About halfway up the aisle, something’s hunkered down between two pews. Something wreathed in twining black shadows that leak from it like ink into water. Some of the shadows flow along the tops of the pews, while others creep like tentacles along the floor, out into the aisle, where they join together in a shifting pool.
The shape hunched between the pews has shoulders and a head…and antlers. Antlers with thin, needlelike prongs that are still growing, still forking into new spines of slender, gleaming black.
I’m locked in place. My chest feels heavy, lungs fighting to haul in breath.
I don’t want to walk up that aisle and look at the thing between the pews. I already know what it is. If I don’t look, I don’t have to believe it.
But love—love is a monster, a sick compulsion, a ferocious loyalty that won’t let me back down. It drags me forward, foot by foot, until I’m nearly standing in the pooled shadows. I force myself to rotate to the left. To look down between the pews, into the swirling darkness. At the horned thing.
“Cathy,” I croak.
She turns. Her face is still hers—pretty features, that sly pouty mouth, big eyes looking up innocently at me. “Heathcliff.” The voice is hers, too. But there are naked brown vines twining around her throat, crawling along her temples, slithering into her hair. The choir robe she wore has been shredded. Vines and shadows encircle her body instead, gaps of bone-white skin showing between them. The antlers spring from her curly brown hair, forming a delicate, lethal crown.
Her voice is light, unworried. “I was just explaining modern technology to Cernunnos. He doesn’t quite understand it yet, but we’re getting there.”
The god is messing with her mind somehow. She has no idea what’s happening to her.
“Cathy.” I move closer, daring to shuffle through the shadows. They shift and swirl around my feet. My voice breaks. “Baby, he’s distracting you. Changing you.”
“Changing me?” She frowns, lifting her hand, and I almost gag. Where her slim fingers used to be, five impossibly long claws twitch and gleam. They’re black and spiny like the antlers. Around her arm writhes a complex network of tiny vines in a pattern like Celtic knotwork.
I was outside maybe twenty minutes. And in that time, the god accomplished all this. If I hadn’t come back when I did, he might have swallowed her entirely.
Through the horror and the bile in my throat, I choke out words. “Cathy, you have to fight it. Fighthim.”
Pain quivers across her features. “We were getting along. He doesn’t seem cruel.”
“That’s what he wants you to think.” I reach for her face, trying not to flinch at the chill brush of the shadows and the rough texture of the vines against my knuckles. “See the truth, Cathy. You always do.”
Her brows bend, and she grimaces, like she’s straining to lift a heavy weight. Alarm wakes in her eyes, and they widen, flooding with shocked terror. “Heathcliff…Heathcliff, what’s happening to me? Oh god…help me, Heathcliff…”
“I will,” I gasp. “I will. I’ll help you. Can you stand up?”
She shifts and tries to stand upright. Her body unfolds, then stretches, higher, higher. She’s towering over me, eight feet tall at least, shrouded in vines and shadows. I glimpsepiecesof her here and there—legs, shoulder, breast—but they’re not where they should be,not her normal proportions. Her hair is longer, too, tumbling in a rich brown cascade and merging into the twisting shadows. She is horrific and beautiful. A nightmarish goddess.
Edgar Linton screams. A howl, a shriek of terror, but there’s a note of grief in there, too.
I hate him for grieving her. He has no right when he consented to her death the first time. I’m the one with the right to grieve. I’m the one she saved by turning herself over to this monster.
My whole body is hollow, shaking. Even my reserves of strength aren’t enough to bolster me in this moment.
“You—” I almost gag, but I resist the impulse. “You have to keep fighting, Cathy.”
She looks down at me, remote, despairing. “It’s too late.”
“It’s not,” I grit out. “It’s not. Use your banshee. You’ve got power, Cathy, you’re stronger than anyone else I know.”
“I can’t scream,” she whispers. “He’s in my throat, in my mind. I am silenced, Heathcliff, I am stolen. But even if all of me disappears, I will still—”
Her mouth stops moving midsentence, and her eyes fix on something in the distance. And then it’s like all of her personality drains out of those eyes until they’re blank and glassy. Void of her fire, her passion.
That blankness guts me. I want this to be a nightmare.I have to wake up.
Cathy blinks. Swivels her gaze down to meet mine…but there is something else looking out of those eyes at me, and another voice issues from her lips. “A valiant effort but ultimately pointless. To regain my power, I require full control of this body. But do not fear, boy. I will ensure she is comfortable. I find her pleasant company. She and I will commune together often within ourself. She will notbe alone…but she will be mine alone.”
Tentacles of shadow thrash outward from the god, accompanied by a blast of icy wind. I’m thrown backward, through the doors of the sanctuary into the lobby. My spine slams against the floor, the impact paralyzing my lungs.
As I flip over, struggling to breathe, the doors of the sanctuary slam shut, blocking my view of the god.
