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“Stop! You can still be one of us,” Whittaker wails. He grabs at my hands, swipes at me, anything to hurt me. But I am beyond hurt. My rage, red and vital, takes me into a different place: one beyond death and beyond his useless words.

I launch into the highest part of the church, into the transept’s beautiful bowl-like curve. Gripping the ancient granite, my skin like a lizard’s, I hold him, dangling. His face smashes against a carving of a dove, his arms and legs flailing. But I’m fast and young. Agile enough that my eyes catch the twitches of muscle movements before they begin.

He can’t win against me. Marcella’s soft whisper echoes in my mind. What are you going to do, lamb?

Grinning, I use my claws like tenterhooks, spearing them up Whittaker’s face until I’m holding him by his scalp and his cheeks. And then, I lean down and whisper, “You have greatly misjudged me. I am a lion.”

My nails spear his eyes with a wet crunch.

Rotted water spills from him and his screams rip through the rafters. Not for long, though. My talons can’t keep hold and so:

He slips, falls.

Shatters.

And the only thing I can do is smile wide, sharp in tooth and claw.

I’ve won.

THIRTY-FIVEMarcella

The vættir are running. Lyle stands, beneficent, on the altar, his fingers tipped in gore as he feasts on the broken curve of Whittaker’s shattered skull.

The ground trembles with it as they scatter, and I claw up on the slick wall, disoriented. Life has taught me that anyone on the ground is easy fodder, so I stagger on my feet. The monsters race toward the door, but it’s locked—warded against them. They’re not the only undead who have a taste for magic.

Shea drags himself across the floor toward me, his brains spilling from the side of his head. “Please,” he squawks, drooling over a half-ruined face, “please, drottning. Save us.”

“You are a small man, and you will die the same way you were born: in obscurity.” I yank him from the floor, my tongues splitting over his face.

I crush his neck between my teeth without a second thought. He is bitter, nothing I want to devour. I spit the darkness out of my gums.

There is only one way for this to stop. It might end me. And even if I succeed, even if this does not kill me, I will no longer be the draugr drottning. I will control no vast hordes of undead. I will be unlike anything I’ve ever known.

But you’ll be free, a soft voice that sounds like Lacie’s whispers, finally.

The worm, this monstrosity that I took on to be the queen, skitters inside me. I dig my hand into my mouth, spearing back, back, until I feel its tail wriggling. It’s behind my upper palate, in my brain pan, and with a vital crunch, I break through the thin skin and bone plate. Black blood flushes my mouth, slopping over my too-wide jaws, painting the underside of my tongue and floods beneath me. The worm is as sharp as fishing wire, just as tangled. It has tiny cilia, all beating and squirming as my claws clamp around it. It tries to get away, squelching up against my sinuses as I pull.

It does not come easy. It pops forward inch by inch, a baby in a birth canal, but I will be its midwife yet. It wraps around my fingers and squeezes, its back barbed and hooking into my fingers.

Lyle sees me, his face darkening.

“Marheiður Þorstéinsdóttir, stop!” he screams, but he’s misunderstood this monstrosity inside me. I’ve held her for years. Nurtured her. Fed her and housed her. I took on the weight of her anger at my weakest and lowest, sick and half-dead and scraping the cold, black earth for sustenance. I let her in, all my choice. I consented to control because it meant power.

The blood and poison of the vættir fattened her, made her grow into a Goliath. My name woke her.

But she is me, this ouroboros that wraps my rage and my hate and my hunger, hunger, hunger, horrible and ill and mine, all mine.

With a horrid suck, the leech imbued with hatred crowns and births. My jaws snap back into position and I grin, bloody and feral, at Lyle. I crush it with my taloned foot.

I want so desperately to collapse, to break into pieces and rest. But this fight is not over.

“W-what?” Lyle stammers. “Marheiður Þorstéinsdóttir! Marheiður Þorstéinsdóttir!” He jolts as I grab him, his skin shucking off his bones as I raise him over my head. “You could be queen here. No one would know your true name but me.”

I roar a laugh. “My name is not yours to know.”

“Please,” he says again. “Now that I’m in charge, you never have to fear for your safety. You’ll never go hungry. I’ll make sure—”

“You are no different than they are,” I whisper, pressing up against him, my face a hair’s breadth from his. My talons tighten around his throat, squeezing, before I toss him to the ground.