Through the door.

It shattered around me, flying off the wall in pieces.

The roar that exploded from my core was entirely instinctual. The tracker's head jerked up, and then she dove for the crimson shape on the floor below her. I saw one pale hand stretched out in futile self-defense.

The obstacle of the door had not slowed my momentum. I flew into the tracker mid-lunge, throwing her away from her target, smashing her into the floor with enough force to crater the wooden planks.

I rolled, pulling her over me, and then kicked her to the center of the room. Where Eleanor was waiting.

For the entire quarter of a second that I was grappling with the tracker, I was barely aware of her as a living creature. She was just an object in my way. I knew that at some point in the near future, I would be jealous of Eleanor and Jessamine. I would wish for the chance to claw and slash and sever. But that was all meaningless now. I spun.

As I had known he would be, Beau was crumpled against the wall, framed by splintered mirrors. Everything was red.

All the terror and pain I'd been subduing since I'd first heard Archie's dread in the airport crashed into me in an unstoppable tidal wave.

His eyes were closed. His pale hand had fallen limp beside him. His heartbeat was weak, faltering.

I didn't decide to move, I was just there beside him, kneeling in his blood. Fire burned through my chest and my head, but I couldn't separate out the different kinds of pain. I was afraid to touch him. He was broken in so many places. I could make it worse.

I heard my own voice, rambling the same words over and over again. His name. No. Please. Again and again like a record skipping. But I wasn't in control of the sound.

I heard myself screaming Carine's name, but she was already there, kneeling in the blood on his other side.

The words pouring from my mouth weren't words anymore, just mangled, heaving sounds. Sobs.

Carine's hands traced from his scalp to his ankle and then back again so quickly, they blurred. She pressed both hands to his head, seeking ruptures. She pushed two fingers tight against a spot three inches behind his right ear. I couldn't see what she was doing; his hair was saturated with crimson.

His chest had stopped moving. He wasn't breathing.

Immediately, my mouth was on his. As I blew the air in, his lungs pushed back.

A weak cry broke through his lips. His face spasmed with pain.

"Keep breathing, Beau." I begged.

Another lungful of air.

Carine was assessing his condition internally. He's lost some blood, but the head wound isn't deep. Watch out for his leg, it's broken.

A howl of pure rage ripped through the room, and for a second I thought Eleanor and Jessamine were in trouble. I touched their minds—they were already gathering up the broken pieces—and realized that the sound had come from me.

Some ribs, too, I think, Carine added, still preternaturally calm.

Her thoughts were practical, impassive. She knew I would be listening. But she was also encouraged by her examination. We were in time. The damage was not critical.

I caught the ifs in her assessment, though. If she could get the bleeding under control. If a rib didn't puncture his lung. If the internal damage was no more than it seemed. If, if, if. Her years of trying to keep human bodies alive gave her a plethora of insights into things that could go wrong.

His blood had soaked through my jeans. It covered my arms. I was painted in it.

Beau moaned in pain.

"Archie, make splints for his leg and arm. Edythe, straighten out his airways. Which is the worst bleed?"

Archie darted out of my peripheral vision, and I could hear his ripping boards up from the floor and snapping them into usable sizes.

Archie started handing her pieces. "Here, Carine."

He made a tiny choking sound.

I couldn't force my eyes away from Beau's bruised, blood-spattered face. Under the gore, his skin was paler than I'd ever seen it. His eyelids didn't so much as flutter.

But I reached out to Archie's mind and saw the complication.

I'd yet to truly register the lake of blood I was kneeling in. I knew, somewhere inside, my body was probably reacting to it. But wherever that reaction was, it was so deep below the pain that it hadn't surfaced yet.

Archie loved Beau, but he was not physically prepared for this. He hesitated, teeth clenched, trying to swallow back the venom.

Eleanor and Jessamine, too, were struggling. They'd pulled the shattered pieces of the tracker—and I could only vehemently hope that those pieces were still somehow able to process pain—out of the room. Eleanor was watching Jessamine closely for a break. Eleanor herself was in admirable control. Her concern for Beau was deeper than her usual carefree frame of mind allowed for.

"My bag, please. Hold your breath, Archie, it will help. Thank you, Eleanor, now leave, please. He's lost blood, but the wounds aren't too deep. I think his ribs are the biggest problem now. Find me tape."

He nodded and stopped breathing as he darted forward and then back, leaving Carine's satchel next to her leg. He'd moved so carefully that he didn't even get blood on his shoes. He retreated to the destroyed emergency exit, gasping for fresh air.

Another moan.

"Something for the pain," I hissed.

"There—I don't have hands. Will you?" Carine pointed to the injectable morphine in her bag.

"This will make it better," I promised, injecting the analgesic into his good leg.

The jealousy surfaced then, like a fist punching through the center of my chest. I wanted so badly to break the tracker, to rip her into long, slow strips. So much pain and so much blood and I'd never be able to make her answer for it. It wasn't enough that she was dying, that she would burn. It would never be enough.

