“We should be grateful she’s not speaking,” said a girl Vivienne recognized as one of the pledges. What had her name been? Lilah? Lydia? She stood as far from Vivienne as she could manage, her nose bloodied and her eyes swollen. “None of us would make it out of here alive if she did.”
“All right,” said Thomas. “That’s enough. Vivienne?”
She dragged her eyes to his.
“Just let me see it.”
They’d gathered in a narrow wailing room, the peeling varnish revealing walls gone yellow with rot. The space was overly warm, light blistering in the gap of a battered side door, and the dogs lay sprawled on the floor, panting heavily. Vivienne perched on the edge of a shallow built-in, dressed in a white crewneck and crumpled gym shorts Thomas had fished out from his truck. A spot of wrong-colored blood had already begun to darken the shirt just over her abdomen.
“You’re ruining my shirt,” Thomas added gently, when she didn’t budge.
Swallowing her pride, she lifted up the hem. Lydia gasped, the sound muffled behind her hand. To his credit, Thomas didn’t flinch.
“Hayes,” he called, “toss me the tape?”
“You got it,” said the boy by the bookshelf. A roll of adhesive tape sailed toward them and Thomas snatched it out of the air, kneeling down to examine the incision.
“Ouch,” was all he said.
She reisisted the urge to tug the shirt back into place as he tore a bit of medical tape with his teeth. She couldn’t bear to look at it—that horrible growth, stacked across her stomach like scales. It was an awful, unbearable reminder.
She’d failed.
She’d failed, and now was right back where she started, with nothing to show for her troubles except a trail of carnage, a shallow laceration that stung when she stretched. She’d never felt more like a nightmare. Her skin was stiff with rust, her hair suctioned to her throat in dark, wet whorls. She could feel everyone in the room staring at her. Studying her, as though she were a circus oddity. A freak.
A monster.
And she was.
She shut her eyes.
“Vivienne,” urged Thomas, tugging her shirt back into place, “it’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. None of this was okay. The end was meant to justify the means. What was the point of so much cruelty, so much carnage, if she was still shuttered away within herself, at the mercy of the creature and its whims? She’d made her decision and it had turned out to be the wrong one. Thomas was being too gentle with her. She couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stomach his pity.
“Mikhail Popov says he used to call you Sparrow,” said a voice, soft enough to be a whisper.
At the unexpected mention of Mikhail, Vivienne’s breath snared in her throat. Her eyes snapped open and she found the white-haired girl peering over at her, her hands wrung tight.
“He says you always walked on your toes,” she added. “You’d flit everywhere like a bird.”
Vivienne’s hands shook.How do you know all of that?
She expected Thomas to translate for her, but instead the girl smiled.
“I can hear him,” she explained. “The dead speak to me sometimes, in the silence.”
“It’s a talent of Lane’s,” said the boy called Colton. “You get used to it.”
You can hear himright now?Vivienne asked.He’s here?
“He is,” said Lane. “Usually, it’s not so pronounced. Just shadows or shifts in the light. But right now, it’s like he’s standing in the room.”
Vivienne bit back a sob.
“He wants you to know that he’s not in pain,” said Lane. “He’s not suffering. He knows it eats at you—the wondering. He doesn’t want you to carry your guilt anymore. He says—” She paused, listening. The wailing room was pillowed in a downy silence. There was no discernible sound at all. “He says you’re not responsible for the sins of your father.”
Vivienne’s cry came out broken. She didn’t mean for it to happen, but she couldn’t hold it back. She thought of Mikhail in her dreams, his face ruined, his flesh rotted through. All this time, that’s how she’d thought of him—suffering in perpetuity, and suffering because of her.
