Killing three girls in one day was a lot to own up to. I probably wouldn't have felt as bad if it were muscle-bound construction workers or middle-aged accountants, but it was just these girls with their gigantic, almond-shaped eyes and their glass-shattering screams. It really made it all that much worse, and I felt guiltier. It left no question about whether or not I was a monster.

When I bit into Tia's neck, she didn't scream. In fact, I could swear I felt her sigh against me, and she didn't move except to grab two handfuls of my shirt and hold herself steady. She wasn't struggling, wasn't fighting me, just standing there like she was waiting for something to happen.

At first when her blood hit my tongue, it was delicious, perfect, amazing. But then as it started hitting the back of my throat, after the first few seconds of tasting it, it was suddenly—something else. A dark sour taste that was suddenly coating my mouth, choking me—I jerked back from her like she was on fire, pushing her away hard enough that she fell back onto the bed, pressing her hand to her neck where it was bleeding.

I was gagging, spitting the blood out, stumbling back against the wall trying to get that taste out of my mouth. It was the worst thing I had ever tasted in my entire life, it was like biting into week-old roadkill. How could shetaste like that? She looked like she was made of lace and rose petals, she was a toothpick girl and she smelled like frosting. How could she possibly taste like that?

I asked her. "What the hell?" I demanded. "I mean seriously, what the hell?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, very calmly for a person who's just been bitten. "Did that taste bad? Learned our lesson, have we?"

"What are you?" I wanted to know.

"I assure you I'm nothing more than human," she said, rubbing carefully at the dirty handprints I'd left on her dress. "God, would it hurt you to wash your hands once in awhile? This is never going to come out."

"You are not human," I accused. "You taste terrible!"

"That's so no one eats me," she explained. "I'm not stupid, I know what you all are. I suppose Lord Amun wanted to make sure I didn't get my blood drained out while I was still—useful to him. He just gave me these pills, and if I just take one every morning the worst I get is a neck injury."

"A pill?" I said skeptically. "What does it do?"

She shrugged gracefully, and I got the instant impression that she'd been dancing since she was a child. "Makes me taste bad, I assume," she said. "You tell me. He once told me that it was actually poisonous if you ingest too much of it."

"Poisonous?" I asked uneasily, rubbing my mouth with the back of my hand.

She looked me straight down her aristocratic button nose. "I wouldn't worry about it, spider. You didn't get enough in you."

"What did you call me?"

"Oh, sorry, would you rather me call you street rat? Guttersnipe? I thought spider was a little more ambiguous."

"Sweet of you," I said flatly. "I'm sorry you have to be stuck here with me, that must be really hard for you."

"Well, it's only been ten minutes," she said serenely. "I'll let you know."

---

When Marek finally came to get me, I practically jumped into his arms. Marek was weird and shuttered and intimidating, but he was nothing compared to Tia. Tia was driving me almost literally up the wall. I'd actually been going over the walls stone by stone at one point, with my hands, as if I might find some escape I'd been missing. I needed it, it was not going to work out with me and this girl. In the last two hours, she had: filed her nails, discussed the pros and cons of arranged marriages, advised me about how I should cut my hair, invented two verses and a chorus of a song about the sky, and reminded me not to touch her. Eight times.

"Oh, thank you," I said, zipping straight out of that room and slamming the door behind me. "I thought you were going to just leave me in there. What took you so long?"

"I told you," Marek said, eyebrows raised at my speed and desperation. "I had things to do—what is wrong?"

"You left me in there with her." I stabbed a finger back at the door. "She's human! I could have killed her!"

"No you couldn't have," he countered. "She's poison."

"Oh, so you left me in there with a poisoned girl?" I adjusted immediately. "What if I'd killed myself?"

"I assumed you were smarter than that," he said. "Want to prove me wrong?"

"You know I can't controlmyself."

"I knew you wouldn't have to," he told me. "There was no way you were going to choke down enough of her blood to do any serious damage. I thought it would be a good lesson for you."

"I would love to hear the rationale for that."

"Well, obviously you need to learn that you can't go around biting every girl who walks across your path. Call it negative reinforcement. Why are you still standing here? Come on."

I hurried to catch up with him—he had those long, lean kind of legs that were just made for striding down long corridors. I couldn't hope to compete. "There has got to be an easier way to control myself."

