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I saw it a second before the other boy did, the wet orange membrane closing over Sullivan’s eyes; saw it flutter against the corneal surface, saw mucus come away; saw the cicadas emerge, boiling from his tear ducts, distending his face.

Sullivan opened his mouth and gods poured out of his throat and Delilah’s answering scream was a knife, cutting through the air.

There was just enough time for Sullivan’s opponent to jolt backward, horror filling his expression.

“They’re so hungry,” said Sullivan, and his voice was plaintive—audible, somehow, clear as despair in spite of the bugs wriggling out of his mouth, slick from his saliva—as he sank his fingers into his would-be killer’s shirt, pulling him lover-close, a hand moving to cup the nape of the other boy’s throat.

All the while, cicadas continued to pour, and pour, and the crowd, seized by an idiot animal terror, pulled back as the cicadas began to eat.

We watched the boy die.

If the universe had any mercy in it, the swarm would have blanketed him, obscured his death from view, but it didn’t.

His death was a spectacle. We saw him denuded of skin, saw them burrow through the spongy tissue of his bones, and gnaw through heart and lung, liver and stomach.

In seconds, he went from boy to Swiss cheese monument, a juddering colander trellised by strings of crawling, jewel-shelled insects.

I inhaled, sharp, as oily clots of organ patterned the floor. Beside me, I felt Portia do the same: a brisk gasp, although there was something sexual in its release, a panting want.

Out of nowhere, an unfamiliar voice, nasally, quintessentially New York: “Is this turning you on ?”

Portia responded with bared teeth, “What the fuck?”

I looked over to see a boy standing about five inches behind us and to the right of me.

Something about his shit-eating smile said he couldn’t be much older than me, but his skin was precociously weathered and there was something equally ancient about his eyes, which were almost the white-blue of a flame save for a drip of hazel like spilled petroleum. Upon noticing my scrutiny, he winked.

The boy went on, clownishly good-tempered. “You’re from the Raw Beef—”

“ Excuse me?”

“—sorority, aren’t—”

“We’re not a sorority and that’s not what she is called.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or shriek, or to try to pinch myself awake, the juxtaposition of this argument and the slaughter unfolding so absurd, so truly bombastically weird, nothing seemed real any longer.

“Makes more sense than the name you’re using,” said the boy.

“ Sense, ” Portia repeated with a laugh that had as much to do with humor as a gut wound with comfort. “You’re the one—”

“I have so many questions for you, but give me a second,” said the boy, who clearly thought of himself as the funniest person in the room. He turned his attention to me. “Name’s Rowan. Heard about you from Johanna. She said you’re prickly. Didn’t tell me you were cute, though.”

I recoiled from his once-over. “How do you know my roommate?”

He waggled eyebrows in answer and said instead, turning back to Portia, “So what’s this about the Raw Grail offering immortal life?

I hear that you girls have a partnership with Hellebore.

Something about making soldiers for the Ministry?

Because if so, I’d love to know more. I don’t personally want to live forever, but I have this condition —”

“Someone is being eaten alive here.” Portia pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “I’d rather focus on that.”

“What’s death but going into another room?” said Rowan, peering over the carnage, utterly flip despite the fact that what was left of Sullivan’s victim was a porridgy smear on the floor. “Many other different rooms, in his case. Possibly hundreds. Oh, that’s impressive. ”

“Thank you.”

Sullivan’s thoroughbred voice with its impeccable diction, its singer’s lilt, gently cut through the air.

He was staring at us, his outfit wrecked, cicadas promenading over his shoulders, rappelling down his trouser legs, the light greasy and gold-red on their amber shells.

I realized with a slight lurch in my stomach that they were cleaning him, eating particulates of organ matter, tugging at the rucked seams: there was no helping the bloodstains but he could at least be unrumpled.

That more than the gore, more than Sullivan’s languid expression, disturbed me.

He smoothed the last wrinkles from his collar, a cicada crawling up to rest on the first joint of his right index finger.

Sullivan’s mouth bled in rivers still. Very informed gossip had it that the Ministry paid for more than the right to keep their pet families under scrutiny.

Some said they were breeding new lines, developing living weapons.

I had to wonder what Sullivan’s home life was like.

Delilah kept her distance, her expression desperate, even lost. When Sullivan held out a longing look, she turned away, melting into the crowd.

“You might want to get that,” said Rowan, touching the knuckle of his thumb to his own lips.

Sullivan, sighing, looked back to us and daubed at his mouth with his fingertips, then looked down at the jammy mess. “Well, that happens sometimes, I’m afraid.”

He ran his tongue over pink-tinged teeth. Cicadas gathered in his dark hair like a crown, like they were comforting him in his abandonment. They buzzed softly. “They try so hard, but my throat tears each time. They’ll fix it eventually, however.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Which part of the process?”

“All of it.”

“Always,” said Sullivan in a hiss, beautiful and terrible and holy, and I forgot to breathe until Rowan spoke.

“Did you have to kill him that way?” he said.

