Jesse scoffed. “Typical.”
With another glance at the box, he turned to go. Thomas followed, stalking him out onto the landing, where the nave spilled away from them in an endless fall of gray stone and sunlit tracery. The call of the clarions clung, ghostlike, to the silence.
“Whatever she has on you,” called Thomas, “I can make it go away.”
Jesse stilled, his heel scuffing stone. It was a heartbeat before he replied, and when he did, he spoke carefully. “Something tells me if you knew what Vivienne has on me, you’d make my life a hell of a lot worse than it already is.”
Thomas’s chest caved at the implication. “Did you hurt her?”
“No,” Jesse said, turning to face him. “But I wish I had.”
Thomas moved without thinking, snatching up Jesse’s scrubs in his fists. With a gratifying smack, the med student’s spine collided into the railing. The box jutted between them as Jesse lay half bent out over open air, dust glittering in the bald light of the drum lamps.
“If you think I’m going to let you near her with that attitude, you’re insane.”
“Save the hero act,” said Jesse. He seemed utterly resigned for a man pressed over a precipice. “You’re not her knight in shining armor, Walsh, you’re just an accessory.”
In the transept below, a crowd began to gather. Thomas ignored them.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?” Jesse’s brows climbed toward his cap. “Look, my sympathies, man. I’ve been there. You want to know why we’re not dead yet? Why we lucky two have been spared? It’s because she still needs us. So, yeah, I wish I’d hurt her when I had the chance. I wish I’d buried her. Because when this is over, I’m dead. And so are you. You’d better make your peace with that.”
He shoved at his chest and Thomas fell back, yielding a step.
“Look in the box, asshole,” snapped Jesse. “What do you think that is?”
Thomas looked down. Inside the shoebox sat two glassy white orbs trailing woven filaments. His stomach pitted at the sight. Not because they were eyes, plucked clean, but because they were his.
“How is that possible?” he asked, his voice hollow.
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it,” said Jesse. “Ever since we got here, Vivienne’s been having a tough time separating out one state of mind from the other. There’s less of a distinction between Vivienne the girl and Vivienne the creature. She’s been ripping all sorts of things from her hallucinations. This morning, she thrashed awake with these.”
Thomas didn’t say a word. His thoughts ran a mile a minute, churning through one impossibility after another.
I dreamed about you, she’d told him.It was horrible.
“If I had to put money on it,” said Jesse, “I’d say the creature has a disproportionate interest in you, specifically.”
Thomas glanced up from the box’s gruesome contents and found the surgeon watching him, a humorless light in his eyes.
“Still want to stay? I wouldn’t.”
With a pat on the shoulder, Jesse departed, leaving him alone on the landing.
•••
By the time Thomas made his way down to the second-story transept, a crowd was already masked and waiting. He took one when it was offered, snapping the straps into place as he crossed to the pew where Colton sat with Eric and Delaney. They’d snuck in the dogs, and they sat by the bench with ears erect, each of them as tense and watchful as gargoyles.
“What’s the plan?” asked Colton as Thomas slid into the empty space beside Eric.
“We stay and watch,” said Thomas. “If she survives, she survives.”
“You’re being very levelheaded about this,” Eric noted.
Colton looked less convinced. “And if she dies? What’s the plan then?”
“If she dies,” said Thomas, “so does Grayson.”
