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Thomas expected Jesse to tug himself free—to drop his scalpel and make a run for it. Instead, the surgical resident stood as though in thrall. An ill-fated sailor, drawn to the sea by siren song.

Hello , she’d said.

Her voice had been low and sweet. Water over stone. In the transept, everyone rose steadily to their feet, braced to flee. Only Thomas remained seated. He was riveted to the scene, dread turning his blood to icy rivers. Beside him, the dogs began to howl like wolves.

Down in the ambulatory, Vivienne swiveled to face Jesse, swinging her bare feet off the table and sliding onto the floor. There was a wrongness in the halting way she moved, each twitch and tic oddly mechanical. Like she was a child’s clockwork toy, wound up by a key.

“Why isn’t he running?” asked Colton.

“The better question,” said Eric, “is why aren’t we running?”

The tips of her fingers looked sharp from this distance, though Thomas couldn’t tell if it was only a trick of the light. Her nails—usually clean and pink—seemed to whittle into sharp gray points. Hands splayed against Jesse’s chest, she rose up onto her toes and pressed her lips to his ear. He didn’t even flinch. Instead, he leaned in. Rapt. Enthralled. His eyes bright and shining.

At first, nothing happened.

The only sound in the sanctuary was the baying of the dogs.

And then the screaming began.

It tore through the vaulted nave, a third howl joining the fray. Lit beneath the lamps, Jesse Grayson began to bleed. It was as though he’d been stuck with a thousand pins, subjected to a thousand cuts. Blood beaded along his brow. It slipped down the sides of his face in thin reams of crimson.

“Hematohidrosis,” marveled Colton, just as Delaney whispered, “Is he sweating blood?”

“I said I was sorry” came Jesse’s shriek over the speaker. “I said—I did what you told me. Make it stop. Make it stop. Please , make it—”

His knees cracked on the ground as he dropped, his collapse gentled by Vivienne, who sank with him. She cradled him, still whispering into his ear as he wept into her shoulder. His blood streaked the curve of her cheek, turned the dry beds of her knuckles to crimson. His scalpel dropped, forgotten, to the stone. It skittered across the floor in a foreboding hop-skip.

The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. Jesse slumped, weightless, to the floor. A last, harsh “Please” sawed through the speakers.

And then there was quiet.

Pandemonium erupted. The pledges scattered, shoving and swarming in a mad dash toward the stairs. At the crux of the chaos stood Vivienne, small and bloody and cherubic. She looked up and up, tracking the rising sounds of panic, until her eyes met Thomas’s. Slowly, the unsteady rictus of her smile sharpened into a grin.

“Time to go,” ordered Eric, hauling Thomas to his feet. “Move, Walsh. Now.”

Against his better instincts—against everything in him that told him to stay—Thomas fled. Out in the vestibule, the stampede came to a standstill. Pledges jostled one another as the traffic jammed, turning the stairwell to a hard clot of people.

Something was happening down below. Something they couldn’t see.

They got their answer seconds later.

“Where are you all going?” drifted a girl’s voice up the stairs. “Didn’t you come to see me?”

The shift was violent and immediate. The current changed direction as everyone who had previously been fighting to get down began instead pushing to go up. The dogs tugged loose in the melee, snapping their teeth at fleeing pledges as they bobbed in and out of the swarm.

“Shit!” Thomas lunged after them, nearly catching an elbow to the face for his troubles. “Heel! Stay! Don’t g— Come back !”

“Walsh, hey.” Eric caught him by the arm and gave him a violent shake. “Leave them. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Thomas let himself be led. They raced back up into the transept, this time in the company of two pledges who’d managed to break free of the throng—a boy with a bruised jaw and a girl in a black mesh dress. The six of them made their way to the other side of the balcony, where a narrow door opened up into the vestries. The stairs here folded in on themselves, descending to several shadowed lower levels.

“Guess we’re going down,” said Colton as, over the speakers, the screaming began.

They took the stairs at a run, racing down one flight after the other until the stairwell spat them out in a basement. The speaker’s audio was grainier here. Faint. The sound of dying pledges crackled out from the wall-mounted monitors like a grotesque hymn.

They edged forward, the motion lights clicking on in a wash of white fluorescents. A long hall dotted with doors stretched out before them.

“There’s an exit sign up ahead,” said Thomas.

“There’s another set of stairs down there,” said the boy with the bruised jaw. “It leads to the front of the sanctuary. If we’re quick, we can reach the door before she notices.”

“Perfect.” Colton folded Delaney’s hand in his and fell into the lead. “Let’s go.”

They moved swiftly, urged on by the brutal soundtrack of the dying. They didn’t make it far before the lights clicked off. The speakers shorted. The screaming cut out. They were left in the faint pulse of red from the exit light ahead.

