Prologue
There was blood on my shirt.
Sickened, I yanked the damp collar wide, desperate to get it off my skin. Buttons popped free and skittered across the parlor floor. I swallowed the slug of panic in my throat and hit my knees on the hearth’s roughened bricks. The tang of iron filled my nose.
“Hurry.”The monster in my head uncoiled itself and slipped into my hollows like a hand donning a glove. Nausea rolled up my gullet, but I couldn’t fight its invasion. I didn’t know how.
The monster had played puppeteer before, but never with so much abandon.
So much violence.
“We need to burn the clothes.”The monster steadied my hand, and together we stripped the bark off a log in quick, blunt strokes, then struck a match. A flame glowed at the tip, lighting the fibers orange.
“Take off your shirt.”
Numbly, I obeyed, shucking it off and laying it on the log. Soon, the fabric caught. The monster’s relief left me lightheaded.“There,”it said, shivering in buried delight at the stretch of my limbs. It brought our hand in front of our face and turned it this way and that.
“Stop it,” I said with a shudder.
“You feel everything so deeply,”it murmured.“Sometimes I forget.”
I tightened my hand into a fist, wishing I could shove the voice out of my head.
“And go where?”it murmured.“We are skin and soul. Bone and blood. You could no sooner suck out your own marrow than rip me from your head.”
Something in me caved inward, too exhausted to argue. The monster had always had a cooling, almost numbing effect on me when I got upset. Even this near to the hearth, with the flames crackling up the bricks, I felt only a heavy chill weighing on my chest. If I let it in, the cold would spread until it reached my fingertips, stealing all the bad away.
But the bad always came back, in the end.
With shaking hands, I snatched up the paper I’d left crumpled on the mantel, smoothing back its creases to reveal a phone number scrawled in hasty loops.
Before tonight, I’d all but decided not to use it.
“She is not your home, little death-touch,”the monster said with a touch of bitterness in its sweet, caressing tone. Then, more softly:“I could be, though.”
Every tired muscle in my body yearned to yield to its siren song. It was always the same.
Let go.
Let me help.
Let me try.
But when I closed my eyes, all I saw was the blood sprayed over the chapel wall. The monster really had some nerve to pretend at gentleness after what we’d seen and done tonight.
I stripped off the rest of my clothes to burn. The wedding slacksJack had given me reeked of iron, too ruined to save. At the snick of a lock behind me, my heart jumped into my throat. I snatched an oversized coat off the back of the couch and slipped my arms into it as the front door burst open and a large, broad-shouldered man stumbled inside. He slammed the door, hastily spinning the lock behind him, a groan releasing from deep in his chest.
“Jack,” I whispered.
The towering giant of a man lurched toward the sink, where he downed a jug of water in one long gulp. His massive shoulders hunched as he bent at the waist and retched into the porcelain basin.
Then he raised his head, wiping his chin with the back of his hand and found me frozen in the doorway to the kitchen. The weight on my chest grew heavier under his stare. “Arthur.” His eyes flicked to the hallway. “Where is she?”
“Sleeping,” I said softly.
Jack jerked a nod and turned back to the cupboards, fumbling through home-labeled jars of herbs and loose-leaf teas inside. Agony stretched his features taut as he braced one hand on the wall.
“There’s something inside him.”
