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Every single goddamned time another student disappeared, I was told I knew nothing. Just a sniveling, hysterical little girl who was not yet wise to the ways of this world.

A howl tears from me, hollowing me out even as the pain rachets tighter around my spine and my gut and my skull. Teeth spring from my jaw, my bones snapping. As I cry out again, my glasses fall from my face and shatter. I wrap a hand around the mangled frames and the metal and glass splinter, leaving my palm weeping red.

She did this to me.

Tipping my head back again, I bellow, and this time they come. My colleagues, my advisors, faces I trusted. The vættir. Sims and Davies run at me, their claws out, their jaws distended and drooling, and I dodge.

But when Davies spins around me, grinning like I’m simply the best toy he’s ever had, I swipe hard, rending his throat open. A fountain of ichor spurts from him, putrid and black.

“Lacie, dear,” he hisses, blood flecking my face. The skin reknits, as it did the night Marcella and I found him. “Let’s discuss this. You’re a good girl. You can hear reason. Not like that monster, Marcella.”

For some reason, I feel the need to defend her. From the corner of my eye, I see Davies edge in, grinning and evil.

“Join us,” he needles at me. “Look what she did to you.”

“Marcella is no more monster than you,” I snap, hands flying up in front of my face for protection, Davies’s blood still dripping off my claws.

I can hurt them. I can hurt them for Laurel. For Therese. For myself. And, fuck it, even for Marcella.

“But you’re not a monster,” Davies says, his voice a smile. “Let us take care of you. You need a soft place to land.”

Sims grabs my arm, twists it behind my back. Lightning-sharp pain races up my spine and I yelp.

“Be a good girl, Lacie,” he hisses into my ear, spittle coating my soaked hair. “And we won’t kill you. Not yet.”

The fury inside me pours like a waterfall, an endless gush of hate. My vision goes red and I bury my talons in his gut as I wrestle out of his hold. Blood pours from his mouth and I slice down, ripping out his stomach, tearing apart his insides until he falls back, sputtering.

“I am not your good girl,” I bark, and launch toward Davies.

I grab his head and throw us both to the ground, heedless of my own pain, the agony in my wrists, as we hit marble. My teeth find his throat and tear it into a wide, salt- and iron-bitten smile. I crush my hand through the opening I leave behind, lancing through the delicate pocket behind his face, under his skull, and slurry his brain with my fingertips.

His face splits beneath my teeth, skin tearing like gauze as he screams and screams and screams.

All I can think about is Laurel in that hall, crumpled and dead and bloody. Therese, left to be eaten by rats. I want to make him hurt the same way he hurt them. Hurt me.

By the time I’m done, he’s no longer moving.

They are not immortal—they are strong, but not invincible. If I’m vicious I can ruin them.

Then a scream cuts the din, the wild cries of the vættir lancing through. Joyful.

Marcella.

I can’t help it: I run. I leave Davies’s and Sims’s bodies on the ground, vaulting over snapping teeth and the mess of death the vættir made, launching on incredibly quick limbs from the nave to the side altar. Whittaker’s hand is a scarf around her throat, Marcella’s monstrous, beautiful face slackening.

She betrayed me. She should die.

She should die.

It beats inside of me in place of my heart. She lied, and she betrayed me, and she turned me, and I hate her and I love her and I—

I am the north wind.

As fast and just as lethal. I knock Whittaker to the side bodily, and he cries out. It is so predictable that he wasn’t expecting opposition from a woman, so patriarchal, and I pity him, nearly.

Whittaker’s on his feet but I have all the momentum, and I close my hands around his throat, dragging him with me as I spring from wall to wall. My foot travels through stained glass, a colorful, deadly twinkle crashing onto the floor below.

I am bleeding, again, and will some more.