The tips of her fingers looked sharp from this distance, though Thomas couldn’t tell if it was only a trick of the light. Her nails—usually clean and pink—seemed to whittle into sharp gray points. Hands splayed against Jesse’s chest, she rose up onto her toes and pressed her lips to his ear. He didn’t even flinch. Instead, he leaned in. Rapt. Enthralled. His eyes bright and shining.
At first, nothing happened.
The only sound in the sanctuary was the baying of the dogs.
And then the screaming began.
It tore through the vaulted nave, a third howl joining the fray. Lit beneath the lamps, Jesse Grayson began to bleed. It was as though he’d been stuck with a thousand pins, subjected to a thousand cuts. Blood beaded along his brow. It slipped down the sides of his face in thin reams of crimson.
“Hematohidrosis,” marveled Colton, just as Delaney whispered, “Is he sweating blood?”
“I said I was sorry” came Jesse’s shriek over the speaker. “I said—I did what you told me. Make it stop. Make it stop.Please, make it—”
His knees cracked on the ground as he dropped, his collapse gentled by Vivienne, who sank with him. She cradled him, still whispering into his ear as he wept into her shoulder. His blood streaked the curve of her cheek, turned the dry beds of her knuckles to crimson. His scalpel dropped, forgotten, to the stone. It skittered across the floor in a foreboding hop-skip.
The rest seemed to happen in slow motion. Jesse slumped, weightless, to the floor. A last, harsh “Please” sawed through the speakers.
And then there was quiet.
Pandemonium erupted. The pledges scattered, shoving and swarming in a mad dash toward the stairs. At the crux of the chaos stood Vivienne, small and bloody and cherubic. She looked up and up, tracking the rising sounds of panic, until her eyes met Thomas’s. Slowly, the unsteady rictus of her smile sharpened into a grin.
“Time to go,” ordered Eric, hauling Thomas to his feet. “Move, Walsh. Now.”
Against his better instincts—against everything in him that told him to stay—Thomas fled. Out in the vestibule, the stampede came to a standstill. Pledges jostled one another as the traffic jammed, turning the stairwell to a hard clot of people.
Something was happening down below. Something they couldn’t see.
They got their answer seconds later.
“Where are you all going?” drifted a girl’s voice up the stairs. “Didn’t you come to see me?”
The shift was violent and immediate. The current changed direction as everyone who had previously been fighting to get down began instead pushing to go up. The dogs tugged loose in the melee, snapping their teeth at fleeing pledges as they bobbed in and out of the swarm.
“Shit!” Thomas lunged after them, nearly catching an elbow to the face for his troubles. “Heel! Stay! Don’t g— Comeback!”
“Walsh, hey.” Eric caught him by the arm and gave him a violent shake. “Leave them. Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, Thomas let himself be led. They raced back up into the transept, this time in the company of two pledges who’d managed to break free of the throng—a boy with a bruised jaw and a girl in a black mesh dress. The six of them made their way to the other side of the balcony, where a narrow door opened up into the vestries. The stairs here folded in on themselves, descending to several shadowed lower levels.
“Guess we’re going down,” said Colton as, over the speakers, the screaming began.
They took the stairs at a run, racing down one flight after the other until the stairwell spat them out in a basement. The speaker’s audio was grainier here. Faint. The sound of dying pledges crackled out from the wall-mounted monitors like a grotesque hymn.
They edged forward, the motion lights clicking on in a wash of white fluorescents. A long hall dotted with doors stretched out before them.
“There’s an exit sign up ahead,” said Thomas.
“There’s another set of stairs down there,” said the boy with the bruised jaw. “It leads to the front of the sanctuary. If we’re quick, we can reach the door before she notices.”
“Perfect.” Colton folded Delaney’s hand in his and fell into the lead. “Let’s go.”
They moved swiftly, urged on by the brutal soundtrack of the dying. They didn’t make it far before the lights clicked off. The speakers shorted. The screaming cut out. They were left in the faint pulse of red from the exit light ahead.
“Alex,” whimpered the girl, “I don’t like this.”
“Nothing’s changed,” said Colton. “We keep moving.”
Directly behind them, there came a faint snarl. All six of them froze.
