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Rowan’s scream pierced the air—and my heart—like a knife.

I chased his wailing back to the main hall, every thought of Gracelynn beaten down by the screaming.

His wailing pummeled the air in the library, filled every corner: I could hear him beg, in sobbing gasps that then lengthened into an animal keening, nearly too high-pitched to be something to claw out from a human mouth.

When I reentered, the air was swimming with embers. If I didn’t think too hard about it, I could admit to its eerie loveliness, the fluorescing cinders like fireflies, and I did not want to think too hard about it because why the fuck did I come back? I owed Rowan nothing.

“You’re back!” said Adam, meeting my arrival with a genial smile. “It’d be nice to get some help around here.”

The screaming tapered again to sobbing: it was lower this time, more guttural.

Rowan was a splayed mess of limbs on the floor, panting.

A rill of blood traced the corner of his mouth as his head lolled in my direction, eyes wide at the sight of me.

His hands were broken, fingers snapped, all bent the wrong ways.

Adam looked fondly down at him and then he gave Rowan such a kick.

A gasp tore itself out of Rowan’s lips and the sound wasn’t loud enough to hide the crack of bone, the noise of his breastbone caving onto itself. Rowan spasmed into a protective ball.

“Some people really don’t know when to just die,” said Adam lovingly.

“You can’t,” I whispered. “I need him.”

“I can, actually,” said Adam.

Whatever color Rowan’s face had had before, it was gone now.

Rowan’s breathing had texture. I could hear him wheezing, his lungs bloodier by the moment, filling with liquid.

He was dying, I could tell. I couldn’t do much about that but I inched over to him nonetheless, careful to keep as far away from Adam as I could.

I reached out a hand, grazed my fingers over his chest, and disconnected the part of his brain that could register any tactile sensation.

If I was better at what I did, I might have been able to unhook him completely from his pain receptors, but my magic amounted to blunt trauma.

His breathing smoothed. It was something, at least.

“Besides, you deserve better than him,” purred Adam.

He smelled of incense, clean; he smelled like a temple, like something holy.

I stared into those blue eyes of his as he crouched beside me, wishing they weren’t so bright and that I wasn’t so human.

This close to Adam, I couldn’t help but burn for him like any fool.

I wanted him. Gods above and below help me, I craved him.

Rumors used to abound about how Adam had a carousel of lovers who survived only as long as his interest and after he was done with them, no one ever saw them again.

Yet like Bluebeard from fable, he continued accumulating paramours.

I hadn’t understood how. Now, skewered by his attention, I was reminded the brain only thinks itself in control.

I wet my lips with my tongue and Adam grinned, the bastard fully conscious of his effect on anything with a functioning endocrine system.

“We would be good together.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

“I see, ” said Adam, the smile melting from his expression, the warmth from his words.

This is his real voice then, I remember thinking.

It’d been my stepfather’s voice too and the voice of so many men I’d met before, all of them charming until privilege crashed into reality, then out came this aggression, this meanness.

He reached into one of Rowan’s pockets, procuring a cigarette, which he lit with a flame from the tip of his right thumb.

To my shock, he then lowered the cigarette to Rowan’s lips.

“You’re lucky I’m a generous man,” said Adam. “I’m not going to take offense at what you said. I’m not even going to ask you to be grateful when I save all our asses. You can have that for free. It’s called courtesy. My mother taught me that.”

“I thought Miss Kingsley died when you were a baby,” wheezed Rowan, smiling unrepentantly up at us. “You never talk about her. Is she hot, by any chance? I want to know if she’s Mrs. Robinson hot or—”

Adam’s smile collapsed. It wasn’t a secret that he, like every good Patrick Bateman wannabe, hated his mother.

He thought of her as weak. The story was she died giving birth to him and he had held the fragility of her humanity against her ever since.

Now it seemed like that was just apocrypha, fiction Adam fed the world for reasons unknown.

Despite myself, I was interested in seeing if he’d biopsy that mystery for us.

“The Ministry is all about making deals with the right people,” said Adam in conversational tones, not turning, his eyes for me and only me, and if I had been anyone else, I might have been lost, a moth eaten alive by the fire.

“And they made a deal with the Abrahamic Devil, who I’m told is very different from some of the other devils that exist in our blighted universe.

Better because he prefers presenting as a beautiful white man.

They promised my father they’d help him impregnate any woman he wanted on one condition: they get to own the leftover children, the ones who don’t become the Antichrist.”

“Why?” said Rowan, preternaturally calm.

“What does anyone do with test subjects that can’t die?” said Adam. “They experiment.”

We’d been right then. This was a holding pen, a processing center, a laboratory all efficiently rolled into one. The only question left now was why.

But maybe it didn’t matter.

“Sully never did appreciate his good fortune,” said Adam, his expression brittle.

No wonder he loathed Sullivan so. Two sides of the same coin, one coddled and the other commoditized.

Never mind that Sullivan, rest his digested soul, hated his predicament, that Sullivan was just as desperate to crawl from his destiny.

Adam saw him as favored, a golden child.

Ironic given how Sullivan’s narrative resolved but then again, Adam seemed the kind to nurse a grudge from cradle to crypt.

“Anyway,” he said. “If you ever bring up my fucking mother again, I’ll burn you to ashes.”

I was saved from having to answer when a familiar voice uncoiled through the air, low and eager and breathy.

“Deathworker, darling, dearest death,” said something in the gloom above us, in echo of words spoken so many strange months ago. “I’ve found you at last and when I eat you, I’ll finally die.”

“Oh,” sighed Adam, standing. “Hello, beautiful.”

