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Marcella whips a hand to my wrist, her skin tacky with Dr. Sims’s blood. I start to shriek but she claps her other hand over my mouth, her lips brushing my ear as she whispers, “Be quiet, little lamb.”

Her mouth smells of pennies, cold as ice. My knees go weak at her touch, my face heating.

I nod as she pulls me farther behind the mirrored bar, tucking me into an open space beneath a gargantuan silver sink. Marcella slides forward, still holding my mouth shut with tacky, metallic fingers, and spears Dr. Sims’s body with her spike heel. With a muffled grunt, she drags him behind the bar with us. His single remaining eyeball reflects dim green light, stares right at me. Tears spring from my eyes, flowing hot down my cheeks. Marcella eases under the bar after me, pushing me gently against one of the walls. She puts a finger to her lips, hushing me.

A flashlight beam whisks across the room. “Who’s there?” a masculine voice calls.

I should do something. I should scream. My body tenses, my throat tightening with an unspent yell.

“Do not make a sound,” Marcella whispers, her voice keen-edged. “Don’t you dare.”

How did she know? But then again: she’s a monster. Everything I’ve ever known is a lie. Anything could be possible. All those nightmares I’ve had, all those stories I’ve read to make sense of them, every dark corner I’ve shrunk from and movie I’ve covered my eyes during before screams ripped through dark theaters—those are real. And didn’t Marcella herself say so? She never lied to me—at least, not about that.

But what’s happening at Preston is her doing.

Her fingertips press hard and sharp against my skin, and I’m panting for breath through my mouth, inadvertently swallowing spit-soaked sips of rancid, almost-black blood.

I make a soft squeak of disgust and squeeze my eyes closed.

The flashlight beam clicks off and the door opens. My heartbeat ratchets higher, and I think faintly that I might pass out.

There’s a dead beat where no one in this room breathes.

“Fucking … Stupid kids,” the voice mutters. A radio crackles. “No, I don’t see anything here. Must’ve been a rat or something.” Unintelligible words shudder through the handset. The man gives a groan. “Yeah. I’ll come break them up. Fuck, the after-party is going to be a disaster.”

Footfalls recede, then are eaten by the absolute silence in the bar room. But between my ears, there’s screaming, high and fine and endless. My shoulders shake with rib-cracking sobs—and I can’t tell what I’m more upset about: that Marcella is murdering people, or that she lied to me.

As if she can hear my thoughts, she presses her lips to my temple, her voice a low, heady thrum. I give a little shudder. I can’t tell why: is it the touch of her lips? Her voice? Her absolute depravity? I’m ensnared: one way or another, repulsed or attracted, I’m trapped. I can no more escape from her than grow wings and fly.

“I promise you, I can explain this.” She hesitates, her smoky voice diving deeper into a whisper. “I’m going to let you go, but you can’t scream. Okay, lamb? Please, trust me.”

I pinch my eyes shut again, nod. My brain is static, my pulse pounding in my throat, my ears, the darkness behind my eyes a blood-slicked, ever-repeating movie of Marcella’s tongue bursting through Dr. Sims’s eye.

Marcella slowly draws her hand away and sits against the opposite wall, her onyx, blood-soaked hair brushing the bottom of the sink. Blood freckles her face, and in the shadows, I can see that the chartreuse light was her. She has never been more beautiful or more terrifying.

Oh … fuck. I know—I know what she is. I was made to know what she is; I study things like her every day. I educate undergraduates on her kind. How did I not see what has been right in front of me all along?

She looks at me, lifts her chin to a proud height. But her eyes radiate panic, her throat bobbing in a tight swallow.

“Y-you’re a draugr,” I rasp.

Marcella tips her head to the side, a smile breaking across her stained lips. “Clever girl. Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”

SEVENTEENMarcella

Ah, shit.

There is something lovely and poetic about Lacie finding me this way. Some goddess-granted gift where I don’t have to explain myself; she just gets to see me in action.

I push away the horrible, bone-gnawing feeling that she might hate me now. That the person she thought she knew and the terror that I am cannot possibly be reconciled, that the distance is too great between who I am and what she wants me to be, and that now she’ll turn from me altogether. I don’t want her to shrink from me.

Because for my part, there’s something gut-twistingly gorgeous about Lacie trembling a hair’s breadth from me, her face smattered in blood.

Never mind that it cannot possibly be human blood. Dr. Sims, or what’s left of him, anyway, tasted vile. Food is food, I’ll grant that, but he was certainly a vættr. The question is: what kind? More pressingly: was he acting alone, and did he kill Therese and Laurel? If so, I’ve put down our little problem and can feel free to move about Preston with impunity.

There’s only the question of the quivering girl in front of me, her heart a riot of sound.

I stretch my hand to her and she winces as I stroke her jaw. “I never meant to scare you,” I purr, thumbing the swell of her cheek.