“I’m not yoked to anything,” snarls Lys in a voice Shea has never heard him use.
“You won’t be, before long,” agrees Paris. “Look at you—the change has already begun. Tonight, we put an end to your suffering. We cast off your mortal coil. Set you free.”
Lys’s jaw wires tight. He watches Shea like he’s memorizing her.
Beneath her chest, her heart punches into her bones.
“You’ll see it my way once it’s over,” says Paris. “Every single person in this room has been given the order to hunt and kill Shea Parker. If you don’t want that to happen, you’ll have to bring them to heel yourself.”
Lys doesn’t look surprised to hear it. He doesn’t look anything at all. He is as rigid as a statue. As unblinking as an effigy.
“You can’t possibly save her,” says Paris, “but, oh, you’ll try. You’ll break yourself with the trying. By the time the sun rises, this pretty little distraction of yours will be among the myriad dead. You won’t even remember her name.”
Lys’s stare burns clean through her. She feels like a rabbit must feel, frozen in the crosshairs of a wolf.
“A head start would be sporting, I think,” says Paris. “Don’t you?”
Lys doesn’t appear to have heard his father. He tilts his head, listening. All around them, so do the others. Paris stills, frowning. Shea listens, too. She hears nothing at all. Nothing but the harsh saw of her own breathing.
And then, beneath it, comes the roar of a motorcycle engine.
“Always with the big fucking entrances,” mutters Lys. His eyes slide to hers. “Run.”
She doesn’t hesitate. She turns, racing out of the spotlight and into the crowd, urged on by the way they break and surge, calling after her. They mock and jeer, clutching at her dress and whistling in her direction, but they don’t give chase. Not yet—not without an order from Paris.
At the far side of the ballroom, the doors slam open. There, bracketed in moonlight, stands Asher Thorley, his shotgun at the ready. Streaming in behind him is a horde of hollows. They climb one over the other in a thoughtless swarm, snapping their teeth at anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way.
The cheers throttle, turning to screams. The crowd shoves and pushes, chaos bleeding into carnage. Tripping over her dress, Shea fumbles up the stairs and bursts onto the balcony, searching this way and that for Camellia. A hand grips her by the collar and she topples backward, slamming into the railing hard enough to bruise her spine. A man’s round face appears in her field of view, his fangs gleaming ivory in the light.
“Should have been faster, Princess,” he snarls.
She thrashes, shoving at him as best she can—trying and failing to reach for the stake beneath her dress. She’s just managed to grab hold of it when, with a yelp, he’s gone. There’s a heavy thud, the sound of a body crashing against the floor. Lys is there, crouching over her attacker with claws extended.
In his face is the final death rattle of his humanity.
His talons sing through the air. Skin splits. Blood spatters, violet dark, against the wall.
Shea doesn’t stick around to watch. She runs. Fast as she can, pulling open the first door she sees and slamming it shut behind her. She’s in an empty salon, the air thick with dust. The windows here are similarly blacked out, no moon at all to see by. Enveloped in the pitch dark, she feels her way to the windows, searching for a latch. As she does, she hears the warning knell of dying batteries. There’s a single, damning beep, and silence falls.
Not now, she thinks desperately.Not now.
She spins out, pinning herself flat against the wall. Back home in Little Hill, the silence was a balm. Here, in the bloodthirsty dark of the Keeling mansion, it’s a bane. In the newly fallen quiet, she feels the creak of the floor under her feet. The shifting pressure of a body, moving just outside. A shadow pulls along the bottom of the door. She clasps her hand over her mouth, silencing her breathing as best she can. Waiting—begging—for the owner of the shadow to move on.
Eventually, it does. She waits another minute. She waits two, deaf to the anarchy raging just outside the door. Cut off from everyone, trapped in her little dark corner.
She can’t stay there forever, and she knows it. Eventually, she’ll be found. In the middle of the room is a chair, tipped on its side. There’s no way to gauge the volume outside the door. No way to tell whether or not the sound of shattering glass will draw a predator. She hefts it up anyway, swinging it at the window as hard as she can. Glass fractures in an explosion of color, raining to her feet.
She climbs through quickly, her dress snagging on the window’s jagged remains as she crawls out onto the second-story balcony. The terrace is hemmed in by a stony balustrade, pilasters overgrown with pink begonias. The air is thick with the sweet-smelling blooms. She leans over the top, hoping it’s enough to mask her scent as she scans the dark.
Below, the revel has begun to pour out into the street, partygoers desperate to get free of the hollows. It’s a stampede, the ground shaking as everyone flees in each direction. Blanketed in the silence, she feels apart from it all. Detached, as though she’s a ghost, floating far above the scene. Untouchable, the way she is impervious to the Gravewood in the silence.
In the dark, it’s impossible to distinguish between hollow and hunter. She tries anyway, searching the melee for Lys.
She finds him right away. He’s standing in the road out front, watching the building with an unearthly calm. The black of his eyes bleeds into his face in swollen tributaries. His hands hang, sheathed in gore, at his sides. A cluster of hollows breaks free of the crowd, moving as one, their sallow faces peeled back in snarls.
Lys doesn’t move.
The hollows race around him as though he’s little more than an obstruction someone has plunked in their path. They don’t see him. They don’t touch him. The night pulses, the air shifting around the turmoil of fleeing bodies, the sky thick with the smell of blood.
