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My muscles burn as I run, but they’re unnaturally fast even as they change, their feet pounding the concrete flooring.

Fuck, I’ve taken a wrong turn.

“Well, well, well, what do we have here,” Whittaker drawls.

I haven’t turned around yet. All he can see is dark hair. I only have one play, and it’d better be fucking good. Doing this—doing this, hungry as I am, it’s dangerous.

But it’s better than dying. It’s better than them seeing who I am and confirming once and for all that Lacie and I are involved.

With an inhuman screech that claws up my throat, bats escaping a belfry, my spine cracks open with a wet snap. My femurs shatter and re-form, my body lengthening and growing, delicious agony singing through my tearing skin. Char-black blood flows from the rents, and when I turn, my unhinged jaw could swallow a man.

Whittaker yells something unintelligible aside from draugr, and he and Sims struggle to re-form themselves in time for my first hit. My fisted talons connect with Whittaker’s jaw, and then I slam him bodily to the ground. His eyes flicker as his head strikes the concrete floor, and he’s out cold.

Drawing myself up, I am twice the height of a mortal man, and just as deadly.

Sims lets out a feeble groan as he scuttles backward. I turn my green glowing gaze on him and remember somewhere deep inside myself that I am a queen. The queen. Of this place, some place far away, all places should I want them. A monster with no gender or age or limits, dispersing death as flowers do pollen.

My jaw widens as I scream again, launching at Sims with coiled muscles to smack his phone from his shaking hands.

“Not me! Please!” he cries, struggling to change. But he’s weak. I made him weak.

He knows me from his nightmares.

Sims crunches through the shattered glass of his phone screen until his back strikes the wall.

“They said it would be safe here,” he whines, wincing and sobbing as my blackened lips and bloodied jaws press close to his thrumming jugular. Inside is filth. But it’s food.

“They said if we stayed in this place we could have our fill. B-but—”

My thoughts winnow and winnow and all I hear is hungry hungry hungry—

“If you want to know,” Sims says, “Sh-Shea said—”

That name. I know that name.

I hate that name.

My talons tear wide wounds across his cheekbones. He crumples to the floor, kneels obeisant at my feet. Whimpers, scrabbling to hold his face closed. Black liquid spills down his throat.

“Give me a reason to spare you,” I say, the words forming in my old language. An intonation, near incantation. “And I might consider your plea.”

Behind us, Whittaker groans, and I know somewhere distantly that I don’t have much time. “Mæla,” I growl, speak, and Sims starts to sob.

“H-here—” His shaking hands pull a small brass key from his torn clothes. He holds it out to me. I slip it over a blade-sharp claw and consider it before palming it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

Whittaker’s hauled himself to sitting and I will not suffer another threat in this, my new territory.

I crush Sims’s throat as an afterthought, easy as breaking the neck of a chicken.

It will not kill him, but it will incapacitate him. I toss his limp body to the side and spin to Whittaker. He—it—has clawed to standing again, the skin on his face peeling back to show the hideous creature beneath: mean, beady eyes rolling loose in a cracked skull shot through with holes, dagger-sharp teeth. He charges me and I, Goliath but not nimble, dodge, slamming into the bookshelves. They begin to fall as he launches toward me, the fire alarm bleating in my hypersensitive ears.

Whittaker snarls as he slashes at my stomach, at my face, at my fisted hand to get at what’s inside. I will not let him have this: hard-won prize, softly important. Mine, mine, mine.

“You monstrosity, return that at once!” Whittaker’s claws hit my chin and my head slams into the books behind me. They topple, fabric and leather tearing.

“Fuck yourself,” I snarl, kangaroo-kicking Whittaker off me. The force propels me back through the shelving, ripping down metal dividers. My skin tears and I howl.

But I still have the key, cold and hard in my palm.