Page 61 of The Library at Hellebore

There was no warning. Adam’s smile stayed genial as he transferred his hand from Gracelynn’s collar to their neck, fingers coiling around their throat, and I watched the flesh begin to blacken. The only mercy of the moment was they couldn’t scream. Gracelynn let out a soft gasp as Adam’s fingers closed into a fist, the butter of their throat and the bones of their neck melting under his touch; it looked like it hurt. It looked like it wasexcruciating.And I am still ashamed of the relief that filled me when Gracelynn’s head toppled from their shoulders, although not as much as I am of the childish solace I found in how I could not see their face, matted as it was with the gore-soaked strands of their hair.

“Too slow, I’m afraid.”

“You’re a fucker, you know that?” I managed, astonished by the tears running down my cheeks. I might have wept for them as Gracelynn had wept for the world if it wasn’t taking all of me to keep myself relatively together. Adam stared soft-eyed in fascination at me as I trembled from the noise, from the work of surviving. I gritted my teeth, sinking then to a splay of limbs, mopping at my face. “Why are you keeping me for last? You don’t like me that much.”

“I’m not keeping you for last,” said Adam. “I’m keeping you for Portia. And then I’ll kill her when she’s done with you.”

“Why are youdoingthis?”

He released Gracelynn as if he were a child and they a toy that had lost its luster, letting them fall into a heap atop the soiled floor. Adam strode toward me then, his smile bright still. If I’d had any reservations about what I intended, they were gone now, like a last breath spent.

“Because I told you I’d make you fucking regret this.”

“Is this about your fucking hand? The hand that you fucking healed in, like, a second?” I tried to laugh but hacked blood instead onto the collar of my shirt, taking an odd consolation in the fact there was no way to further despoil the damn thing: its original color was lost wherever our innocence had gone. I flashed him a red-gummed smile; all it provoked was laughter.

“A gentleman keeps his promises,” said Adam, crouching down to fuss at my hair, tidying the strands, tucking blood-matted clumps behind my ears. “You have to respect that.”

I reached for him and he let me. I twinned my hands around the back of his neck, pulled him to me. I kissed him. I kissed him with Portia’s loneliness and Rowan’s shocked tenderness, like this was the last time I would kiss anyone, which I guess wasn’t untrue. I kissed him like fury, like grief, like a kiss could undo all of this, give us back our dead, make us young again, make death someone else’s problem once more, make us whole again, innocent of all this pain. Adam froze against my mouth, his lips softer than I anticipated. He tasted warmly of copper when I bit him but also strangely of incense. I’d expected brimstone, but not this, not this smoke that bled down my throat like a memory. I cupped both hands around his cheeks, pulling his head even closer, devouring in my insistence, surprised at this unexpected energy. He sank obediently to my level, kissing me now in turn with a matched ferocity, his cock hard against my side.

His hand sank into my hair, fingers threading through the wild mass. He pulled, surprising a soft moan from me and he laughed at the sound, transferring his mouth to the column of my throat, where he kissed a path to my collarbone and then sank his teeth deep.

“Necrophiliac,” I hissed even though there wasn’t a part of me that did not recognize that he was beautiful, that did not hunger for him with his body in such close proximity.

Adam withdrew, blue eyes through his golden lashes like a caged sky. “It’s so much better when they can’t run.”

My shoulder ached where he’d bitten me; burned, really. I ran fingers over my collarbone, and found scars instead where the teeth marks had cauterized. It seemed like a courtesy at first but I realized it was a branding. Adam watched me with starved eyes and a half smile that might have been beautiful on someone else, but on him resembled something stolen. Given his nature, it probably was. When I did not move, his hands found me again, palming my breasts, finding the buttons of my shirt. I closed my eyes. He undid them slowly, savoring the release of my flesh, and so intent was he on my disrobing that I don’t think he even registered the moment the burning sun in his heart began to die.

Although, at that moment, his attention was pulled elsewhere.

“M i n e.”

A shape embroidered itself into the air. An outline at first, a suggestion of a body. Slowly, the shadows of the figure filled in. The light found the bladed lines of a leg, the still-lovely geometry of a woman’s torso, denuded of its breasts: pale freckled skin save for the scabbed-over wound running down its breastbone. It wasn’tnotPortia, for all the alienness of her anatomy, for all that she was missing her head. Her skull was just gone. But she didn’t need it. Her ribs had cracked apart and scythed outward, piercing flesh. I could see her mouth—clever, crooked—through the gore, grinning at us through what remained of her chest. She lurched a series of quivering steps forward.

“Ah,” said Adam, turning away from my body. “There you are.”

“M i n e.”

Adam stood. “When I’m done.”

Portia skittered closer, a stop-motion horror. The constellation of her eyes traveled my skin and there was enough pity there for me to sneer back at her; instinctive vanity, at this point. I wasn’t anything anymore, not really, just a dead girl sitting, a corpse that didn’t know she was dead. The light shimmered along Portia’s carapace like oil on water, and she was still grinning at me.

Her gaze flicked back to Adam, who’d begun to smoke, a black haze pouring over his skin. He smelled like a crematorium, like fat burning and bone cooking. Dismissed, I inched backward until I had my back to a wall. My shirt hung open, the fabric hanging like a flap of skin pared from a rabbit’s corpse. The buttons felt like bones under my fingers as I straightened myself, watching as Portia let out another low growl.

“M i n e.”

“No,” said Adam again. “She is not.”

I watched my breath curl through the air, white. Thought of Rowan in the graveyard, his face in the dark. Thought of Gracelynn, my hands in theirs, telling me to go,run.Thought of Johanna that last night before, telling me about the Wolf. Thought about how she’d said,Sometimes, we do terrible things to survive, don’t we?

And despite everything, I smiled.

BEFORE

When we emerged from Kevin’s shadows, zodiacal light had begun to soften the night’s blackness, staining Hellebore’s horizon with a dim whiteness. A lone figure waited for us in the jasmine-scented dark, illuminated despite the hulking corpse of the burnt-down building behind her: Portia.

The darkness suited her. In its tepid glow of the predawn, there really wasn’t any color save for the deep carmine of her hair, like she was hiding a head wound. I was coherent enough to be surprised by the sight of her. Then surprise became suspicion. Portia likely had the ear of the faculty, and if she had their ear, it made sense they would have their hand on the collar around her neck.

She glanced disinterestedly at us as we appeared. Her expression, illegible at first, became one of faint disappointment. But then a small smile creased her face, her attention swimming through the dark to rest on me. She smiled and my breath snagged in my throat at the sight.

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