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The rest of the Hellebore welcome assembly was rather standard compared to its hypnotic beginning.

Once the headmaster had us deep in our feels, she then turned to administrative banalities: her expectations in regards to our behavior ( Yes, your frontal lobes are still in development, but for all that is holy and otherwise, don’t embarrass the school, please and thank you); Hellebore’s code of conduct (be exemplary in all matters always; understand that if you are not of use, you are of no value); an introduction to the faculty (mostly geriatrics or those on the verge of being such).

Tittering, she suggested that we might be sorted into houses, a prospect so repellent the crowd spontaneously lost all fear of her and began groaning objections.

“I am just kidding,” she simpered amid the thunderous murmurs. “Although the way you’re all complaining, I might have to make it happen.”

Though she retained her mask throughout, what mystique she possessed was lost in the wake of that awful joke.

Now, she was indistinguishable from any elderly relative: an inescapable embarrassment to be tolerated until we could emancipate ourselves.

In hindsight, I wonder if that had been strategic, a wolf putting on its lambskin and capering for effect.

After the last professor (Fleur, Botany, recognizable by the fungal-shaped bouffant that was her hair) finished with her own tedious version of a welcome, we were permitted to leave, ushered out by Hellebore’s meat stewards.

Some of them had begun to ooze, and they smelled overpoweringly of rich fat.

“I’d have hoped some of them would be hot, ” I told Portia halfheartedly, less because I cared and more out of courtesy: I had an allergy to authority figures who didn’t practice good boundaries.

“When I was a freshman, there was one attractive lecturer. It was the year the Raw Mother came to Hellebore. She Who Eats and the Ministry had come to an agreement. The school was filled with young women who could commit to her without worrying about their virtue, and she could have her worship without destroying families and ending marriages.”

“That’s some patriarchal bullshit.”

“It was,” said Portia, face soft with remembrance. “But it worked out. Those of us who were drawn to her went to her, and it was good, Alessa. She took care of us. The one thing in the school that didn’t want us dead.”

“The one thing in the school that didn’t want you dead, huh?” I repeated gingerly. “I sure hope things have improved since then.”

“Anyway, there was one very hot lecturer back then,” continued Portia like I hadn’t spoken, roping an arm around my shoulders. She smelled delicious, like honey and vanilla. “But we—”

“We who?”

“Oh, the Raw Mother’s girls, of course. We all started arguing over him and he ended up torn apart. It was a whole thing,” she said. “They’ve only just found his right earlobe.”

The crowd swam past us, led this way and that mostly by the skinless automatons although occasionally, I’d catch sight of a masked servitor, tugging a student down a narrow hallway.

Sunlight poured through the windows in beveled spears and Portia was run through by one as she paused. She glowed like a saint.

“How long ago was this?”

“How long ago was what?” said Portia, smile empty and bright as glass. “Twenty years.”

“Twenty—”

“I thought it’d all been destroyed but apparently not.

Although by the time the janitors found the ear, it was a mummified, rat-gnawed morsel.

They almost made the mistake of throwing it out.

” Her eyes twinkled. I still couldn’t tell the color of her irises: they seemed an impossible purplish red, like wine, almost dark enough to be black.

“You said twenty years, Portia.” I asked. “What the hell did you mean by that? And, more importantly, what the hell did you mean by the only thing in the school that didn’t want you dead ?”

“It’s in a reliquary somewhere now. I could show you,” said Portia, answering a question I definitely did not ask. Her smile was bright, innocent, dazed: the smile of a woman waking from a dream. Before I could interrogate her further, a commotion stole everyone’s attention.

Portia grabbed my upper arm without a word, yanking me forward.

We threaded through the rubbernecking throng of students until we reached the front.

A circle had formed around Sullivan, a black-eyed girl with the most magnificent trove of dark curls with whom he was holding hands, making her Delilah, and an absolutely gargantuan boy.

The other boy dwarfed Sullivan by an impressive seven inches or so; impressive, as Sullivan cleared six feet himself.

He was wider too, built like the archetypal lumberjack.

He had a despondent, miserable face and a mealy complexion, the face of someone who had never heard of skin care.

Delilah held on to Sullivan’s arm, her face buried against his sleeve, mostly occluded by his bulk.

