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She only offers him a smile. “Lacie is good company.”
“Let us hope so. And that she can keep her mouth closed. If she doesn’t, well … there will be some disciplinary action.”
What?
“I understand,” Marcella says, the corners of her mouth ticking up in a faint smile.
Dean Shea nods, then turns his head, and in the darkness his eyes glow a soft, terrible white. “Ah, it is almost time.”
“Almost time for what?” I manage.
Dean Shea looks back at me. “Why, Lacie, the main event. Come. I think you will enjoy it.”
Fuck. I want to get out of here. I want to leave, run, never come back. Quit Preston and take up elementary school teaching and never see Marcella or Dean Shea or any of these terrible people ever again. But I have no idea what other places are like.
Is this everywhere?
Biting my lip bloody, I follow Marcella to the edge of the circle.
The frantic jostling slows down with the softening beat of the drum. Moans and whimpers fade as people untwine and come to stand. A femme body with slick skin stands near me, and she smells so deliciously alive that my breath catches in my throat. I start to turn toward her to run my tongue along her arm, but Marcella grabs my shoulder hard enough to make me squeak.
“Careful,” she murmurs, her thumb grinding into the rise of my collarbone. “Don’t make any choices down here.”
Swallowing hard, I wrestle myself into some kind of calm control. I’m here to watch. To learn. Not to lick the soft curves of some rabbit-masked woman’s throat.
Christ.
Marcella drops her hand to mine and clasps me in a vise grip. She’s tethering me, and I’m grateful, because Dean Shea is stepping into the center of the circle with a knife. Its blade glints dangerously in the twisting firelight.
I have the sense that I’ve stepped out of time, that I could be on a black sand beach three thousand years ago or the suburbs of Boston. Or nowhere. I could be nowhere, caught in a universal anomaly.
“Friends,” Dean Shea booms. “We have come here to pass the sacred rite of the Dyrhólaey clans to another.” That name sticks in my skull. Wasn’t that journal in the Rare Book Room written there? He turns, cradling the blade to his side. Its curved, honed edge bites the air from his shoulder to his hip. His fingertips, too long and char black, grip the leather-wrapped hilt. “Arjun’s passing hurts us all, but the vacuum he left behind—that is the worst of it. Let me be clear, we will find the creature responsible and we will end them.”
A cry rises from the crowd, and all around me the humans are changing, their skin pulling like dark taffy and rising into the gloom. Claws erupt from nubby, unsuspicious fingers, animalesque musculature rippling from bone-riddled skin. They loose another cry of anger before Dean Shea—or whatever, whoever he is—raises the knife.
“Tonight, we will have a new oath bearer.”
Oath bearer? Oath to what?
“What is going on?” I whisper to Marcella, but she’s looking straight at Dean Shea. She hasn’t changed, not like the others, and I wonder over it. Her grip is getting tighter, tighter, and I know I’ll bruise tomorrow, the thin bones of my hands no more than a bundle of sticks. My fingertips go numb.
Perhaps she’s trying not to change, and it’s taking every ounce of her effort.
“Lyle, come forward.”
From the darkness, Lyle comes. He’s been painted in bloody runes, too smudged for me to read.
Oh god, they’re going to sacrifice him, aren’t they? We’re about to watch Dean Shea, the prime mover of all this death and destruction, kill another person. I start to move away, to find the stairs, but Marcella holds me fast.
“Stop,” she hisses. “Or they’ll set on you. Breathe.”
I want to, but the room feels like it’s closing in on me. The smell of blood is so sharp and burning in the back of my throat, and pressure is building behind my eyes. I know I’m going to start to scream soon—and now Lyle is kneeling, pupils saucer-wide, facing out to the crowd, and Dean Shea is saying something in Norse—
The blade comes down, splitting the skin at the nape of Lyle’s neck. Dean Shea begins to skin him alive, flesh popping audibly, peeling glistening muscle away. Blood pumps from thick ropes of veins, silvery bundles of nerves severed and hanging as his whole back is slit.
And Lyle doesn’t make a goddamned sound.
The other humans around me are softening, screams of indignation pooling quietly behind their teeth. But the beings? The vættir? They’re panting like they’re hungry.
