Page 38

I tried to ignore the noises emanating from the Librarian’s coils, tried to ignore the ache that was beginning to spread from my throat across the length of my torso; a sensation like ice and heat both, like a sentient fever traveling into the bones so every joint twinged.

I tried to ignore all of that and rise to my feet instead, wincing.

Because there was Adam, smiling like it was Christmas and naked as his namesake, dragging Gracelynn along the ground by an ankle, their hair so matted with gore that it trailed red over the floor like a paintbrush.

“My father,” he said in wondering tones, “he once appeared to me in a dream. And in the dream, he showed me my inheritance should I prove myself worthy: a hell of mewling sinners. It was the most beautiful thing I’d heard.”

“And?”

“And I’m looking forward to hearing Gracelynn do an encore.”

“Not to be that person, but that isn’t how you use the word,” I said in lieu of anything useful, preoccupied with maintaining focus, wondering the whole while if this was the root of Rowan’s irreverence: easier to act like everything is okay if you’re focused on something else.

I forced a smile to my mouth. “Did he tell you he loved you at the end of it?”

Adam cocked a sympathetic look at me, guileless and compassionate; it made my skin want to writhe off the muscle. Where was Portia when you needed a fucking spider monster?

“Were you two friends?” he asked as if he hadn’t seen Gracelynn give it all up for us, hadn’t heard them scream for me to run, hadn’t seen me come back, desperate.

As if he hadn’t been witness to their kindness and my refusal of such.

The absolute sincerity in his voice suggested two things: either this was a trap, or he hadn’t cared to pay any attention up until this moment.

“If I’d been a better person, we would have been,” I said after a moment, a eulogy of a kind in the declaration. An odd epitaph, I guess, but a better one than I was liable to receive, which was to say when I was gone, there’d be no one to say I was here and that I mattered.

I ran my tongue over my teeth. One of my molars had loosened unexpectedly. I wiggled it, abruptly fascinated by how I could feel the tether of its root.

“Let them go. Please. You can have me instead,” I said impulsively, my mouth filmed with a fresh wash of blood. “Let them go. Please. You can have me instead.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’ll have way more fun with me. Let them go.”

He laughed. Adam remained offensively attractive despite our shared deprivations, his hair tousled as opposed to ruined. I wanted him to touch me, wanted him, wanted to nuzzle into his shoulder, let him lie to me about whatever he wanted.

“No,” he said. “No, we can’t do that—”

“Adam, please.”

Years spent around men who believed that their dicks were reliquaries taught me how to smile despite the wave of nausea rolling through me.

I sweetened my expression as best as I could even as the world swam, every object becoming haloed by a soft light of its own.

I blinked hard, salt stinging my eyes, nails cutting crescent wounds into my palms. My own stigmata, my own punishment for this weakness, this greed for life.

“Maybe,” he said, raising Gracelynn’s limp form so he had them suspended by the hair, their legs swaying. There was so much blood on them, I couldn’t see the patterns on their skirts any longer. Their head hung slack, chin brushing their chest.

At the word maybe, I couldn’t help the surge of hope.

Adam’s smile told me he saw it too, that misguided optimism of mine, and the smile widened like a slit throat as he said, “Maybe. If you’d been kinder to me, if you’d cooperated, I might have considered it.

But none of these things are true and I need you more than I need her, so… ”

He gave a philosophical little shrug, lifting Gracelynn so their face was level with his. “No hard feelings.”

I was on my feet.

“I won’t let you,” I said. Blood shone down my chin, my hands, through the beds of my nails; I felt it trickle from my nostrils, thickening.

My mouth tasted hot and coppery and rank.

It might have felt less like a nightmare if Adam wasn’t still fucking naked and utterly unselfconscious of his bobbing erection.

He was enjoying this. I might have felt rage if I wasn’t dying too.

“How are you going to stop me?”

“Not sure,” I said, reaching out with what little of me wasn’t consumed by the work of staying alive, fighting against Rowan’s deathworker magic coursing through my body.

I traced Adam’s bones, the line of his spine like a subtle question mark; there was his heart, his liver, that corrupted fire he’d inherited from his father, burning like a star. “But even if it kills me, I’ll do it.”

There was no warning. Adam’s smile stayed genial as he transferred his hand from Gracelynn’s collar to their neck, fingers coiling around their throat, and I watched the flesh begin to blacken.

The only mercy of the moment was they couldn’t scream.

Gracelynn let out a soft gasp as Adam’s fingers closed into a fist, the butter of their throat and the bones of their neck melting under his touch; it looked like it hurt.

It looked like it was excruciating. And I am still ashamed of the relief that filled me when Gracelynn’s head toppled from their shoulders, although not as much as I am of the childish solace I found in how I could not see their face, matted as it was with the gore-soaked strands of their hair.

“Too slow, I’m afraid.”

“You’re a fucker, you know that?” I managed, astonished by the tears running down my cheeks.

I might have wept for them as Gracelynn had wept for the world if it wasn’t taking all of me to keep myself relatively together.

