At this, I finally snap, lunging forward. My blood boils as I knock him down, a scream caught in my throat. It was all my fault. If I hadn’t caught his eye, if he hadn’t smelled my blood, if I hadn’t shownpotential,my parents would still be alive. I land a punch in his face, and he laughs. Then I press my thumbs against his eyes, screaming at him, but before I push inwards, I feel the thorns of the Familiar’s mark moving, shredding through my skin.
For a moment, I see white, the pain freezing every muscle in mybody, telling me to seal the contract with Aliz. But Aliz is gone. And as I try to remember how to breathe, I feel him pushing me down.
“I seldom get to enjoy this,” Gustavsson says, his grip on my arms gentle. “I’ve only led to the recruitment of a handful of hunters, but they all die before our paths cross again. So from the moment I saw you here”—he clasps my cheek, and I look up at him, taking in his crimson eyes—“I’ve been fantasizing about this moment. Every time you looked at me from the back of my classroom, I imagined how it would feel to snap your neck.”
Slowly, the pain starts to recede. I wonder if midnight has passed already, if the mark is now permanent. Regardless, I feel my strength return to my muscles, and after a short breath, I throw my weight against him, flipping us over and digging my knee between his legs. He hisses, and I do what Penny did earlier, stringing together prayers to keep him down.
He covers his ears, all while I reach behind my back, through the feathers of my wings, where I know it’s hiding, just in case. There’s no point in keeping him alive. It’s too late. I grip my stake, and just as I’m about to slam it into him, he stabs my arm. I miss, pain searing through me as I spot the open gash.
The wound heals a few seconds later, and, “That’s interesting,” Gustavsson says, as he gets on top of me again. “You became someone’s Familiar? If I knew you were willing, I may have offered you the position myself,” he says, grabbing the stake that missed his heart. “But alas, we’re running out of time. The quartet are missing their cellist.”
I stare at the moon as he plunges the stake through my torso, a guttural scream muffled as he clasps a hand over my mouth. I try to reach for the stake to pull it out, but I’m already losing feeling in my hands. The wound can’t heal if the stake is still inside. My whole body feels like it’s melting, my skin trying to lace itself back together but finding an obstacle.
Gustavsson ducks down, licking the side of the stake. My scream is bottled beneath his hand. “You know something, Rebecca,” he says, his voice slowing. “When I moved their bodies into the car,your father was already dead. Yet somehow, your mother—and I’m sure you remember the state in which she was found—she was still breathing. I told her I was a police officer and to squeeze my hand if she could hear me.”
Dread climbs through my chest, momentarily washing away the pain.No.
“She squeezed it, so then I told her what awaited you. ‘Your daughter is going to spend the rest of her life avenging you,’ I said. And I went into every detail of a hunter’s training. ‘They’ll fry her brain,’ I said, ‘and they’ll cut her off from her family,’ I said as well. But I think what really killed her was when I told her what your missions would consist of. ‘Your daughter will be the lowest of hunters. She’ll be used as bait and will be dead after a few missions.’ Oh, you should have seen her face.”
My tears spill over my cheekbones.
I look up at the moon again, and that’s when I see her behind him, a flash of white.
Her silver sword cuts through the back of his head, and Gustavsson lets out a growl, eyes wide. And before he can turn into a bat, Aliz plummets the sword down onto his neck, a clean slice through it, so that his head rolls into the rosebush, and his body falls limp beside my own.
If we left him, in a few hours, the strings between his severed neck would start to lace him together. His headless torso would pull itself towards its missing appendage, and after a few weeks, or sooner, depending on his strength, he’d regain consciousness. Such is the power of the undying.
“Forty seconds.” Aliz’s voice is trembling. Her eyes are bright red, and I know, without looking down, that my white dress is soaked in blood. She squeezes her eyes shut as she pulls the stake out of my stomach, and I let out a cry, unable to hold back tears. “It’s all right,” Aliz says. “I made it in time, I made it.”
Before she explains what she means, I watch as she tears through Gustavsson’s torso, cracking through his rib cage and grabbing his heart. It’s smaller than I expected, still beating furiously. “Open yourmouth,” she says as she sinks her fangs into the organ, and blood drips straight onto my tongue. It burns the back of my throat. “Bite it,” Aliz says, mouth covered in crimson. She swallows more, and as the wound on my chest starts to knit itself together, I sit up and bury my teeth into the heart’s rubbery flesh.
Then the lines of the mark are tearing through me again. I try to stop drinking, pushing Aliz away as I feel them travelling up my torso, but she forces me, with a hand gripped behind my neck, to remain still. I swallow his blood and see my parents in the mortuary, their disfigured bodies the entryway into this awful world of monsters. Penny, beside them, offering me her condolences.
Penny, at the back of the church, telling me I can get my revenge. Handing me a train ticket to London, with the promise that I’ll find out who did it once I’mgood enough.Penny, sitting with me after my first mission, drying my tears, running her hand through my hair, promising me it’ll get easier.You’ll get stronger.
Then I see my parents again, out in the back garden, chatting about something I no longer remember, but with the sun, which so seldom shines in Scotland, washing their faces gold.
Aliz’s arms are around me, her lips are on my head. She came back forme.
I hide my face in her chest. She squeezes me tight, kisses my hair again.
The itch on my neck vanishes.
She rubs my skin, and lets out an airy laugh, filled with disbelief. “It’s gone!” she says. Aliz tilts my head up, and her eyes are bloodshot, but her irises are black. “We got rid of it, Cassie.”
Her face falters, as though she remembers what adrenaline forced her to forget. “I wanted to tell you,” I whisper.
“What’s your name?” she asks, thumb running across my cheek. “Rebecca what?”
“Charity,” I reply, before she bends down, pressing her lips to mine. The adrenaline, I think. Because now that the mark is gone, Aliz’s feelings for me will disappear. That’s what I think, at least, but as the kiss deepens, I forget about everything, drawing her as close to me as I can.
Only when I feel Gustavsson’s stiff undead corpse beside me, do I stop, and Aliz looks at him. The cavity where his heart used to be has already begun to knit itself shut. “What do I do?” she whispers. I reach for the stake, covered still in my own blood, and hand it to her. Then I nod to the half-eaten heart on the ground next tous.
Her hands tremble before she slams it down into it, and in an instant, Sven Gustavsson’s rotten existence turns into a cloud of smoke and dust.
Epilogue
Dear Students,
