What the feck was I thinking, standing there saying anything besides “Run”? Bickering as usual, like we had forever and always would!

“I thought you guys would duck at the last minute,” I mutter at their bodies. Or freeze-frame away, faster than me. Or maybe Ryodan would use whatever secret weapon he used against Velvet against her. Never in a gazillion years did I think anything could actually get the jump on them!

But she exploded from the wall and her lances were through them before any of us could even react. Their bodies are still moving but I think it’s just the final twitches a body makes when it gets traumatized so abruptly and completely.

I hear a weird clicking sound that affects me the same way the ZEWs’ chittering does, terrifies me on a primitive level. Is she coming for me now? I grab my sword and whirl. It takes me a second to spot her. I follow the trail of blood.

Up.

The Crimson Hag is perched on the roof of the building behind BB&B, with ropes of entrails dangling over the side in long glistening strands, dripping on the sidewalk. The bony needles she used to flay Barrons and Ryodan are actually her legs, which bend weirdly, sort of like a praying mantis’s front legs, and have curved hooks on the ends.

With insectlike appendages, she’s knitting their guts into the hem of her dress. As her bony legs click and clack together, the guts sway over the edge, shortening, inch by inch, smearing blood up the brick.

It’s so disturbing that my stomach heaves and my body tries to burst into tears and puke at the same time. I swallow it all and choke.

I hear a guttural sound followed by a weak sigh and look back at the bodies.

“I’m going to kill the kid,” Barrons says faintly.

Ryodan makes a burbling sound like a bloody laugh. I don’t think he even has the parts left to laugh with. “Get in line.”

They both deflate and go still.

I stare dumbly.

They die like superheroes: cracking a joke. Like they’re just going to get up tomorrow and fight another day. No fear. Balls to the wall until the bloody end.

I feel like somebody ripped my guts out, too. I can’t stand to look at them anymore so I drop my head, and squinch my eyes up tight. My head’s a muddle. How did I get here? How did deciding to go to the Unseelie King’s library end up with Ryodan and Barrons dead? I can’t make sense of it. I mean, I can, because duh, I can follow the chain of events, but who the feck could have foreseen such a bizarre and preposterous outcome? How am I supposed to make small decisions when they can have such large, unforeseeable results?

“Well, that was fortuitous.” Christian skirts their bodies and moves toward me, laughing. “Two down, seven to go. I wonder if we can just point the bitch at the rest of them. Mac, too.”

My head whips up. He’s laughing. They died and he’s laughing. I start to shake. “Stay. Away. From. Me.”

“What did I do, lass?”

“You took me in there, that’s what you did! You didn’t warn me enough. I’m only fourteen! I don’t know everything! I can’t know everything! You’re older! You’re supposed to warn me about stuff! And now you act like it’s good that they’re dead!”

“I thought you wanted Ryodan out of the picture.”

“I just wanted him to leave me alone! And I never wanted Barrons to die! Aw, crap, Mac!” I wail. I look at the back of the bookstore, now even more miserable than before. Mac’s in there. How long before she comes out and finds Barrons in the alley, bled out in the snow? How long before she discovers my complicity in this, too? I can see her, finding him, flinging herself over his body, weeping. One more tragic loss in her life.

Because I opened a fecking bottle.

Because I was curious.

The night Alina died, I felt like I wasn’t … really there. I never been able to shake the feeling there was something wrong with me. I searched Ro’s journals from beginning to end but she never wrote a single fecking word about me. Never. Makes me think maybe she had other journals I ain’t found yet.

But tonight I’m all here.

I suffer that unpleasant shift I felt once before, the night I got Jo stuck working in the club. The one where I move sideways into a different way of being me, see myself different, and I don’t like it. It’s the shift where I’m a boat and there are all kinds of people capsized in my wake. No, not a boat. What did Ryodan say I was? A tsunami. That’s it. Crashing into things and leveling them. When he said that, he had no idea he’d be one of those things I leveled. Or that he wouldn’t live to see the one hell of a woman I’m going to become.