He was wearing the excitement of a child at a circus, one ready for a harmless spectacle or at least one where he had no stakes. No, that wasn’t right. His was the face of the gore hound, the ambulance chaser. He wanted the crash, wanted the six-car pileup mess of body parts and screaming people.

“Give him to me. Give the deathworker and I’ll give you the cursed song, a favor for another, a gift for a gift in return.”

“Gracelynn,” I whispered as a shape peeled out from the darkness.

High above us, the Librarian emerged, looking for all the world like a hand puppet being thrust out from behind a velvet curtain.

It was smiling with every single one of its mouths; it was practically porous with good faith.

Most of its hands were steepled, all but two: one held Gracelynn’s sagging frame by their nape while the other gestured toward its captive.

Blood sheeted from their face like a mourning veil, and maybe it was a good thing we were all going to die here or I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming of bloody hands.

Gracelynn blinked their eyes open.

“No, no,” they panted, looking like a sacrifice. “You were supposed to run.”

“I fucking tried,” I shouted and they laughed, a long and hollow noise not unlike a coyote’s sobbing call.

I felt fingers try to curl around my ankle.

“Alessa,” said Rowan, spitting what was left of his cigarette out. “Now. Now’s when.”

“What—”

“It’s happening. What Ford said,” he said, each word costing him more than he had, every syllable syruped with blood. “It’s okay.”

“You’re so gorgeous,” sighed Adam, his eyes only for the Librarian. “But you don’t have what I want. Keep the bitch.”

“I can hold it,” shouted Gracelynn from above. “Take Rowan and—”

“What are you talking about?”

“My death,” said Rowan and it was sweet somehow, that red-gummed smile of his, fierce and sure. I remember thinking oh as I stared down at his face, beautiful in its fatalism. “He knew you’d be worth it. You’re going to make this worth it because you’ll make him fucking pay. ”

Ford also said half live if Rowan dies. He didn’t say how Rowan needs to die. I turned to the Librarian and shouted, my voice loud as the snap of a breaking bone, despair sanding away whatever self-preservation I had left. Fuck all of this. “ You can have him! ”

“Alessa.” Adam’s voice gleamed with warning.

“Take him.”

“ Yessss, ” sang the Librarian, accelerating across the ceiling, unfurling, Adam and his threats and flirtations forgotten, its eyes only for me and Rowan as the latter wincingly propped himself up to meet his end. “Finally, I’ll die. I’ll die, I’ll die, I’ll die at last. At long last.”

Snarling, Adam blanketed the air with a bright blaze of blue flame, earning a wail from the Librarian. It fell back, crawling halfway down a wall again with its myriad hands, Gracelynn clutched like a childhood charm, screeching what I suspected were curses in a language dead and old as compassion.

“He’s mine, you fucking centipede.”

Adam erupted into a star. I could almost see a humanoid shape in that terrible whiteness: it’d been cauterized of any extraneous fat; it was barely more than smoldering bone. Still, he rose into the air, still he bellowed. “So stand the fuck down.”

“No,” sang out the Librarian. “No, I think I will not.”

I kissed Rowan then as the Librarian dove forward, through the inferno of Adam’s refusal, immolation hardly a significant obstacle when one’s long anticipated death was waiting there with an exhausted smile.

I kissed him not full on the mouth but on the leftmost edge of his lower lip, where a scar ran to his chin.

Carefully, because he’d been hurt enough.

And softly, because I could. Because I’d rather remember him this way than broken, his blue eyes as clear as the winter sky.

It wasn’t technically my first kiss but it was the first that I’d offered of my own free will and Rowan tasted of ash and blood and too many things unsaid.

My hand closed around his jaw. He pressed his cheek into my palm, his eyes softening.

When we broke apart enough, he was smiling at me with heartbreaking sweetness, every capillary in his eyes burst. Rowan was dying, dead already, really.

I didn’t love him could barely say I even liked him, but he’d always been in my corner and I was tired of losing everything.

“Go.”

And it was strange he was so at ease with his death, but maybe he’d spent months acclimatizing to the thought and maybe he had been waiting for this: tenderness without condition, affection without restriction; lips against his, hands around his face.

If you’d never had a choice about your life, maybe there was a comfort in knowing your death, especially if you knew it’d be the softest thing you ever experienced.

Gracelynn screamed again, an animal noise cut short by the shatter of bone, and I didn’t think I had enough of a heart left for anything else to be broken but you learn something new every day. I didn’t turn to see Gracelynn’s death.

Instead, I bit down.

His lower lip began to shear from his jaw, blood gushing over both our chins.

I would never get used to the bounce of human lips, not their texture, the slight gelatinous nature of it all.

When I tried chewing, it resisted my molars.

So I swallowed Rowan’s lip whole, even as his eyes rolled up in his head.

I kissed him on the brow for good measure, breathing his scent in—cigarettes and old books—and mouthing goodbye against his skin.

He pushed me. With more strength than I’d ever imagined his thin frame would conjure, he pushed me, just as the Librarian crashed down like a comet, carrying him into a wall, its laughter filling the world.

For a moment, I could see through the fire, looking like a biblical lithograph, and my magic found the small bones of Rowan’s neck, and I broke them, every last vertebrae, even as white swallowed my vision, my last sight of him his eyes as the light winked out of them and the Librarian’s jaws closed around him like a secret to take to the grave.

Then it was over—for whatever value of over could exist with the Librarian shuddering over what remained of Rowan, gasping in the agony of its pleasure, short-breathed by its dying; if I’d ever wondered if it would regret its suicidality, those doubts were gone.

But the Librarian had not been joking. In all my years, I had never heard anything die with so much pleasure.