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Marcella casts her eyes away, toward the dark window. Outside, a smattering of rain has begun to fall. Wind works its howling fingers into the cracks between panes. The radiator squeals and clanks. Marcella’s jaw works like she’s grinding words to ash. Finally, she looks up at me again, her eyes unreadable except for their flat anger.

“Fine. Go.”

Tears spill down my face as I push past her, past Lyle and Therese, their surprised, panicked faces reflected in the vermilion light of the exit sign.

I run into the rain.

NINEMarcella

My phone is stone-cold silent. Fuck.

I haven’t seen Lacie in almost two days. I’ve felt her through our shared wall, the hitch of her breath as she touches herself late at night, seen the flashing sheen of her hair as she disappears through Preston’s halls, but I haven’t spoken to her.

I worry that she’s trying to take things into her own hands. She’s going to get herself killed.

Perhaps it was a miscalculation on my part to confront her in Dean Shea’s office.

Do I want her to be a little angry? Maybe. Because anger begets violence, and if nothing else, she needs bloodlust carved into her bones for whatever comes next.

But not alone. Normally I wouldn’t care, but, well, she’s cute.

That’s all.

Snickers wrappers litter the floor of my apartment. Bellatrix paces as I slip into a Hervé Léger, a vintage black bandage piece that clings to my hips.

Draugur are all shapeshifters, and I’m no exception. With a snap of my fingers, I fill the hollows of my pelvis, padding myself. But it’s all hot air. My physical form is thinning, growing weaker and weaker.

Lacking the energy to change myself at will hurts me—and not just on a physical level. The older I get, the more I realize that the form I take daily no longer fits me. I’m growing different, more masculine—but it’s harder to hide that way, and harder still to change that much in the first place. So, for now, I hide in the easiest fashion, the one with swinging hips that charm men. This takes less work, but I’m still emptying out. Soon, I won’t have any strength at all.

My stomach twists, or the monster inside me does. I’m hungry, hungry, hungry, and that sip of Arjun’s essence did very little to quell the frantic screaming inside my head telling me to feed.

So far, I’ve fought off the urge to claw through the walls of this place just to silence this burden I bear. But now that I know there’s been a monstrous killing on campus, I can’t be too careful. Don’t want to be noticed. Not yet, not yet.

I pet Bellatrix gently on the head, then smooth black-painted nails from ears to tail; she arches against my touch and bounds off, into my bedroom. She no longer cares to follow me to the door, mewling for my attentions. She can tell my mind is elsewhere, and anyway, she’s becoming a pro mouser in this disgusting old dormitory. There are fat rats scrabbling in the walls, their bones pleasant to crunch for my little kitten.

“Toodles, Lovebug,” I sing. As I open my door, Lacie closes hers. Unschooled anger thickens my throat, and I glower at the wood, her smudged, gold-painted room number.

I’m too proud to beg for attention. Too fucking old, too. But if this is how she wants it, fine. I’ll do the dirty work for us and send her a sharp text come morning.

Meet you outside? Arjun’s text buzzes, shaking me from my fury.

Sounds good, I tap back.

Dean Shea might have invited me to tonight’s Dean’s Dinner himself, but the power structure here is becoming clearer: Arjun is a lackey even with his supposed star status. Nothing more than an errand boy for the rich old men in this place.

But he has the key to whatever they’re hiding here—I know it.

Arjun stops in the quiet academic suburban street, about a block from Dean’s Shea house. A shimmer of snow falls from the sky, illumined by pretty black iron streetlamps. For a moment he says nothing, gazing at his hands still gripping the wheel.

“Are we going to talk about what happened last time?”

I hope to goddess I did not slip up, that the command has held and he remembers nothing of my teeth in his tongue, my claws in his throat as I sucked away something deeper than blood. “You mean…”

“God.” He slams the heels of his hands against the steering wheel. “I want you like no one I’ve ever wanted before, Marcie. I feel like we have something between us. Some secret thing, you know?”

My nose wrinkles at the nickname. What kind of 1950s bullshit is that?

This is kind of ghastly, to be honest, even if I did accidentally do this myself. But how was I to know he would latch on to me? Going on another date is something different than actually feeling something for each other. But maybe he is just that emotionally stunted.