Page 10

Against my will, I recalled how he’d looked that night in the dark: how his upper lip crooked at its rightmost edge, the corner fletched with the ghost of a scar. “Fuck off into the sun.”

He dropped his hand, a thumb hooking into a pocket.

“I think I’m going to name this little guy Tim,” Without apparent revulsion for the worms spilling from every wound, Rowan stroked the back of a finger along the rat’s swollen throat.

It leaned into his touch. “There was a kid who tried to be friends with me in the hospital. I had to tell him to go away, of course. But he was cool.”

“Not here to walk down Memory Lane with you, Rowan.”

“Kind of wish I could have given Tim a hug,” Rowan nodded at the rodent, who was still actively decomposing and whose effluvium was beginning to stain the shelf on which it was perched, and was somehow now on its back, writhing like a happy cat in a puddle of its secretions. “But I guess they will do.”

It took everything I could to avoid making a face. “Were you following me or were you not? Answer the damn question.”

“I didn’t set out to follow you. But as it happened, I ended up in the same place. So, I suppose that’s following you,” he said very nonchalantly. “I think we’re both looking for the same thing.”

“Please don’t say it’s answers. I’ve had enough of that from Eoan and Gracelynn.”

For as long as I’d known him, Rowan had been—except once, just once, as we stood over Johanna’s sad, folded-up corpse—pathologically incapable of treating anything with even an iota of seriousness.

He was an indefatigable peanut gallery, the kind of person who’d make his last words a wisecrack.

But there was none of his usual irreverence at that moment.

Rowan stared at me with a pensive, thin-lipped expression.

Black was beginning to bleed from the confines of his pupils, tendrilling into those hoarfrost irises.

“You don’t have to tell me why you did it. It’d be nice if you did but you’re not obliged. And just in case you needed someone to say it, you don’t need absolution from me.”

“I wasn’t looking for that, but thanks for telling me.”

“Sure.” His eyes were black from pupil to sclera.

I tensed, not knowing what to expect. But I could sense his rabbiting pulse, feel the structures of his muscles, his bones, the yards of nerves stitched under his skin.

One tug and I’d have him unspooled on the floor like so much yarn.

Nonetheless, I still took a wary step backward.

“I’m just saying that if you find yourself seeking forgiveness, you probably want to do something more productive with your time. Everyone knows these are weird days.”

“Okay. Can we move on?”

“And you were wrong, by the way.” A muscle in his right jaw seemed to flinch from the words queued up in his mouth. “When we were in the dorms? When you were yelling at me about how I didn’t know she loved me? I did, actually. She deserved better than we gave her.”

“Excuse me. What the hell do you mean we ? I—”

“Johanna was a lot of things and she had a hell of a savior complex, but all of it was coming from a good place. She wanted to make the world better. She was kind—”

No, I thought, remembering what Johanna had said in those strange minutes before I unbuttoned her vertebrae. She’d been angry.

“—and she really liked you. We talked a lot about how sorry she was that you were stuck at Hellebore. She tried to come up with ways to get you out. She knew how much that mattered to you. And how much you mattered to me.”

With reverential tenderness, Rowan took one of my hands in his own gloved ones, stunning me into a nerveless silence.

I was at a loss for an appropriate reaction, couldn’t do more than stare as he raised my knuckles to his mouth, almost—almost!

—grazing them with his lips. I couldn’t think of a quip, a retort, could just gawk like an idiot.

“I wish it’d been different. That we could have all met in a different life,” said Rowan gently. The nearness of his lips, his breath, it all stung like salt water dripped on a raw lesion.

“So you could have a harem?” I managed, my voice huskier than I’d have liked.

“No? So we could have had the option of being normal. Haven’t you ever wondered what that’d be like?

To be without all this baggage? To have the freedom to fuck up and not worry if it’d destroy the world or turn a person into sludge?

When I was a kid, I used to dream about meeting someone who could tell me what that’d be like: being normal.

It’s why I enrolled, you know? I couldn’t figure out a way to talk to Hellebore’s graduates, so I thought—”

I would think about his face and his words every night to come, rotating the memory in my mind, studying it like a wasp preserved in amber, how his eyes had looked, the earnestness in his expression, and wonder what would have followed and what I might have said if a deep, amused voice hadn’t intoned: “Am I interrupting something?”

Rowan and I leapt apart. I turned to see Adam leaning against the doorframe, half in light, eerily lovely as he always was: less a man than an idea, a fantasy loosely distilled into meat and sinew, bone and bored disdain.

“What do you want?” I asked.

Rowan slipped his smirk back on and for once, I was glad to see it in its usual place. “He’s had a crush on me since he saw me. Sorry, Adam. You’re very pretty, but I just don’t see you that way.”

I would have paid with my soul to have Adam’s ensuing look of disgust bottled up and preserved for my future pleasure. He let out a matching noise, a sound like a man offered piss when he had asked for wine.

“I should have let you die.”

Rowan cocked his head. “But that’d have required you being good enough to keep me alive, which I don’t think you are.”

We were united then, he and I, all previous awkwardness and resentments shed in the company of a mutual foe.

I didn’t like Adam. Never did. Long before everything imploded, he had already established himself as a fucker.

He had made no secret of the fact he was septic with envy for the respect Sullivan commanded.

As far as he was concerned, he was better than Sullivan: more handsome, more facile with his abilities, more in command of his identity.

Our dearly deceased valedictorian had struggled with nightmares.

Adam had none, dreamt of nothing but ownership of the world.

Why indeed did his peers look to his rival instead of him?

