages August to eat the occasional soul. Leo has managed to embrace his darkness so he doesn’t have to worry about going full dark. He can access and put away his darkness at will, but he also relishes torturing and killing humans in a way that August is not OK with.
Ilsa seems like she’s not all there. She went dark before the city was split in two and killed a whole lot of people. One of the terms of the truce between Flynn and Harker (who rules the north side of Verity) is that Ilsa is never allowed outside of the compound that serves as Flynn’s headquarters.
Kate Harker is Callum Harker’s daughter, and despite his determination to keep her out of the city where monsters roam, she is determined to get back to him and prove herself worthy of being his daughter. When we first meet her, she’s burning down a Catholic school’s church so she can get herself expelled and sent back home. It works, and when she’s sent to a school in Verity, August is given the name Freddy and told to get close to her … but not too close.
August is getting somewhere when two Malchai show up at school one day and try to kill Kate. They brought a blowtorch with them so they could burn out her eyes and blame her death on Sunai. August saves her and the two of them go on the run together.
Callum Harker has a Malchai working for him who Kate suspects was behind the attack, so they can’t go to her place. When August tries to call home, Leo shouts at him to tell him where they are and August doesn’t fully trust him, so the two of them head out on their own.
They only spend a couple days together but it’s enough for Kate to learn that Sunai can only eat the souls of sinners (which is not common knowledge), and for August to learn that Kate is innocent. That doesn’t last, though, because they’re attacked at the house Kate used to share with her mother and Kate shoots a guy in self-defense. Now her soul is red instead of white and edible for August. Not usually a problem, except at this point it’s been so long since August has eaten that he’s afraid of going dark, and now Kate is no longer safe with him.
Kate is also dealing with the trauma of having been in a car crash with her mom when she was a kid. Her mom didn’t make it and Kate always assumed it was just an accident, but the more she thinks about it, the more pieces of the memory start coming back to her … like the red eyes staring at her through the windshield.
Turns out she was trying to take Kate and leave the abusive Callum. Of course Callum couldn’t have that, so he sent his Malchai to kill them, but Kate survived. Ever since then he’s been shipping her off to various boarding schools so he won’t have to deal with her.
Now Callum is anxious for an excuse to go back to war with the South side of Verity, so he and Sloan (the Malchai who works for him) have been working with Leo to make that happen.
Whole lot of hurt feelings when all that comes to light. Leo and Sloan are killed, and Kate is about to kill her father to take revenge on him for what he did to her mother, but August assures her she doesn’t want that on her conscience, so he kills him for her.
Then August heads back home and Kate heads out of Verity under her mother’s maiden name. She heads back to the house she had lived in with her mom before her mom had made one last effort to make things work with Callum. There she finds someone waiting for her, and I guess I’ll have to wait until I get around to reading the sequel to find out what that’s all about.