“Worse ways to die in Hellebore.” Sullivan’s smile was pitying.

You could describe it as kind if you wanted to, but only if you were willing to ignore how practiced it was.

His attention swiveled and his eyes weren’t black as the cicadas burrowed back into him, but gold.

“Did they tell you that when you enrolled? That you’ve come to a place of monsters? ”

“Right where I belong then.”

“Do you remember being so confident, Miss du Lac? So full of joie de vivre?” His attention flicked to Portia and then back to me. A patina of honest amusement coated his smile. “Keep your innocence as long as you can.”

“I’m afraid that was lost a long time ago,” I said. He was agonizingly condescending.

He smiled thinly. “Then make sure you’re ruthless enough to survive the next few months. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. The few rumors that have escaped Hellebore’s publicists. It’s supposed to be hellish in here.”

“Oh, leave her alone, Sully, ” said Portia, and she wore no expression at all despite his jovial tone, her face no more than a death mask. She did not blink. She barely breathed. “She’s not yours.”

“Is she yours then?”

My heart lost a few beats in Portia’s answering silence.

Chuckling, Sullivan said after a moment, “You and your sisters think you’re so different but we come from the same kind of gods. Mine are just more honest.”

“More cruel too,” said Portia with that same insect stillness.

“Perhaps.” Sullivan’s attention drifted to me again. “Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive, don’t we?”

I tensed. It was hard to tell who was the worst person to have my back to. Sullivan, in his awful glory. Portia, in her quiet. Rowan, in whatever the fuck you would call it, smiling broadly with his fingers steepled, a kid let loose in his favorite toy store.

“Fuck or fight. Who wants to start a betting pool?” Rowan chirped, breaking the tension like glass.

“Do you ever shut up?” Portia hissed, reverting to animated humanity.

“No,” came the unrepentant answer.

Sullivan looked over to Rowan then, a certain wonder in his gaze. Surprise too, as if the two hadn’t already exchanged words, as if Rowan were a dead rat he had discovered in a shoe. His smile collapsed into an expression of pure incredulity.

“And who,” he said, “are you?”

“Rowan,” He bounced from one foot to another, gleefully clapping . “But I also have questions. First off, do you or do you not think that Miss du Lac is very much goth mommy material and—”

“We should leave.” Portia’s voice in my ear, low and urgent, and it wasn’t five minutes ago when I might have let her tow me away to safety, but Sullivan’s words were branded into the marrow of my skull: We come from the same kind of gods.

“We could,” I murmured back. “But I don’t know if I can trust you.”

“Do you want to, though?” said Portia.

“I’m sure you have a million questions,” Sullivan said. “Unfortunately, I don’t want to answer them.”

“Fair.”

Sullivan nodded, the matter concluded as far as he was concerned, his attention beginning to swing away. Except Rowan then reached over to grab his shoulder with a gloved hand.

“But I really, really,” said Rowan, his grin continuing to extend, a caricature of itself at this point, “ really want those answers, though. Pretty please?”

Rowan’s impropriety shocked all the languor from Sullivan’s expression.

For the second time that day, that look of dreamy resignation closed over his face.

His eyes unfocused, softening. I heard the buzz of cicada wings, their droning song; saw again the boy and his despairing gaze as they bit down and broke skin.

Looking back, I wonder if I might have intervened had I not been standing so close to ground zero.

There wasn’t anything about Rowan I liked except how he’d winked at me.

Whatever the truth was, I justified it then as not wanting to leave it to chance.

No telling just how much fine control Sullivan had over his gods and if they had an indiscriminate appetite.

I’d just seen what they could do. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me.

And there was Portia too, staring at me, a smile spreading her mouth like a fang, waiting for an answer I wasn’t sure I wanted to give.

“Let’s not turn more people into a slushy,” I said.

“ He’s the one insisting on overstepping my boundaries.” Sullivan let out an aggrieved sigh. “I’m tired. All I want is to be done with the day and to spend the evening reading with Delilah—”

“Reading! Is that what the kids call it these days?” said Rowan.

“—if that’s all the same to you,” said Sullivan. “Just let me kill him and we can all go our separate ways.”

“No,” I said.

“The Raw Grail stands with Alessa,” said Portia very softly.

“This doesn’t have to escalate,” said Sullivan, sounding truly appalled.

“It doesn’t,” I said. “So back down.”

“Are you serious?”

“Serious as cancer,” I said. I kept my eyes on him, on his impassive face, his cheekbones like cornices: he had an architectural quality to his good looks, like someone had plotted even the shadow under the overhang of his lower lip, the faint panes of stubble across a jaw so cut, you could have used it as a measuring tool.

“What’s it going to be? Fight or fuck off? ”

Predictable as a clock, Rowan began to say: “You know—”

Sullivan mashed his face with a hand.

“Fine. You lot win,” he said with great finality, swearing up a bilingual storm, the word fuck and its variations delivered with unsavory gusto, interspaced with some rather liberal use of merde and putain. “Let’s just fucking go to lunch.”

And that was that.