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Her blood spurts, wet and hot. My tongue follows the iron, then slithers down, deep. A vættr throws himself against my spine, fingernails gouging the broad muscles of my back, and I roar. This is my dinner.

My tongue splits into thousands of tentacles, wrapping around Kehane’s waning heart, lapping up her life force more steadily than her pulse beats.

She slowly goes slack, cold, her body bitter. Spitting, I cast her husk aside, desiccated and air-filled.

When I turn, Whittaker has locked his vættir around me in a semicircle, their bodies linking to form one wall of flesh, profane and screaming—and faced away from me. Revitalized from the fresh flush of Kehane’s energy, I launch toward the undulating, roaring mass. Sims growls at me from a crouch, his face bloodied from where I’d swiped him. Weakling. I can take them all on if they’re so fragile. But then he, too, turns away.

They’re focused elsewhere, all of them—on the gnat-high cries, the cut-off yells for mercy, the wet burble of final prayers.

They’re devouring every human left in this place.

They’re gathering power.

A trembling adjunct whose name I did not bother to learn races away from the crowd of feasting vættir. He’s shaking, sweating, his hands wrapped around himself.

Better that he does not suffer.

I whip my arm out as he passes, and his neck snaps with a sharp click. He falls, broken.

Sims breaks free of the horde, casting his body onto the fresh kill, and rips his skull half off until he reaches his brain. He digs his teeth in, devouring and devouring, his slurping and sucking frantic until he pulls away, red-faced and grinning.

“You cannot win,” he laughs, flipping his hands out to reveal the musculature on them regenerating, and then generating, and then augmenting, until his body is taut. He falls onto all fours, a wide, slavering black tongue licking his teeth. “You think you can kill me?”

Davies turns next. “You think you can kill us?”

Another. Another. They turn, chanting, changing, their bodies growing tall and thin, brittle and sharp as sabers. Their jaws widen, their eyes flashing bright silver, until I start to fall back. My chest tightens, a high-pitched keen coming from between my ears.

Whittaker’s wraith body stretches long and spindly, his jackal-teeth sneering. “Bend the knee and we will make your undying life painless.”

They walk me back, a barricade I could never hope to prevail over. We march farther, farther, toward the side altar, past the Virgin in Pietà, her eyes clouded by tears. Candles flicker and then sputter out, the weight of the magic issuing from my body snuffing any light.

My back hits the wall and the procession stops. Whittaker pulls forward, his smile widening. Saliva loops thick and jaundiced from his jaw. This close, I can see the spiderlike hairs springing from his deformed face, the bridge of his nose cracked so the bone’s decayed innards are exposed. His skin spreads like putty, disappears into a char-black heart where once he was staked by the king of the vættir.

He gets close enough, his cold breath chills my face, the rot of the grave searing my nose.

“Fuck you,” I hiss, even though fear has taken hold of me like a hand around a trembling mouse. “You will have to kill me before I bow to you. And even then, I will speak a curse so livid that your clan will decay in its nascency, your children and your children’s children will wither and die in front of your eyes.” I cast my gaze toward the altar, hoping against all hope that Lacie has found her way back from death, that she’s taken her first steps as a draugr in peace and strength. But I cannot see her.

My eyes whip back to Whittaker, to the long claws he takes to my face. He scratches a fine crimson line down my cheek, then licks his talon clean. I cannot help it: I scream. I am afraid. I’ve fought for this life—it wasn’t perfect, and I filled it with lies, but there was good there, too.

There was Lacie. And I’ve betrayed her. And now, she won’t even have me.

“I will make you hurt for this,” he whispers, his voice the thousand eldritch wails of all those he’s killed. “And when you are maimed, I will end your little girlfriend, too. I’ll make sure you live to see her die.”

Rage slams through me and I tackle him, taking his massive body down with me. I rip at his scalp with my teeth, flaying skin from his body until his sick, poisoned blood deadens my tongue. But he is too strong, and I’m flagging.

He tosses me to the side like I am nothing more than a nuisance. His hand closes around my throat, his lengthened fingers a searing wrap around my spine.

“Go back to hell,” I rasp. My vision sparks and blackness edges in, spangled and final.

“Now. Lyle, boy,” he says, rising. “It is time to meet your end.”

THIRTY-FOURLacie

No breath comes as I stumble from the cracked altar, my bare feet slipping on spilled blood. The mess of dead and dying professors drag at my feet.

Every single time I knuckled under, they knew.

Every time they failed, it was another point against me.