"Of course there is," he said, not turning. "Want to know the secret?"

"Are you kidding?"

"You just have to hold your breath," he told me.

"Hold my breath?"

"All there is to it," he said. "The scent of potential prey is what triggers the hunger—if you hold your breath around humans, it dampens that a great deal. You may have noticed that you don't exactly need to breathe anymore."

"Really? That's all there is to it?"

"What, like it's hard to figure out?"

"I guess," I said, thinking about that a little more. Holding my breath, huh? I could do that. "Hey, where are we going, anyway?"

"I assume you want to get control over that other part of your life," he told me. "You know. The fire."

"Oh, that." It just kept coming back to haunt me, didn't it? I couldn't understand it. "Listen, Marek—I don't know how Lord Amun got that idea. I really can't—manipulate fire, or whatever the hell he thinks I can do. I don't know what he's expecting."

"Benjamin." It was the first time he'd said my name—I didn't even know that he knew it. "I think you'll find you're capable of more than you expect."

"If I could control fire," I griped, "don't you think I would have noticed by now? I mean, wouldn't I have flame shooting out of my palms, or something?"

"Talents like that usually don't amount to much in a human," he explained to me. "That's why he wanted to change you, so that it would strengthen enough to be useful."

"So is that why he changed you?"

He looked sharply back at me, with an odd expression on his face—as if he hadn't expected me to catch on. "Yes," he said with a tight smile. "As a matter of fact, it is."

He stopped at a door and swung it open so hard that I had to jump back to avoid being hit. Marek was the kind of person who did that, did everything with violent energy and little thought to who might be in the way. I scrambled to get in the door after him.

It was a pretty normal room, a good size for maybe an office or a guest bedroom. The only thing strange about it was that there was—nothing in it. Literally nothing, no furniture, no carpets, no paintings on the walls. It was just a big marble box, six marble walls. It made me feel oddly claustrophobic.

He sat down in the middle of the floor and crossed his legs, looking perfectly comfortable at once, staring up at me expectantly while he waited for me to follow suit. Reluctantly, I sat down next to him, but I didn't cross my legs.

He pulled a box of matches out of his pocket and set them on the ground between us. "So," he said. "Based on what I've heard of your ability, it sounds like we're going to need to get you really upset or frightened."

"Wow, this is going to be fun," I said, and settled in for a long afternoon of him throwing things at my head.

"I can't tell you how to access your ability," he said. "It's different for everyone. I can tell you, though, that it'll just be like a switch. Once you figure out how to do it, you'll never forget. It'll be some pressure point in your mind—you just have to figure out where it is."

Such helpful advice. "All right," I said, rolling up my sleeves. "Let's do this." I still wasn't convinced that there was any truth to this at all, but this was what was on the table for the next few hours, so might as well play along with it.

He lit a match and brought it slowly up in front of my face. I watched him carefully to make sure he wasn't going to throw it at me, but he was nicer than that. Very, very slightly nicer. "Try to move it," he said. "Try to change it. Find that place in your mind, Benjamin."

I stared at that match as hard as I possibly could, but my psychic abilities were probably being hindered by the fact that this is so stupid kept running through my head. "Marek…"

"That girl that you killed," he cut in, his voice low and constant. "You knew her, didn't you?" The match went out, and he picked another one out of the box and lit it.

"Yeah," I said. "I knew her."

"I saw it in the moment before you killed her," he told me. "I saw you talking to her. You knew her name."

"I knew her."

"She was a close friend, wasn't she? And you killed her. She trusted you, didn't she?"

"Please shut up."

"She just walked right up to you, she wasn't scared. She didn't know you were going to kill her, she never suspected. I hope she didn't have any plans for her life. What was she, seventeen?"

"Shut up!"

"You asked me if I believed in Hell," his voice kept pressing. "I told you no, but I do believe in Hell, Benjamin. Hell is real and you are going there. You don't have a soul anymore. You're a monster and you kill people who don't deserve to be killed."

"Shut UP!"

There was a loud crack, and I felt the ground moving under my feet. As I threw my head back and screamed the ground screamed as well, and a crack raced down the floor between us, cutting neatly between Marek and I and widening, cracking into an earthquake fissure.

We both stared at it blankly, not looking at each other. The match burned out in Marek's hand.

"Oops," I said.