Paris’s voice drifts in from behind. From the side. He’s circling them like a shark, a silhouette of Lysander’s worst nightmare come to life.
“You didn’t tell her the reason she is so priceless to you is that you’ve never been able to hunt. Not like the others. Not without carving away another little sliver of humanity with each kill. And you have held on to your humanity for quite a long time, haven’t you, Oliver? In spite of my efforts, you have rebelled against me at every turn. You let yourself starve, drinking filthy pig’s blood. Ignoring your baser instincts. Hobbling yourself. Until her.”
Shea hasn’t taken her eyes off him. He stares right back.
“How many times have you killed for her, Oliver?” asks Paris. “How many times did she make you bend your precious code? How many nights have you carved yourself up to keep her?”
He shuts his eyes. When he opens them again, Shea is watching him still. For the first time ever, her eyes are full of stars. Tears glimmer, spotlit, in her lower lids.
“I did this to you,” she whispers.
He shakes his head. “No.”
“I did. It’s my fault.”
“It’s not. It’s mine.” He takes her face in his hands, ignoring the cheer that goes up from the crowd. Someone whistles, sharp. He pretends he can’t hear it, catching starlight on his thumb. His skin comes away wet. “Listen to me. When I tell you to run, you run.”
“With you?”
He smiles down at her. Everything hurts. Everything ends. “I won’t be leaving this ballroom.”
“Then I’m not leaving, either.”
He searches her face. Memorizing it. It feels like he’s reaching in and ripping out his own heart. And in a way, he is. He always knew this was where it would end. He knew, and he ignored it. He is what he is. What he’s always been. Selfish and impulsive.
Quietly, he says, “Do you remember when I told you I don’t have a soul?”
“Yes.”
“I was wrong. It’s you.”
“Lys—”
He doesn’t let her finish. “You want to keep it intact?”
“Yes,” she breathes.
“Then run.”
All around them, the crowd has begun to chant. Their voices rise and fall in a repeated benediction. It’s the same cry he’s heard all his life—an apostle’s prayer, etched into the walls of his childhood bedroom.
“—from the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast. From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast—”
Oliver Lysander Keeling has always been very careful with his humanity. His mother raised him to be. She taught him how to cling to it. How to keep it. How to hold fast to the beating heart of whatever made him feel alive. In a few minutes’ time, he’ll carve it all away.
The chanting grows louder. The room thunders with it. In the melee, Shea’s eyes dart to his. He thinks of her in springtime, blood on her hands and determination in her eyes. He thinks he loved her right then. Isn’t that the way all tragedies begin?
“Any minute now,” he says. “Don’t stop for anyone. Don’t look back. Not until the sun comes up, do you understand?”
As quickly as the chanting began, it stops.
Silence settles in after it, like an unseen conductor has just brought an orchestral piece to a close. Lys and Shea are left standing face-to-face in the quiet, blinking like voles. He looks devastating beneath the broad white light, a crown of brass gleaming at his temples.
Ridiculously, she thinks this is how he was meant to look all along. Like royalty.
A shadow appears at the edge of the circle. Slowly, it coalesces into the tapering figure of a man. Into Paris, wearing Lys’s smile. Looking out of Lys’s eyes. Seeing them like this—side by side—she wonders how it’s possible that she didn’t see the resemblance right away. He clasps Lys on the shoulder, his smile paternal. Lys holds himself still, but she can see the flinch behind his eyes.
“I know you’re angry, Oliver,” says Paris, “but this is what you were bred to do. You’re destined for so much more than what you’ve become. All that drivel your mother put into your head in her efforts to manufacture you a conscience—it’s done nothing but plague you. Yoke you.”
