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I twist the handle with a roar, my hand crushing the iron until it’s a mess of crumbling metal. Behind is a darkened stairwell launching up and up. Hissing against the thrum of panic inside of me, steeling myself as I fight for every movement of my legs, I climb. Magic ripples over my skin, digging tiny fishhooks into my skin. They pull me back, but I fight forward anyway, ignoring the tear of flesh, the spill of black down my shirt.

The answers are here. I know they are. Why go through the trouble of warding this space? What is up here—and what does it have to do with me?

A man’s voice echoes through time. Help me!

And I hate myself, that I’ve allowed for whatever illness has hurt me now, that I’ve allowed myself to be irrevocably changed. But I can end it. I will find it and I will crush it like I’ve crushed every other obstacle in my path. Then Lacie and I will burn this fucking place to the ground.

Each step is a battle, but the higher I go, the slicker the steps get. I can taste it: pennies on my tongue, but rotted, soured like old milk at the back of a fridge. Crawling on hands and knees, throat burning, I reach the landing before the final rise of steps. Here, a puddle of black, fetid and dank.

Fighting revulsion, I run my fingers through it and inhale.

I can’t grip the person behind this blood, but it doesn’t matter. When I find them, I have half a mind to throw their corpse from the bell tower so he makes a pretty puddle on the dais of the church.

Growling, I harness that rage: that I’ve been made to come up here, made sick. And for what?

For fucking what?

Staggering, I rise to my feet as I reach the top. The door is slightly open. A jagged little cut in the bricks, it’s scraped with blood and skin.

Finally.

When I step through the door, my mind struggles. It is not what I expected. Yes, I expected the crumpled body. Yes, I imagined I would see books hidden from the prying eyes of enterprising students, too curious for their own good. Yes, I knew I would come face-to-face with the evils of Preston, all concentrated in one area.

But I never could have imagined this.

On the far wall, strings of Icelandic fragments written in cracking, dried blood, heavy wood tables covered in metal instruments of death: knives and scalpels, saws and machetes, edges gleaming in flickering lamplight. And not Lyle’s, but Evan’s body, huddled in a corner, his throat rent apart.

Stifling the flare of my own conscience, I step closer. I suppose that was me, wasn’t it? Well, it was deserved. Because his body tells the tale of a brutal physical fight, his clothing torn off his body, his fingertips riddled with blood.

My blood?

His eyes are still open, but the jelly of his whites is dried on his cheeks. Sightless. There are thousands of pocked holes riddling his body, open and still weeping. His blood, crimson in some places, black in others—he was turning, wasn’t he? They were making him into something.

I grip his head, turning it this way and that. The rigor mortis tells me I killed him sometime in the early hours then stumbled home—down those stairs. Alone.

There are so few times I feel truly alone.

An unexpected sob curdles in the back of my throat, my chest tightening with tears I don’t want to waste on this.

I drop Evan’s wasted, torn body, turning back to the chamber of death I entered willingly.

We take the body and we crush it, we make it something new under the eyes of the old gods, we set ourselves an oath—

It’s creation, isn’t it? It’s a new way. My fingertips touch the bloody words as I squint at them.

We place our souls into the revenants who offer themselves, prostrate, before us—

Ah. My eyes flick to Evan. Arjun, too? Human beings—at least Arjun was, the taste of him strangely soured but still relatively untouched. Perhaps they were only beginning. Maybe Lyle was next.

Say I found this place. Say I killed him—and Evan—to prevent the vættir from using his body’s resources to rise again.

Say someone found them both.

My thoughts slip and snag on another disquieting angle: say they found Sims’s body in his grave and instead of letting on, they merely raised him by sucking more life away from others.

Invulnerability. Eternity.

And they could do it, couldn’t they? Every year, they could steal only a few people: the poorly performing ones, the ones no one would miss, the ones they deemed unworthy of instruction, and every year they’d increase the strength of their colony. I turn back to the wall’s bloody words, shaking.