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—for there are ways to become like gods.

That’s what must be in those books: the answers they sought and then sought to hide when Lacie started poking around. Panic tightens inside me. Lacie’s in possession of Dean Shea’s key, and so I’ve made her a target unwittingly, not just an annoyance robbing a collection. If they search our rooms …

Groaning, I slam my hands against my temples. Why can’t I remember? What did they do to me? My eyes travel back to Evan’s body.

What if.

I kneel next to his form. Fighting disgust, I lift his stiffened arm to my lips, dig my teeth into his veins.

It burns, fire ripping across my throat and into my stomach. Howling, I pull away, scrubbing my lips.

“Poisoned food,” I spit. “Intelligent.” I bark a hard laugh. What’s an easy way to prevent another colony from edging in? A draugr couldn’t know anything but that the blood tasted wrong, that the energy was tainted. And something insidious like this would rob them, slowly, of their faculties—and it would also be the perfect slow death. The vættir could sweep in when the draugr was weak, sputtering, on its knees.

Heaving, I force myself to throw up half-digested blood, but the damage is done. Inside me, sick energy rages, wriggling through my brain and into my bones.

I might have killed myself, just when I thought I found a home in someone. I grab Evan’s spent body and shake him, growling, “Did you do this to me? For them?”

His head strikes the stone wall with a hollow thock. My eyes travel the cuts in his throat. They’re not puncture wounds, I realize suddenly, but slashes. Small and well-made, focused to look like teeth pierced his soft skin.

A thought flashes behind my eyes: I didn’t do this.

And then: This is a trap.

They didn’t come for me yet because they didn’t need to. I’ve been led here, with a trail of breadcrumbs I couldn’t resist.

With a stifled scream, I throw Evan’s body from me, panicked energy singing through me. I need to get out, I need to—

But every time I try to stand, my knees feel like rocks, my throat tight and swirling with acid sick.

“Damn it,” I grind out, pressing onto my hands and knees like an animal.

A papery, single-person applause sounds from behind me. “Well, now. It took you long enough. I’m surprised, Marcella.”

I fall back, my cry ragged and shortened. Lyle grins at me with blackened teeth, his face arrayed with deep scratches. “You interrupted my dinner, but I realized how glorious this all could be, now that I have you in my reach. Something far better.”

“What? They said—they said you were missing!”

And I realize that my brain isn’t catching up as fast as I need to. In this game of chess, I’m three, four, five moves behind.

Lyle clicks his tongue. “What a goddamned shame you aren’t as smart as you needed to be, Marcella. But that’s not your name. No. As soon as I know that, I’ll have you, won’t I?”

Lyle steps toward me, his once warm eyes gone cold.

“Fuck you,” I snarl.

“You know, love really has blinded you. It was easy enough to tell the Classics professors that you and Lacie were poking around in the Rare Book Room. Easy to get them to close it down. Easy to make them targets for a certain draugr turned romantic.”

At that he laughs, his face contorting into the atrocity just behind his skin. Neither draugr nor vættr, but something else entirely. Something new. The scholar in me wants to pick it apart—pick him apart, taking his pieces and arraying them on a table so I can know who he really is. I want to categorize him and know him so I can end him.

So we never have to come face-to-face again.

“Why do this? We were helping you.”

“Helping me? I never needed your help. But I saw the way they cast off Therese, like she was nothing, like she was trash.” His face twists and he looks away. When he turns back to me, his face wears the eeriest, serenest mask, his lips quirked in a studied smile. He doesn’t even fucking blink. “At the end of the day, you’re just as much a part of this system Dean Shea’s made as Evan was. As Dr. Sims is.” He bares his teeth at me. “As Lacie is.”

“Don’t you dare lay a finger on her!” I snap, lurching toward him. The creature inside my skull wriggles and I’m seized by a razor-sharp convulsion. Screaming, I crumple to the floor. My skull smacks the flagstone and the thing inside me slides deeper, a scalpel into my brain stem. “You wouldn’t hurt her,” I gasp. “She’s too good.”

“No, no, that will not do.” Lyle crouches near me, and I smell the putridity of death on him—no, radiating out of him, as he puts his lips to my ear. “They’re all so shortsighted. They could never have imagined anyone seeing them for what they are. But I do.”