Through the open door drifted the faint sounds of sirens, looking for the car that had raced so recklessly through the city streets. I doubted they would find the stolen car parked in the shade on a quiet side street, but I didn't really care if they did.

Carine was suturing the tears in his scalp so quickly her movements were blurring again. No bleed could escape her eyes. She was able to repair the larger vessels with tiny stitches that another surgeon would not be able to duplicate under perfect conditions even with mechanical assistance. I could hear under her controlled calm that there was more damage to his head than she liked. He'd lost so much blood...

"Edythe..." Beau managed to rasp.

"Shhh, Beau, it's going to be okay. I swear, it's going to be fine."

"E—it's—not—" He winced in pain again, losing his breath.

"Hold on, Beau," I begged. "Please just hold on."

He moaned again—no, he tried to say something again.

"Can you understand him?" Carine asked.

"Just rest, Beau. Breathe."

"No—hand," he gasped. "Edythe—right hand!"

His eyes fluttered, blinded by blood.

The sound of his agony stupefied me. I knew that I understood the truth of what he was saying, but panic scrambled all the meanings in my head. It felt like someone else was forcing my head to turn away from his face, forcing my eyes to focus on the crimson-stippled hand he was thrusting away from himself, the fingers seizing, twisting to the torture.

A short, shallow slice was torn through the skin across his index finger. It was nothing to his other injuries. Already the blood was slowing...

I knew what I was seeing, but I couldn't form the right words.

All I could gasp out was, "No!"

Carine glanced up unwillingly from her work, her fingers pausing for the first time. "Edythe?" And then the shock hit her, too.

Her internal voice was hollow. She bit him.

My own words came at the same time. "She bit him."

There were the words: she bit him. The tracker had bitten Beau. The fire was venom.

Carine's hands were still motionless. Fix him, I wanted to scream at her, but I knew, as she did, that her efforts were worthless now. Everything broken inside him would knit together on its own. Every shattered bone, every gash, every tiny leaking tear beneath his skin, all would be whole soon.

His heart would stop and never beat again.

Beau screamed and writhed in misery.

"What do I do, Carine?"

Edythe.

Archie had returned, finding some new resolve that let him crouch beside Carine now, red seeping into his shoes. Lightly, he brushed the bloodied hair from Beau's forehead.

You can't let it happen this way. He was thinking of Carine.

Carine was also remembering. The teeth marks on her palm, and the long, protracted suffering of her change.

Then she thought of me.

A phantom burn raced along my hand, my arm. I remembered, too.

Edythe, you have to do it. Archie insisted.

I could make this easier, faster for Beau. He didn't have to suffer as long as I had.

He would still suffer. The pain would be unimaginable. The fire would torture him for days. Just... not as many days.

And at the end of it—

"No!" I howled, but I knew my protest was useless.

Archie's vision was so strong now it seemed inevitable. Like history, not future. Beau, stone white, his eyes glowing a hundred times brighter than the slaughter scene surrounding us now.

My own memory intruded, shoving another image into juxtaposition with Archie's vision: Royal. Resentful, regretful. Always mourning what he'd lost. Never resigned to what had been done to him. He'd had no choice, and he'd never forgiven us.

Could I bear to have Beau stare at me with the same regrets for the next thousand years?

Yes! the most selfish part of me insisted. Better that than to have him disappear now, to slip away from me.

But was it better? If he could grasp every ramification and every loss, would he choose this way?

Did I even fully understand the cost? Was I aware of everything I'd traded in exchange for my immortality? Had the tracker just met the same black wall of nothingness that I was destined for someday? Or would there be eternal flames for the both of us?

Beau was screaming, convulsing underneath Carine's hands, writhing away from the pain in his hand that was a million times more than pain.

Edythe! Archie shouted at me. His impatience with my hesitation was reaching a frenzy, but he didn't trust himself enough to act.

Archie saw that I was drowning. He saw my futures spinning out into a thousand different kinds of despair. On the outer edges, he even saw me doing the one unimaginable thing I hadn't yet consciously considered. The thing I was sure I was too weak for. Until I saw it in his mind, I didn't realize that version even existed inside my head.

Now I could see it.

Killing Beau.

Was it the right thing? To stop his pain? To give him, in his total and perfect innocence, a chance at a different destiny than the inevitable one I knew I was facing? A different kind of afterlife than the cold, bloodthirsty one he was burning toward now?

The pain was too much, and I couldn't trust my thoughts, spinning out of control because Beau was screaming.

I turned my eyes and mind to Carine, hoping for some assurance, some absolution, but I met something entirely different.

In her mind, a coiled desert viper, sand-colored scales sliding across each other with a dry, rasping sound.

The image was so unexpected that I froze again with shock.

There may be a chance, Carine said.

There was just a glimmer of hope in her head. She saw what Beau's suffering was doing to me now; she, too, feared what forcing him into this life would do to both him and me in the future. And yet, the sliver of hope...

What was the chance?

Carine started stitching his scalp again. She had enough faith in this idea that she thought it might be necessary to finish repairing his wounds.

