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The knife arcs through the air. It opens a line of pain across my chest. I raise a hand to ward her off as she swings wildly, throwing her weight toward me. Jeremy gets an arm around her neck, hauling her backward.

The beast bellows. It strides toward us from beyond the house. No mist to cloak it now—we can see its body, densely furred, dark sable at the head and shoulders fading to white. It has the torso of a man but the legs of a stag, and its hands end in jagged black claws. Its four amber eyes are open, and it strides toward us.

“I had no choice,” Grace shouts, struggling in Jeremy’s grip. “I had to reach her, don’t you understand? Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear her calling? I need to get to her. You have to let me go. You have to—” She’s still straining to bring the knife to bear. Jeremy tries to control her arm, but her wild panic makes her strong. The knife bites across his palm; he yells.

The beast is two steps away. We can’t outrun it. I meet Jeremy’s eyes. We can’t stop her. She’ll kill us, and she’ll convince herself she was in the right. We have to defend ourselves.

I step forward, grabbing hold of Grace’s arm. Together, we throw her from the road.

She flails for balance. She keeps her feet under her, but her momentum carries her off the edge of the road. Onto the grass, the empty field, not even the false road to anchor her. She stands stock-still, mouth gaping open, then shut. Sooty blackness crawls over her skin like a slow frost, and smoke curls from her.

The beast reaches us. For a moment, it pauses. It looks down at us, and in its eyes is an intelligence, however alien, but no anger, no hostility. Only something akin to pity.

It reaches out a clawed hand. Everything on this road has found some cruel way to undo us. Our trust. Our perception. There is something merciful, something kind, in the swift flick of that claw as it carves through Grace’s chest.

Zoe, wandering the false roads, persisted. Grace comes apart, as ash and soot. Not sated, the beast turns to me.

Someone is screaming my name. I never find out who. The tip of one black claw settles softly against my chest, where I am already bleeding. I shut my eyes and breathe out.

Something slams into me from the side. I hit the ground and roll. Jeremy stands over me, hands still out. “Run, damn it!” he shouts.

The creature bellows. The sound is heat and rage, shaking the air. It seizes him, claws closing around his lower body, and wrenches him into the air. And then it brings him down. Hard.

His body cracks against the road. His limbs flop. His head lolls, blood sheeting over his face—I can’t tell from where. The beast tosses him. Casually, like you’d flick a bit of meat off the end of your knife. His body hits the ground, tumbles like a broken doll.

The beast turns again to me.

“—and beneath it writhes and scrapes its bulk against the rocks, and there is no light, and in the sinner’s hand the cup—”

I tried not to write the words. I’m sorry.

It’s Trina’s voice, but not Trina’s voice. The words slither out of her. Her smoke-shrouded eyes are fixed on the beast, her hands spread with palms up as she advances step by step. She doesn’t even have the book anymore; it lies on the ground behind her.

Smoke pours from the flesh of the beast—and from Trina’s palms. She is no longer shaping the words; they are shaping her tongue and lips and mouth to force themselves into being.

Black tendril-like bands detach from the beast’s torso, its chest, dissolving into smoke as they peel free, as if the words are flensing the flesh from it, strip by strip. It staggers back, lowing, a sound that makes my joints ache with the vibration. Still the words come, a torrent, and still Trina advances.

The beast retreats again. Trina gulps, the flow of words stopping for a moment. She shakes with the effort of containing them—and the beast, recovering, advances.

“Stop,” I yell at Trina, but she’s already speaking again. The beast bellows as its skin writhes away from its torso, and this time it turns, fleeing—striding away with great steps as smoke coils and curls from its massive shoulders, its ravaged chest.

Trina stands, swaying, the words pouring out of her. Her eyes are clouded over completely with smoke. I grab her wrists; her skin scorches, but I hold fast.

“Trina, stop,” I say, my words lost under hers. “Trina, it’s gone. It’s running.”

She sucks in a ragged breath, and for a moment her eyes clear.She looks at me, desperate and afraid, and shapes four words of her own. “I can’t stop it,” she whispers, and then they begin again. The rolling rhythm of the words, looping and repeating, her voice layered over with other voices, echoes and whispers. Her eyes fill up with smoke again, and her fingers begin to turn a sooty gray.

Kyle stands frozen, gape-mouthed, shaking his head in a movement so small it is almost a tremble, the fluttering wing of a dying bird.

“No. No, stop. Trina, please. Please, it’s killing you,” I say, knowing it’s true, feeling the shift beneath my hands as her skin becomes insubstantial. “Stop! This was my choice! I decided! I was the one who chose! I was the one—”

She sucks in one final, sharp breath between her teeth. Her head kicks back, her gray-drowned eyes fixed on the empty sky—and she comes undone. It is as if she is unweaving, coming apart in strips, in ribbons, her face dissected cleanly, her body already hollow but for the smoke.

I try to hold on. But there is nothing to hold on to.

“I chose,” I say. My hands are empty. The air is empty before me. I chose to run. I chose to die. But I’m still here. And she isn’t.

Jeremy lies faceup, eyes staring. A crown of blood below his head. The geometry of his body is wrong. I cannot look too closely. I do not need more than a glance to know he’s dead.