Such was his narcissism that it never occurred to him that even here in Hellebore, no one liked a killer who made off with their smiles, their mannerisms, the little idiosyncrasies that made them individuals.

Every beautiful thing about Adam was stolen; he was a mimic, empty of actual personality.

The only thing he had of his own was his sense of envy.

“What do you want?” I repeated.

“What do you want? What are you two doing here?” said Adam with a dazzling smile, all glint and no warmth at all. “Are you perhaps looking to see if there is a way to survive? Let me tell you there isn’t. Not unless I decide it.”

“What we’re doing is still none of your business,” I said.

“Actually, I think it’s very much my business,” he said, taking several purposeful steps forward so he wasn’t just encroaching on my personal space but dominating it.

We were practically chest to chest. I could feel the heat radiate from him, the inferno of his parentage barely held back by his skin.

Adam grinned down at me, eyes half-lidded, pretty despite his brazenness or maybe because of it.

It irritated me to no end that I noticed the fact.

“Back the fuck up.”

“Or what ?”

“This,” I said.

My response, I’ll admit, was disproportionate to the situation.

I raised a finger-gun at Adam, lifting my hand so the tip of my index finger bumped against his perfect nose.

As his smile widened, I traced a path across his chest, down the long path to his wrist. I tapped it thrice, bent my thumb, and mouthed the word bang.

His right wrist exploded into a bloom of red sinew and bone shrapnel, little gore-stained chips of scaphoid going everywhere.

His hand, bereft of support save for one rapidly fraying tatter of skin, plopped onto the ground a second later.

Where most people might have screamed, Adam only addressed me with a pissy little stare.

Not with any subtlety, Rowan crowded in to attempt a fist-bump.

“Nice,” he said, pronouncing the word as an exaggerated noice.

“You’re kidding me,” said Adam, his voice thinning with rage. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

I adjusted my stance. You could call the thing on Adam’s face a smile if you wanted to: it had the right curvature, an appropriate number of teeth on display.

It even reached his eyes. But I wouldn’t.

It had that certain je ne sais quoi I’d come to associate with people about to lose their fucking shit.

If I had any reserves of self-preservation, I’d have tried to diffuse the situation, but I was still mottled with gore from the deaths of the graduating class, and to be honest, at that point, I was just sick of marinating in other people’s company.

I didn’t care that Adam was mad. I didn’t want to care.

I wanted a fight down to the wet bones of me.

I bared him a grin as I backed up to curtsy dramatically at him.

Adam wagged his still-suppurating stump at me, something like joy in his expression, jets of arterial blood fountaining through the air.

He began to incandesce, the nuclear brilliance growing until he was an effigy of himself, a column of eye-watering light, fatal as a star in its death throes.

The air smelled of broiling keratin and charred polyester, and it took me a second longer than Rowan—his arm touched my clavicles, nudging me back—to understand we were beginning to burn from proximity to Adam.

“I know you think that was incredibly brave,” said Adam. What gore I had spilled was gone, immolated, a sacrifice to himself. It was with the cadences of my voice that he spoke, his tone playful, even eager, “But you’re going to regret it.”

“I don’t know what you think you are, but I know you’re still meat under that fire,” I said, reckless with trauma, feral with grief.

I wasn’t mourning our eaten peers per se but my god, was I done with being so afraid.

I resented the tension. I resented his smug manners and the future waiting for us.

I could not stand the idea of Sullivan’s slow death, of dying under a blanket of geriatric horrors.

The fucking ignominy of it all. To die like that, to have the capstone of my life be feeding our former professors.

Or worse, to die so Adam could be the last one standing.

They say burning alive was one of the worst ways to go but the metaphorical they weren’t trapped in this library.

I ducked under Rowan’s arm before he could object, jolting forward and unflinchingly toward Adam.

Like I said, even under that cocoon of white fire, there was still meat, a chorus of synaptic instructions propelling him onward, keeping him upright.

I could feel the ladder of his spine; I could sense every contraction of his ventricular chambers.

It’d have been a question of who was quicker on the draw, of course, but I’d never gone wrong betting for myself.

“All this for a boy who can’t even fuck you?” asked Adam.

“Sex,” said Rowan from behind me, “isn’t just about penis in—”

“No, all this because I’m tired of your face. I can end what I started. Don’t fucking try me.”

To my surprise, Adam laughed.

A single luminous finger rose—the line from his shoulder to elbow as exquisite as the one from elbow to wrist—and drew a circle in the air.

Almost instantly, I felt a matching pressure tighten around my right wrist: a truth spell.

The physics of it was simple. Upon submission to one, the afflicted had to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, or the spell would shear clean through bone and muscle.

I tipped my chin up, defiant, refusing Adam any show of emotion outside of boredom.

“Tell me this,” said Adam, still a human flare. “If it came down to it, if you had to choose between Rowan and getting out, if the condition of your escape from the awful vaulted halls of Hellebore was that you had to feed Rowan to the faculty, would you?”

I didn’t hesitate.

“In a heartbeat.”

The light wicked from Adam’s frame, taking with it any vestige of modesty he might have possessed, the cinderous remains of his clothes staining him with ash: he stood naked as his namesake, grinning like the devil, hand restored because the Great Adversary doesn’t shortchange his brood apparently.

Ignore them, sure, but not leave them destitute of limbs; I stared at that fresh limb, filled with a sudden furious despair even as he waggled fingers at me, nails growing over their beds.

“You’re fun, Alessa. Let me know if you ever want to partner up with someone who isn’t a walking corpse.”

And before either of us could fire off a retort, he began strolling away, the light especially kind to the shape of his ass. “By the way, the Librarian’s awake. Might want to move quietly.”