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Fuck, what the fuck—

Dean Shea’s talons spear into Lyle’s back and pull. He draws out a long, shining worm, each horrifying inch a wet slurp. It pulses like an artery, like an umbilical cord.

And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s being born.

Dean Shea opens his jaw; it cracks wide, wider, wider still, bristles of teeth marring the slick skin slipping off his bones. Shot through by holes, riddled with worms and decay. Maggots writhe and fall.

He swallows the worm, sucking it back in one go, and then his jaw snaps shut. Dean Shea pushes Lyle so he’s flat on the earth, so the whole of his spine is cracked upward and visible, and presses his serpent’s tongue into the slice. He tongues up gouts of blood, rippled oozing of yellow fat, and then he—

He fucking spits—

Black.

Black into the cavity.

I can’t. I can’t do this.

I must faint away because when my vision blurs and focuses, Marcella’s arm is wrapped around my waist, holding me up. I feel something writhing beneath her skin and I try to draw away but she clamps me closer.

“Stop,” I whimper, but I’m not sure to who, because Lyle is lying face down, his back stitched crudely up with thick onyx thread, and I need Marcella, and Dean Shea is standing back, licking his fingers clean of gore.

The vættir around me are dancing, circling, the humans getting pushed in and in, toward Lyle’s body—dead, he must be dead—and Dean Shea, screaming and crying and gnashing teeth until saliva bubbles and foams and fills the air.

“I’ve got you,” Marcella whispers into the side of my head. “Don’t fight.”

But I want to, I want so desperately to get out of here and to live, to grapple with my shitty associate professor hours and answer Slack messages and never get tenure, but live. I don’t want to die.

Please, God, I haven’t prayed since my parents turned me out of my house, but if you let me live, I’ll go to church, I’ll become a nun, I’ll do anything—

And then Dean Shea yells, “Rise!”

And he does. Lyle lurches onto hands and knees and throws his head back until he’s sitting on his legs, a wild yell escaping from him. Blood flecks his face, slips down his bare throat.

His eyes are a hard, bright white.

“Feed!”

The spell seems to break all around us at once: the humans here begin to scream—and Lyle launches, taking a woman in a mouse mask down. He sinks his teeth in where her neck meets her shoulder and pulls. Blood spurts from the wound and she screeches—

I need to help her, I think, but I’m frozen. I can’t make myself move.

Marcella grabs me, spins me. Turns us toward the stairs.

“Run, Lacie. Run like your life depends on it.”

NINETEENLacie

I don’t remember the run back to Craven, not really. The last thing I recall is steadying myself against Marcella, and then the cold air of the road, and thinking that we might survive this horrible moment only to live long enough to feel Dean Shea’s cold tongue at the back of our necks.

But I’m alive.

New bile slithers up my throat and I press my hand to my mouth. Marcella’s crouching in front of me, studying my face. She’s rinsed off since she conveyed me to her apartment, her human mask firmly slipped over the monstrous face beneath.

The teeth. Her tongue.

Oh god, Dean Shea skinning Lyle. Lyle taking a bite out of that woman’s shoulder. The worm.

I close my eyes again and try to breathe away the nausea thickening my throat.