The boy had been following him since the metro.
He had spotted the exorcist at Kasuga park station.
The spiritual energy came off him differently than it did from ordinary humans.
Cleaner. More concentrated.
Most humans leaked their energy in thin, tasteless threads, barely worth the effort of taking.
This one was different.
This one pooled around him, dense and layered, rich in a way that made the back of the boy's throat ache.
The boy pressed himself into the shadow between two pillars on the metro platform and watched him board.
He followed.
He had been hungry for three weeks.
Not the dull background hunger that came from going too long without ordinary spiritual energy.
The small snacks he took from sleeping humans, the ones who never noticed the slight heaviness behind their eyes when they woke, the faint ache in their chest they blamed on bad sleep.
This was the real hunger.
The deep kind.
The kind that came from knowing something far better existed and not being able to stop thinking about it.
Exorcists were the best.
Everyone knew that.
The training alone concentrated their spiritual energy into something rich and dense, layered with years of refinement. Taking an exorcist was dangerous.
They could fight back, they could seal you, they could destroy you if they were strong enough.
But this one.
This one didn't feel strong.
The energy was there, real and clean and plentiful, but it ran unsteady.
Unrefined.
Full but unstable, the kind that spilled at the edges.
The boy smiled to himself in the dark of the metro carriage, three rows behind the exorcist who was looking out the window at nothing.
The boy was seventeen in appearance. Lean, sharp-jawed, the kind of face that looked permanently unimpressed. It was useful.
People dismissed teenagers, looked past them, didn't clock the hunger in the eyes as anything more than adolescent boredom.
He had gotten very good at looking bored.
Easy, he thought, watching the exorcist's reflection in the darkened window glass.
He followed him off the train and through the gates and down two streets to a university campus.
He watched him disappear through the front gate with other students.
The boy stood outside and looked at the campus and thought about it.
University security. People everywhere. Not ideal.
But he was patient.
He had been patient for three weeks.
He could wait a little longer.
He found a gap in the perimeter fence at the back of the grounds, near a maintenance building.
He slipped through and moved into the shadow of a large tree and settled there.
The campus spread out ahead of him.
Students moved between buildings on the paths. Loud, ordinary, oblivious.
He watched.
He tracked the exorcist through two building windows over the course of the morning, a pale shape moving between classrooms.
The spiritual energy was a thread he could follow even through walls if he concentrated.
Faint but present. He kept it at the edge of his attention and let it pull him forward.
By midday he had located the building.
Third floor, east side.
He waited.
He was good at waiting.
He sat in the shadow of the maintenance building with his back against the wall and his arms loose over his knees and looked at his nails as thought about the meal ahead.
He had a ritual.
He always thought about it in detail before he took it.
The anticipation was part of the pleasure.
The afternoon classes shifted.
Students spilled out of doors and moved across the grounds in loose groups, breaking apart at junctions, filtering toward different buildings.
The boy watched from the shadow of the maintenance building, eyes moving through the crowd.
There.
The exorcist came out of the east building alone, bag over one shoulder, heading toward a connecting corridor that ran between two older structures at the back of the grounds.
Narrow. Covered. Isolated.
The boy had clocked it an hour ago.
He moved.
He kept to the shadows along the perimeter, moving fast and low, cutting across the back of the grounds while the exorcist walked the main path.
He reached the far end of the corridor before him and pressed himself into the alcove where the two buildings met.
Dark here. Old stone. The kind of corner that hadn't been properly lit in years.
He could feel the energy getting closer.
That clean, layered, unsteady warmth.
His mouth filled with saliva.
He leaned forward slightly and watched the entrance to the corridor.
The exorcist turned in.
The boy's fingers curled against the stone.
His nails had already started to shift at the tips, the skin splitting slightly around them, the first edge of what was underneath pressing through.
He took one step out of the alcove and into the corridor.
The shadow behind him moved.
He stopped.
Something was there.
He hadn't heard it arrive.
He hadn't felt it approach.
One moment the alcove behind him had been empty.
The next it was not.
Something in the base of his spine tightened.
Old instinct, the part of him that had survived long enough to know what that kind of presence meant.
He overrode it immediately.
Whatever was behind him, he had handled worse.
He was hungry and sharp and three weeks of patience had narrowed everything down to the meal at the end of this corridor.
He turned around slowly.
A girl stood at the entrance to the alcove.
Tall.
Silver hair loose around her face.
A black crop top, short jacket, mini skirt, thigh highs. Her hands were at her sides. Her red eyes were on him.
The boy relaxed and laughed.
"Woah." He looked her over. "Another Umbral? Here?"
She said nothing.
"Small world." He tilted his head. The nails on his right hand had pushed through fully now, dark and curved, longer than they should have been. "You after the exorcist too?"
"Don't touch him," she said.
Her voice was completely flat. No anger in it. No warning. Just a statement of fact.
The boy laughed again, louder.
"That boy?" He jerked his chin toward the corridor. "I found him first. I've been following him since this morning. He's my prey."
She looked at him. Just looked. Her expression didn't change.
"And you," she said, "are mine."