“Alex,” whimpered the girl, “I don’t like this.”

“Nothing’s changed,” said Colton. “We keep moving.”

Directly behind them, there came a faint snarl. All six of them froze.

“Someone tell me that was their stomach,” whispered Eric.

A second snarl joined the first. From out of the hall’s yawning abyss emerged Molly and Judd, ears flat and fangs bared, slaver hanging from their jowls. Eyes glinting red in the glow, they looked like veritable hellhounds. Between them stood Vivienne, her hair black with blood, her features as sleek and shining as a siren’s.

“Don’t run away,” she said. “It isn’t nice.”

“Go,” barked Colton. “Now.”

They didn’t need to be told. They broke into a run, skidding around a labyrinthine corner and down a shallow set of stairs. With vicious howls, the dogs gave chase.

Delaney reached the exit first, skidding to a stop atop battered combat boots and wrenching the door wide. They piled through one after the other, Thomas taking up the rear. He’d nearly made it when the boy in front of him stuck out his foot. Instinctively, Thomas grabbed hold of him. They both went toppling to the floor, the impact hard enough to send a white sear of pain across his vision. The door swung shut just as the girl screamed out, “Alex, get up!”

“Get off me,” bellowed the boy, shoving at him.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” Thomas scrabbled back to his feet, nearly dodging a sloppy uppercut in the process. He slammed the boy hard into the wall, jamming an elbow into his windpipe. “What the hell is your problem?”

“That’s for nearly breaking my jaw, asshole.”

“Your what ?” Understanding hit him like a sucker punch. The pool house. His masked assailants. His hesitation lasted just long enough for the boy to shove him off. They wrestled for the door as Molly and Judd came careening around the corner, talons scrabbling.

Molly reached them first. Her jaw snapped around the boy’s ankle like a bear trap. He toppled hard to the ground, his hands thrown out to break his fall. In front of Thomas, the door swung wide to reveal Eric.

“Help me,” begged the boy as Eric yelled, “Walsh, move !”

Thomas hovered in the open door for a fraction of a second before making his decision. He lunged for the boy, hand outstretched. It was too little, too late. Judd—timid, goofy Judd—detached from the darkness like a living shadow. Eyes red. Lips peeled back. With a scream, the boy was dragged out of the pulsing crimson glow and into the dark.

The door to the stairwell swung shut with a slam.

“Any chance we can speed this up?” called Colton, peering over the second-story landing. Tucked under Delaney’s arm, the girl was openly weeping. They ascended the rest of the way in silence, emerging into the mouth of the sanctuary. The air here hung in a hush. The smell of iron clung to everything.

They arrived at the front doors to find them barricaded. The rusted hinges sat off track so that a thin bar of daylight seeped through the gap. Between this stood a boy covered in a series of shallow gouges. He wove a thick set of chains through the handles, his jaw set.

“What is this?” demanded Eric. “Let us out.”

“Can’t do that.” The boy tugged at the chains, testing their strength. “The chairman isn’t happy with you. He didn’t want her harmed.”

“Hey.” Thomas reached through the gap and grabbed a fistful of the boy’s collar. “Look at me. What’s your name?”

“Adrian,” said the boy. His eyes were slightly out of focus. “Adrian Faber.”

“Listen to me, Adrian, there are innocent people in here. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I need you to undo these chains and let them out.”

“To-ommy.”

Thomas’s name singsonged through the dark, its echo dissipating through the shadowed transept like smoke. With a cry, the girl clapped her hands over her ears. Behind them, the nave was the color of blood, sunlight seeping through the upturned faces of the saints.

“Where are you, To-ommy?”

“Open the fucking door,” ordered Colton.

“Sorry,” said Adrian. “I would if I could. But there’s these worms in my head. They won’t stop squirming. The chairman promised he’d make them go away, I just have to teach you a lesson first.”

The door slammed shut. The last gap of sunlight extinguished.

“Was that you, Tommy?”

Thomas ducked into an alcove filled with unlit prayer candles, his heart hammering. The others followed his lead. Next to Delaney, the girl’s nose had begun to bleed. She let it trickle freely, keeping her hands pressed tight over her ears. Silence fell, save for the harsh saw of his own breathing. He edged carefully toward the center aisle, peering around the corner of a wide stone pilaster.

The drum lights had been knocked on their sides, bulbs shattered against the modular walls of the clean room. Only one remained lit. It cast the aisle in a shaft of blazing white. As he looked, a shape stepped into it, ballerina lithe.

“Leave,” he told the others. “Find another way out.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Eric in a whisper.

“I’ll handle her.”

