Page 20

At Hellebore, it was monsters all the way down.

Bad enough we had to worry about the faculty outside and the Librarian sleeping in the walls.

Now there was a new concern right in our midst. We turned as a group to see Eoan backpedaling from the stop-motion nightmare Portia was becoming, the latter twitching forward on her hands and knees.

She was molting. A sheath of muscle tissue and crumbling bone trailed from her, like a dress half-shed, clinging wetly to her waist.

Gone, her skin and her very red hair. Gone, the leanly muscled slope of her back and her lithe legs, her expressive hands.

Gone, those velvet-soft eyes of hers—no, I amended the thought as I took in her new face, the cracked skull with chitin blooming through a maze of fractures, like she was a piece of kintsugi inverted.

No, her eyes were still there, only multiplied: a shining constellation of sable gazing benevolently down on us.

I’d thought her gorgeous before in her humanity, but she seemed a miracle now, with the near translucence of her frame.

Portia shuddered. Through the mess of her transformation, I could see organs shifting inside, undergoing mitosis and metamorphosis still: intestine fractalizing into tubules; a heart becoming seven then unfurling into a single red organ like a crooked finger set over her still human spine, which was reassessing just how many vertebrae she really needed.

She chirruped at Eoan, a dissonantly kittenish noise, almost cute (a word no one should associate with an overgrown arachnid).

She’d been human a second ago. I was sure of that.

Had we missed something? Did something catalyze this?

Those thoughts came after, long after the fact, and the blood was pooling black and thick.

The only thing resounding in my mind then was:

Oh shit.

Portia exploded forward.

I started in her direction and slammed into Adam’s outstretched arm.

“Wait,” he said, calmer than anyone had the right to be, his expression one of academic interest. “Just listen to what she’s saying—”

“She’s going to kill him,” panted Gracelynn, feral with worry. “We have to—”

“No, she’s not. Just watch. ”

“She’s hungry,” said Minji from somewhere behind me, unbothered.

Not everyone who came to Hellebore was a murderer.

Accidentally guilty of manslaughter, sure, that part was inevitable.

Powers like what burned through us have an elemental voracity, the carnivorousness of a natural disaster: they can’t help but cause hurt.

But most of us never started out wanting to commit homicide, for all that the school made it so easy to forget such aspirations.

By graduation, though, there wasn’t a student in our class with clean hands, and anyone who might have objected to this was dead.

The eight of us were not what anyone would call good.

Even Gracelynn, for all their softness. Someone with more of a heart would have told Adam to fuck himself, would have hesitated less, would have leapt to help Eoan because that was what you did when you were a good person.

But we hadn’t survived this long by putting too many others first. We’d been taught too well.

So we did nothing.

Surprisingly, Adam was right. Chelicerae scythed out from the ruins of Portia’s face as pedipalps reached from her throat, all said appendages coming to close gently over Eoan’s cheeks.

And while spiders had no tongues, Portia seemed to have no knowledge of that: a red stem of muscle wormed out of her mouth and between the boy’s lips.

“Is it weird I find this kinda hot?” said Rowan.

“No one asked you anything,” said Minji.

“What is she doing?” I hissed. Adam had his arm lowered by then so I advanced on the unfortunate sight, less out of compassion, more out of an abject fascination.

Foam bubbled from the corners of Eoan’s mouth, his eyes like a frightened animal’s; they were framed by white as they rolled to stare at me.

His throat was distended from its invasion: it throbbed as Portia crept up onto his torso, his own body flat and prone on the beautiful floor.

Rowan wasn’t wrong. There was a terrible intimacy to this, to Portia straddling him, her legs coming to cup his head, press him to her chest: she looked like a bride ready to slough her innocence.

He gagged, spasming under Portia’s body.

“The meat,” said Adam, understanding dawning in his cruel eyes. “You two didn’t want any of it. You knew. ”

“I wasn’t hungry,” I said.

Rowan let out a hoarse chuckle. “I am a vegetarian except when it comes to, you know—”

“Eoan’s a portal, isn’t he? I’ve heard of them. They’d win wars for people if they could get that shit under control. Poor lad,” He sighed then, shaking his head. “Probably had such a bad life. I heard it hurts like a bitch.”

As though on cue, Eoan bucked in Portia’s embrace.

“So now what?” said Rowan.

I ran my tongue over my incisors.

“Well,” Minji said, coming to crouch down beside the pair. She stroked a hand through his thin claret hair, ignoring Portia’s chitter of warning. “If he’s what you claim he is, he’s probably incredibly used to being parasitized. His kind—”

“His kind?” demanded Gracelynn. “He’s a person. Like us. What are you talking about?”

“Like you,” corrected Minji smoothly, teasing the wrinkles from a fold in her dress. “Eoan’s kind is meant to be fed on. We should do what we can to keep him alive for as long as possible. He can keep the Librarian and Portia occupied while we figure this out.”

Gracelynn shook their head. Their attention shot to Rowan and I.