Adam stared soft-eyed in fascination at me as I trembled from the noise, from the work of surviving.

I gritted my teeth, sinking then to a splay of limbs, mopping at my face.

“Why are you keeping me for last? You don’t like me that much. ”

“I’m not keeping you for last,” said Adam. “I’m keeping you for Portia. And then I’ll kill her when she’s done with you.”

“Why are you doing this?”

He released Gracelynn as if he were a child and they a toy that had lost its luster, letting them fall into a heap atop the soiled floor. Adam strode toward me then, his smile bright still. If I’d had any reservations about what I intended, they were gone now, like a last breath spent.

“Because I told you I’d make you fucking regret this.”

“Is this about your fucking hand? The hand that you fucking healed in, like, a second?” I tried to laugh but hacked blood instead onto the collar of my shirt, taking an odd consolation in the fact there was no way to further despoil the damn thing: its original color was lost wherever our innocence had gone.

I flashed him a red-gummed smile; all it provoked was laughter.

“A gentleman keeps his promises,” said Adam, crouching down to fuss at my hair, tidying the strands, tucking blood-matted clumps behind my ears. “You have to respect that.”

I reached for him and he let me. I twinned my hands around the back of his neck, pulled him to me.

I kissed him. I kissed him with Portia’s loneliness and Rowan’s shocked tenderness, like this was the last time I would kiss anyone, which I guess wasn’t untrue.

I kissed him like fury, like grief, like a kiss could undo all of this, give us back our dead, make us young again, make death someone else’s problem once more, make us whole again, innocent of all this pain.

Adam froze against my mouth, his lips softer than I anticipated.

He tasted warmly of copper when I bit him but also strangely of incense.

I’d expected brimstone, but not this, not this smoke that bled down my throat like a memory.

I cupped both hands around his cheeks, pulling his head even closer, devouring in my insistence, surprised at this unexpected energy.

He sank obediently to my level, kissing me now in turn with a matched ferocity, his cock hard against my side.

His hand sank into my hair, fingers threading through the wild mass. He pulled, surprising a soft moan from me and he laughed at the sound, transferring his mouth to the column of my throat, where he kissed a path to my collarbone and then sank his teeth deep.

“Necrophiliac,” I hissed even though there wasn’t a part of me that did not recognize that he was beautiful, that did not hunger for him with his body in such close proximity.

Adam withdrew, blue eyes through his golden lashes like a caged sky. “It’s so much better when they can’t run.”

My shoulder ached where he’d bitten me; burned, really.

I ran fingers over my collarbone, and found scars instead where the teeth marks had cauterized.

It seemed like a courtesy at first but I realized it was a branding.

Adam watched me with starved eyes and a half smile that might have been beautiful on someone else, but on him resembled something stolen.

Given his nature, it probably was. When I did not move, his hands found me again, palming my breasts, finding the buttons of my shirt.

I closed my eyes. He undid them slowly, savoring the release of my flesh, and so intent was he on my disrobing that I don’t think he even registered the moment the burning sun in his heart began to die.

Although, at that moment, his attention was pulled elsewhere.

“M i n e.”

A shape embroidered itself into the air.

An outline at first, a suggestion of a body.

Slowly, the shadows of the figure filled in.

The light found the bladed lines of a leg, the still-lovely geometry of a woman’s torso, denuded of its breasts: pale freckled skin save for the scabbed-over wound running down its breastbone.

It wasn’t not Portia, for all the alienness of her anatomy, for all that she was missing her head.

Her skull was just gone. But she didn’t need it.

Her ribs had cracked apart and scythed outward, piercing flesh.

I could see her mouth—clever, crooked—through the gore, grinning at us through what remained of her chest. She lurched a series of quivering steps forward.

“Ah,” said Adam, turning away from my body. “There you are.”

“M i n e.”

Adam stood. “When I’m done.”

Portia skittered closer, a stop-motion horror.

The constellation of her eyes traveled my skin and there was enough pity there for me to sneer back at her; instinctive vanity, at this point.

I wasn’t anything anymore, not really, just a dead girl sitting, a corpse that didn’t know she was dead.

The light shimmered along Portia’s carapace like oil on water, and she was still grinning at me.

Her gaze flicked back to Adam, who’d begun to smoke, a black haze pouring over his skin.

He smelled like a crematorium, like fat burning and bone cooking.

Dismissed, I inched backward until I had my back to a wall.

My shirt hung open, the fabric hanging like a flap of skin pared from a rabbit’s corpse.

The buttons felt like bones under my fingers as I straightened myself, watching as Portia let out another low growl.

“M i n e.”

“No,” said Adam again. “She is not.”

I watched my breath curl through the air, white.

Thought of Rowan in the graveyard, his face in the dark.

Thought of Gracelynn, my hands in theirs, telling me to go, run.

Thought of Johanna that last night before, telling me about the Wolf.

Thought about how she’d said, Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive, don’t we?

And despite everything, I smiled.