“How?”

He didn’t know. But he’d made her a promise. “I’ll figure it out.”

Out in the sanctuary, Vivienne traipsed down the aisle as though she were in a wedding processional. Step, step, stop. Step, step, stop. Her hospital gown was torn at the collar, the papery-white shreds fluttering off her shoulder. There was something predatory in the way she moved, each step suffused with a wrongness that struck him cold.

“We need a token,” whispered Delaney suddenly.

“Lane’s right,” said Colton. “Do you have something of hers? A bit of fingernail, maybe. Or even a lock of hair.”

Eric made a thinly veiled sound of disgust. “Why the hell would Walsh be carrying around her fingernail clippings?”

Quickly, Thomas said, “I have a baby tooth.”

“You—” Eric cut a look in his direction. “Her tooth ?”

“Yeah.” Thomas held up his wrist. The silver chain links sat nestled against the pink-and-white pony beads she’d given him the day of the gala. The word crybaby leered up at him alongside the pale white opal of her molar. “Will this work?”

“It should,” said Colton. “Free will is a uniquely human trait. Whatever’s driving Vivienne, it’s not human, which theoretically means it can be controlled.”

Thomas thought of the teeth scattered across Philip’s office. The signet ring he wore on his pinkie, flat and dull. Vivienne’s voice on the recording: I have to do what I’m told, or else it hurts all over.

He closed his fingers over the tooth. “What if you’re wrong?”

“Then you’d better run faster than you did downstairs,” said Colton.

“Funny.”

He braced himself, gathering up the shreds of his courage and stepping out from behind the column. Vivienne stood directly before him, bent forward as though she’d been eavesdropping. He drew up short, inches away from careering clear into her. The dogs sat at her side, ears pricked and muzzles bloodied.

“Hi,” he said.

Her eyes were black all the way through, her fingers long and knuckles knobbled. There was nothing of Vivienne in her expression. She was all creature. Its head turned on a swivel and it peered sideways up at him, intrigued.

“You look nice,” he added. “A little murderous, maybe, but pretty.”

The thing wearing her face hadn’t blinked. Not once. “Why don’t you bleed?” it asked, and it pinched his chest to hear Vivienne’s voice, low and sweet. “You and your friends—you don’t even flinch.”

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. “That’s a good question. I don’t know, actually. Luck?”

“You reek of death.” It sniffed at his throat, scenting him like a huntress. “You carry it with you like a talisman. How?”

“Death and I are pretty good friends,” he said, and shrugged. “Maybe that’s it. Hey—do me a favor?”

Its head quirked to the side.

“Tell Vivienne to wake up.”

Its eyes dropped to his wrist. To the white milk tooth embedded in his bracelet. “Oh, you’re very clever. Do you think one little token is all it takes?”

“We’ll see,” said Thomas. “Wake her up.”

“I won’t,” said the creature, and now it didn’t sound like a girl at all. Its voice distorted, dropping a register. “She needs me. She has no one.”

“She has me,” said Thomas. “Wake her up.”

“Foolish boy.” The creature’s mouth unfurled into a sneer. “You don’t know what’s out there. You don’t know what hunts her. Vivienne Farrow has been marked for death all her life. Without me, she is nothing but bones for lesser creatures to gnaw on.”

Thomas frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The creature smiled a wholly un-Vivienne-like smile. “Too late now,” it whispered, and collapsed.

Her body pitched forward as though she were a marionette, her strings coming loose. Thomas caught her before she could hit the ground, hooking his elbows under her arms. He held her that way for a moment, studying her expression in repose. Slowly, color rose into her cheeks.

Her eyelids fluttered open, and he was met with a stare the color of cognac. Human all the way through. For several heartbeats, the only sound in the sanctuary was the two of them breathing in tandem. And then, with a gasp, Vivienne scrabbled backward out of his reach.

“It’s okay.” He held up his hands in a show of peace. “We’re okay. It’s over.”

Clutching at her gown, she peered around at the damage she’d wrought. The empty sanctuary. The broken drum lamps. A wail built in her throat and she covered her face with her hands. With a whine, the dogs lay down at her feet.

“Vivienne,” said Thomas softly. “Look at me.”

“Hey!” Eric’s shout vaulted through the sanctuary. “Over here! We found a way out.”

Tensing, Vivienne peered out from over the tops of her fingers. She looked on the cusp of flight, like the slightest sound might send her running. He didn’t want that.

“It’s just my friends,” he said, and held out his hand. “Let’s get out of here, all right? We’ll deal with the rest together.”

Hesitantly, she slipped her hand into his. Her fingers shook. Her skin was ice cold. When they went, the dogs followed, trailing behind them like shadows.