Page 126

Now, I think, it’s time to let it out.

THIRTY-TWOLacie

The burning of her lips. The heat of her eyes. The gasp stolen from my lungs. My muscles surge with singeing, horrible energy, rabid and desperate and vicious. I am not alive. But I am angry.

And I am hungry.

THIRTY-THREEMarcella

There is no time for regret. Whittaker swings his crooked, jagged claws wide and slashes my face. Searing pain rips through me, my joints cracking all at once as I hit the stone floor.

In this form, fully evolved, my eyes are heat-seeking lances, my dead heart pumping again.

There is nothing like this thrill, even if it is to fight for my life—to fight for our lives.

I draw up, my mouth a blister of screaming, my head frayed by teeth.

“You,” Whittaker snarls in Old Norse. “It was you all along. Had I known how very close I was, I’d have ended you myself.”

We circle each other, the church around us frenzied. By a quick count of beating versus non-beating hearts, there are at least fourteen vættir and twenty-five humans aside—and whatever abomination Lyle and Shea have turned themselves into.

“I’m not the one you want,” I say, my voice the rolling staccato of my birthlands. “He”—I point to Shea—“is the monster who killed those girls.”

Whittaker sucks a breath. “Shea,” he begins, but I step forward, between them.

Lyle begins to move, but I keep my eyes locked on the man who cursed this entire university to suffering. Who ruined two women whose futures should have been theirs and theirs alone. I will root this evil out, pluck its stem and burn its body and salt the earth it grew inside. I lunge for him, grabbing his arm and dislocating it as I whip him onto the dais.

Shea screams, his body shaking and morphing, his face splitting down the middle. His teeth drive deep into his cheekbones, twisting like corkscrews into a false, curving smile, blackened skin shredding around his serpent-eyed stare. But he flashes silver, too, the flesh flaking from his body like a shedding monitor lizard, his claws a gleaming black. He is not a vættr. He is knit from greed and bone.

His other arm hangs, bruised and horrible, knocking loosely at his side, knuckles dragging on the floor. When he speaks again, it is with a pronounced slur as his broadened tongue licks his teeth. “You will pay, drottning. You will suffer a thousand years.”

Lyle is up again, his fingers slitting the pages open to my name.

—my name—

His voice strengthens into Old East Norse, the consonants rolling as he draws a curse into the air.

“Marheiður Þorstéinsdóttir, you are mine.”

The worm inside my skull writhes and I fall, screeching, to hands and knees. My claws snick into the marble floors, leaving great troughs of powdered stone. My skin shakes, tension winding in and in and in until I’m sure I’ll snap, until the tether is so taut I can barely move. It’s a trembling, scouring line ripping a trough into my being.

Lyle, panting, bares his teeth in a smile. “John. Morris.” Dean Shea and Whittaker twitch toward Lyle. “You took Therese from me. Now meet your end.” He tilts his head toward me. “Go.”

I coil and spring, arms extended, panther-sharp and lethal. It’s not Whittaker I collide with, not Shea. My body rams into Lyle’s with a sick thud, his flesh flaying as I draw a hand over his stomach. He howls and rolls, glistening fat and thickened part-crimson blood making a slurry beneath him.

The diary, my diary, falls beneath him, covered in his effluent. Whittaker grabs beneath us, then screams, a thing of fury and sadness. It disintegrates, ruined by blood, the ancient words on the vellum pages slicked away. He throws the leather away and reverses, clutching for reinforcements.

Shea reaches for the ruined pieces of leather, but I catch him on the tips of my daggerlike nails, then propel him backward and into a column. His head cracks hard, but as it does Whittaker tips his head back and screams the vættir war song, razor-keen and tipped in blood.

He falls onto me, and we meet the ground, my head blaring as my eyes blur for a single moment. His talons tear at me, white-hot pain ripping into my side. But I am no weakling, and he is only a wraith locked out of his barrow.

Gathering my strength, I slam my foot into Whittaker’s chin, crushing his teeth through his upper lip. While he wails, I scrabble onto the column where Shea is rousing. Using him as a ladder, I spring up, up, into the eaves of the choir space. From this position, the chapel spreads wide, a dining table rolled out with a feast.

I rappel off the side, diving for Kehane, her mask knocked off and broken, her chic black dress matted with sweat.

She screams as my teeth meet her neck. “NO! Why me?”

I don’t need to answer her. She knows the truth: she’s allowed for this, and that’s as great a sin as taking part.