My fingers clamped around his wrist. I held my breath, waiting for her to pronounce his sentence in my head, as if it were one of my own thoughts. To turn his crimes—whatever they were—back upon him.
But while I could feel thefuriaeraging inside me, a beast demanding to be fed, her voice was oddly silent. I had no idea what this man had done to rouse her ire. I couldn’t even be suresheknew.
Fire seemed to flow through me into the man’s flesh. His eyes widened in terror. Then he jerked free of my hold and ripped out his own throat in one sudden, brutal motion.
I gasped, shocked, as a fount of warm blood drenched me, arcing over me from my chin to my kneecaps. I staggered backward, and the grass was so slick with blood that I nearly slipped. Two stumbling steps later, I realized that thefuriaeseemed satisfied by what I’d just done and had released me from her grip. My body was my own again. And I was left with the aftermath of a destruction that looked horrifyingly similar to what I’d seen in that sliver of memory of the murder in the woods.
The man grasped at his throat, choking and gasping, spurting more blood. I stared, stunned and numb, as he fell first to his knees, then onto his side. His body twitched once. Twice. Then he went horribly, horribly still, his hand lying in a puddle of his own blood.
Shaking, I looked around to find blood glistening in the starlight. On my clothes. On the grass. Pooling in bare patches of dry yard.
“Delilah?”
I spun toward the house so quickly that, again, I nearly slipped in the gore. Gallagher stood in the doorway, his massive silhouette a darker shadow against the night. “I... I... I...” No other words would come. My arms trembled as I held them out, trying to show him what I couldn’t seem to articulate.
He jogged down the steps toward me. “What happened? Who is that?”
“I don’t know. He was watching me. Through the window. I wanted to come get you, but my legs brought me out here, and then...” I mimed reaching for the dead man. “It just happened.” I swallowed thickly as tears filled my eyes.
“You killed him?”
“No. Thefuriae...she made him tear his own throat out.”
“Is that what happened last time? You said you didn’t remember actually killing that other man.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Gallagher, this wasn’t like the other times. She’s never made her victims outright kill themselves before.” Sure, thefuriaehad given them wounds that were likely fatal, eventually, but her goal always seemed to be that they suffered with their own sins unleashed upon them, not that they necessarily died. “But this... This was decisively, efficiently lethal.” As if the furiae thought this man was too dangerous for anything other than a swift end. “And I have no idea what he did to deserve it. I didn’t see him doanything.”
Gallagher knelt beside the body, then looked up at me with one hand out, palm up. “I need your cell.”
I turned on the flashlight and gave him my phone, though I had no intention of looking at the dead man. I’d seen enough. But then the beam of light caught a strand of dark hair, and—
“That’s not him.”
“What?” Gallagher frowned up at me.
“That’s not the man I... Gallagher,that’s not him. The man thefuriaekilled had blond hair. Light eyes. This guy...” I clasped my hand over Gallagher’s and redirected the light at the corpse’s face.
This man had dark, straight hair and dull, dead brown eyes. His skin was light, but not as pale as the man who’d looked at me with such curiosity. As if he’d been drawn to me.
Drawn to his own death.
“What do you mean? There’s another man out here?” Gallagher stood with a speed and grace that shouldn’t have been possible from such a large, thick frame, already searching the shadows for an undiscovered threat.
“No, this is him. Only it’s not. He...changed. Is that some kind of glamour? I assume glamour fades when the person using it dies?”
“Yes.” Gallagher frowned at me, then knelt next to the man again, studying him under the bright light. “Only thefaecan use glamour. If he’sfae, I don’t recognize the species. But then, there are hundreds of species, and most of them have been living among humans, beneath the veil of their own glamour, for centuries.”
As Gallagher himself had.
“So that’s a yes?” My teeth were chattering from the spent adrenaline. “He could befae?”
“I can’t think of any more likely explanation. You’re sure he didn’t look like this?”
“Absolutely sure. But that makes no sense. It’s not like he was hiding green hair or a hollow back. Why would anyone use glamour to disguise one human appearance with another human appearance?”
“I don’t know.” Gallagher aimed the beam of light at the dead man’s face again, and I made myself take a closer look, pushing past my own horror and disgust.
The man’s face was largely free from blood; most of it had sprayed me or soaked into the ground. But his eyes...