“I know you,” the unhappy boy said to Sullivan, his tone dull. “I would know you in my dreams.”

“If it’s any reprieve, it’s why I’m here.

I want to redeem that bloody history of mine.

” Sullivan stared at the taller boy, his lips pinched together so hard, they were a bloodless gray.

His voice nonetheless was calm, the same exquisite and unbothered tenor that he had used to critique my wardrobe. “We don’t have to fight. Please.”

“You’ve taken so much.”

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry.”

“You took everything. ” The boy’s voice broke under the weight of the word everything, turning shrill. “You and your family. You fed on us.”

“Not willingly,” said Sullivan. Had I been standing at any other angle, I would have thought him utterly bored by the other student’s blandishments, so neutral his tone, but I could see how he held one hand clenched in a white-knuckled fist, how it shuddered at his hip. “Not by choice.”

“I can’t let you live,” said Sullivan’s opposite. He shook his head and then once again, harder the second time, eyes widening until they were mostly whites. “No, no, I can’t let her live. She’s the source of your power, isn’t she?”

“Leave Delilah out of this.”

“They’re all dead. My family—you owe me.”

“Me, perhaps, but not her.”

“I can’t let any of you live,” said the other boy hopelessly. “I can’t.”

The threat in the other boy’s voice was unmistakable.

A prematurely excised fetus would have been able to say, Yes, that man very definitely wants to cause harm.

Sullivan did not withdraw nor did he posture or jeer at his adversary.

Instead, he ran a hand along his hair. He laughed tremblingly, as though his amusement were a living thing, squirming in his grip.

“You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that already.

The first person to want me dead was my mother.

Poor girl. They carved out her memories, you know?

Told her she was going to get a white-picket future.

Might have gotten it too if I’d the decency to be born a daughter.

When they found out I was going to be a boy, the cicada-lords filled her lungs and her thoughts and her womb.

Everyone was so happy. She, though, wanted to smother me in my own placenta.

Tried to, I’m told. They didn’t allow her, of course,” said Sullivan and his voice smoldered with warning although he was painstakingly gentle as he unhooked the girl’s arms from his waist. “And the last person to tell me that Delilah needed to die, well. I didn’t allow them to do that either. ”

“Sullivan, no, don’t, it’ll be okay. He can’t hurt me. Please, let me—”

“It’ll be all right, my love,” he said, lips touched to each of her fingertips in turn.

The love enshrined in his gaze was a holy thing and that holiness was what made it dangerous: worse wars had been waged by men with less faith than this one, who stood there looking like he’d bring the world down for this girl.

“Sully,” Delilah whispered.

“It’ll be all right,” he said again and I saw her shoulders drop.

Later on, I’d find out how many times she’d died, how over the years Sullivan would find her broken-doll corpse on an altar over and over again: throat cut, ribs split, just raw meat sometimes.

Delilah, I would learn, was what they call a Lamb—an immortal sacrifice—and that the first time Sullivan had sat waiting for her to come back, he’d been thirteen years old.

Sullivan rested his forehead against Delilah’s before he pressed her into the embrace of the crowd, turning to regard his adversary.

He said: “It took them eight generations of careful pollination and meticulously applied eugenics to create me. Do you really think you have a shot? I hold all my gods in me. Turn around and leave. We don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to die.”

He said all this as the other boy mimed hefting a weapon, his hands locking around thin air. No, not thin air. Not ultimately. A labrys coalesced into reality as the boy made the motion to swing. The creation of the ax left grease smears in the air.

“If it helps at all, I do wish sometimes that I was never born,” said Sullivan, still with that strange hungry earnestness.

“If I hadn’t come into this world, none of this would have happened.

You wouldn’t have suffered whatever you did.

Lila wouldn’t always be at risk. It’d be fine.

All of it. If I knew all this could have been stopped, I’d have let my mother asphyxiate me.

And I wouldn’t have to listen to the cicada-lords screaming in my head.

Every night, every day, every hour of my existence.

Buzzing away. I never sleep.” His voice again slipped into an abstracted softness, the words spoken for him and no one else.

“Do you know what it’s like to never sleep? To only dream of wings?”