“Say something,” they demanded. “One of you. You can’t be okay with this! This isn’t right.” Their dark eyes found mine. “Look, I—I know you’ve done some terrible things. But I know you. You’re better than this. We can’t let Eoan—”

“Why not have it both ways?” interrupted Adam, smiling, encroaching so deeply on Minji’s personal space that she had to withdraw a step.

He lifted Portia from Eoan while we were processing the utter cognitive dissonance of him using a meme.

As he hoisted her upward, a single arm clasped around her belly, Portia’s tongue came unstoppered from Eoan’s throat, revealing that it was, really, more of a second mouth: there were jaws there at the tip, with its teeth locked around a curd of squirming meat.

“I’m going to be sick,” moaned Rowan but no one paid him any mind.

“Adam,” I began. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. ”

“Softness isn’t a good look on you, Alessa,” he chided, and with a writhing Portia draped over his shoulder, he touched a single luminous finger to Eoan’s navel.

“ Stop, ” Gracelynn howled, faster on the uptake than the rest of us.

Blood erupted from Adam’s ears as the command burrowed into us, forcing all the rest of us to seize in place: lungs and hearts and nervous systems suddenly torn between their genetic prerogative to keep us alive and to listen to the word.

But it wasn’t enough. Adam smiled at Gracelynn, and it was a testament to their power that his expression seemed strained.

I went to my knees, gasping, then fell onto one shoulder.

A blue-white light ignited along Adam’s palm, spreading over his fingers, climbing to his wrist. As it did, he pressed down, sawing through Eoan’s belly like he was a pat of warm butter.

The smell of roasted meat boiled up through the air. My mouth watered instinctively, guiltily, even as Eoan screamed, unable to do more than lay there as Gracelynn slumped to the ground in horror, legs splayed outward.

“Stop, please, stop, Adam Kingsley, stop.” They repeated until the words lost their meaning and it was just them weeping softly.

I think sometimes it’d have been kinder if Adam had used a cleaver.

Easier certainly for Eoan. Blood loss would have resolved his torment speedily enough.

But that would have compromised Adam’s scheming.

No, he wanted Eoan to live. The rest of us emerged from the fugue of Gracelynn’s command, retching, as Adam completed his brutal work.

With the contented sigh of a man pleased at a good day of labor, he set Portia on the ground and then both hands on the halves of a now-bisected Eoan, pushing them apart for our review.

“There,” he said, patting Eoan on the cheek as the boy panted the hummingbird breaths of someone going into shock.

“I have a confession. I was actually concerned when Ford made his prophecy originally. Without Rowan, there’s only seven of us.

It made no sense. Half live? How would that work?

But now we can fling Eoan out of the door, prove our first kill.

If anyone needs a more guaranteed chance of survival, well, I can happily”—he made a whoosh ing motion with a hand—“amputate them.”

Rowan, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, spat black onto the ground. He stared at Adam without any of his usual irreverence, a chill I’d never seen on him crossing his long, knobby features. “You’re sick.”

“And you’re a corpse who doesn’t know he’s dead.”

“Hungry,” whined whatever had crawled out of Portia’s body. I couldn’t bear calling it by her name anymore, though it retained enough of her features to be mistaken for something that could be saved.

“Hun. Gry, ” it said again, snapping chelicerae.

“Take it,” said Adam magnanimously. To give credit where credit was due, he’d done an excellent job bisecting Eoan: both sections had their arteries cauterized, their veins seared shut.

His work was so clean, the halves almost looked like artifacts from some medical college: props some lecturer might use to illustrate the parts of the human alimentary system.

No, that’s a lie. The top half looked that way. As for the bottom…

I will always recall how the thing that had been Portia flung itself at the latter, burying its face in the bowl of Eoan’s belly, a sight that would have been unnerving enough ordinarily, but there was neither stomach nor liver, gallbladder nor kidneys, just—exactly like Adam had said—a portal through which foamed up shivering curds of pale wrinkled meat.

Portia, the spider-creature, ate it all down like it’d walk us back to when we thought we’d get to leave Hellebore.

“ I want you to stop breathing, ” said Gracelynn, mascara bleeding across their cheeks. “I want your heart to stop. I want your—”

Adam winced at the volley but stood nonetheless, dusting himself off before he took Eoan by a limp arm. “You doing that isn’t going to change the fact that he’s dead already. We can fight, if you like, but I’m going to win and Kevin’s sacrifice is going to go to waste. Wouldn’t that suck?”

That shut Gracelynn up so hard, I heard their teeth clack together.

“And besides, this way no one has to die so Portia can feed her appetites. Isn’t that nice?” said Adam to his stunned audience, his gaze lingering on me. “Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive, don’t we?”

I bared my teeth at him. He was right. It was over for now.

More violence would be imprudent. At least for now.

So we watched as he lugged what remained of Eoan to the doors, tossing him out.

And though I’d thought him catatonic from the trauma he had endured in Adam’s hands, Eoan still screamed when the faculty found him.

And he kept screaming until morning broke over us like an emptying skull.