Free The Inexplicables (Clockwork Century) by Cherie Priest

retreat back the way he’d come.
    Funny. He hadn’t noticed on his frantic way up how fragile the steps felt beneath his boots. The wobble wasn’t his imagination. They creaked, too. He leaned toward the rail, and to the bit of wall that remained on that side.
    Don’t die yet. You ain’t allowed.
    “Shut your mouth, Zeke.”
    One hand on the splintered, rickety rail, he breathed real slow and kept his eyes on his feet. One in front of the other. One step at a time.
    He stopped.
    What was that noise? Had the stranger caught up to him? He held still and listened.
    Sounded like breathing. Low, wet, and not very healthy. Coming from something pretty big. But he didn’t see anything. The air was too dense; it moved like smoke in front of his lenses, one broken and one still clear.
    Someone sighed.
    Or some thing sighed. The gas-poisoned atmosphere whispered and complained, and once again Rector choked on a big gob of fear. It swelled until he could hardly swallow, and his heart caught up with a fluttering skip.
    The breathing behind him—yes, behind him … and not his own—grew louder. Closer. So close he imagined he could feel it, warm and dank, against the back of his neck.
    Stumbling now, he picked up his pace. He could fall, he thought. He could tumble and roll, and that would be faster, in a way. It’d hurt, and it’d be loud, but it’d be quick. A quick way to reach the bottom. A quick way to die. Wouldn’t it? His ankle turned, almost sprained. But didn’t. The joint kept locking, unlocking, with each stair.
    A throaty groan shocked him with its nearness. He spun around, flailing, expecting to hit someone square in the face, but no. There was no one behind him, no one beside him—there couldn’t be. To one side was a drop-off leading nowhere; to the other, a lone wall—a final surviving shred of the old building.
    Another groan, more harsh this time and, if at all possible, closer still.
    “It doesn’t make sense,” Rector squeaked. He saw no one and nothing, heard only the breathing, the moan that came with an edge like gargling.
    He ran, tripping over himself and the uneven, unstable stairs. Behind him they crumbled away; he heard them clatter, bounce, and break on their way to the ground. And he heard something else, too: a bang so loud that at first he didn’t realize it was a footstep. Not until a second bang followed behind it, then a third and a fourth, did Rector recognize the rhythm of something stomping behind him.
    Not some one . Not this time.
    For one ridiculous moment he wondered what’d become of the other guy, the one who’d come after him first. Where was he? Maybe he was evil, and maybe he was a murderer, but he’d been human—Rector was sure of that much. And whatever was behind him, this unseen foe, this was not a man. Men didn’t move so heavily, dropping from foot to foot with the weight of a horse. Men didn’t have such strides, longer than a half flight of stairs. Longer than …
    A crash shattered the old building wall and ripped the rail out of the boy’s hands. He gasped and staggered, falling forward and catching himself. But the catch didn’t hold, and he slipped down farther, tumbling less gracefully than he might have if he’d gone down on purpose—but descending all the same, and face-first. On the way down, he whacked his chin on a step and knew it would mean more bleeding, but he couldn’t worry about that right now.
    He scrambled on his hands and knees, ducking almost by accident, but his timing was good. As his head went down and his knees went out from under him, an enormous shadow leapfrogged him in a flash of terrible motion.
    Through his one good lens Rector saw a shape that had two arms and two legs, but was in no way human. He watched it sail overhead, a lunging hop thrusting the huge, heavy thing from one turn of the stairs to the one below it, shattering the place where it landed.
    It bellowed, and Rector’s heart nearly stopped. He still