See if you can suck the venom back out. Her thoughts were calm again as she worked. The wound looks fairly clean.

Every muscle in my body locked down.

I can't see if that will work, Archie amended. Nothing was clear. No decision had been made. My decision was not made.

Carine didn't look up from her work. I don't know. But we have to hurry.

I knew how the venom would spread. He'd felt the first burn just a moment ago. It would climb slowly up his wrist, into his arm. Then faster and faster.

There was no time for this.

But! I wanted to scream. But I'm a vampire!

I would taste the blood and I would frenzy. Especially his blood. Only the burning he was feeling now was stronger than the flames in my throat, my chest. If I gave in even a tiny bit to that need...

Did she even realize what she was suggesting? I didn't know if I could do that.

Carine's fingers moved the suture needle so quickly it was all but invisible. She'd moved to the back of his head, on the left now. There were so many wounds.

It's your decision, Edythe, either way.

Life or death or half life, my decision. But was life even in my power? I'd never been that strong.

I can't help you, she apologized. I have to get this bleeding stopped here if you're going to be taking blood from his hand.

Beau thrashed as a new wave of pain rocked him, jerking his twisted leg.

"Edythe!" he screamed.

His blood-filled eyes snapped open, and this time they focused sharply, boring into my own. Imploring, beseeching.

Beau was burning.

Edythe! Carine's internal voice had lost its control. Pain bled through. Pain for me, pain for Beau. You have no time to waste.

Beau's eyes begged, desperate for relief.

Beau was burning, and I was exactly the wrong person to save him. Absolutely and literally the worst person in the entire universe for this task.

But I was the only one here to do it.

You have to do this, I ordered myself. There is no other way. You cannot fail.

"Yes," I resolved. "I can try. Archie—scalpel."

"There's a good chance you'll kill him yourself," he warned, holding up a blade from Carine's bag.

"Give it to me." I snatched it from his hand. "I can do this."

I grasped his twisting hand, smoothing his clenched fingers and holding them still. The point of envenomation had already sealed shut. I recreated the same wound again with the scalpel, and Beau did not react. I stopped breathing and bent to press my mouth to his hand.

The skin of his hand was already much cooler than the rest of his body. Changing. Hardening.

I sealed my lips around the small gash, closed my eyes, and then began.

It was only a trickle of blood—the venom had already begun sealing off the blood vessels. Just a few drops to start with. Barely enough to wet my tongue.

It hit me like an explosion. A bomb detonating inside my body and mind. The first time I'd caught Beau's scent, I thought I'd be undone. That was a paper cut. This was a decapitation. My brain was severed from my body.

But it wasn't pain. Beau's blood was the opposite of pain. It erased every burn I'd ever suffered. And it was so much more than just the absence of pain. It was satisfaction, it was bliss. I felt suffused with a strange kind of joy—a joy of the body alone. I was healed and alive, every nerve ending thrumming with contentment.

As I pulled from the wound, it reversed the effects of the venom. The blood started to flow steadily, coating my tongue, my throat. The sharp, icy taste of the venom was a weak counterpoint. It did nothing to interfere with the power of his blood.

Rapture. Elation.

My body knew well that there was more to be had, close at hand. More, my body hummed, more.

But my body couldn't move. I'd forced it motionless and I kept it so. I could hardly think to know why, but I refused to release my hold.

I had to think. I had to stop feeling and think.

There was something outside the bliss.

Pain, there was pain that the pleasure couldn't reach. Pain that was both outside and inside my mind.

The pain was high-pitched and dissonant. It swelled into a crescendo.

Beau was screaming.

I reached out mentally for something to hold on to...

Edythe, Archie's mental anguish was deafening. It isn't going to work. We were too late. You have to stop.

"Edythe!" he demanded aloud this time. "Edythe, look."

Archie showed me glimpses of the near future. Beau lying cold in a coffin, pale white and drained.

No, the monster within me countered. He's wrong.

The images that were directly counterpoint to Archie's filled my mind. Beau smiling, Beau laughing, Beau reaching for my hand, Beau holding his arms open for me, Beau staring into my eyes with fascination, Beau walking next to me at school, Beau sitting beside me in his truck, Beau sleeping in my arms, Beau pressing his hand against my cheek, Beau holding my face and pressing his lips carefully against mine. A thousand different scenes with Beau, healthy and whole, alive and happy, and with me.

The bliss, the physical joy, dimmed.

The taste of venom was strong. It was still too soon.

Please, Edythe. I love him. You love him. Archie begged.

"What is it, Archie?" Carine's voice was far away.

But I felt myself careening past the place where I could stop. I was losing myself. I was going to kill him, my body thrilling with joy the entire time.

Beau's screaming quieted, loosening my connection to the pain I needed to feel. He whimpered a few times, and then sighed.

I was going to kill him.

I was barely aware of anything else. Sound faded, the light seemed dim behind my lids, there was nothing else really, just the blood. Even Archie's thoughts, nearly screaming at me, felt muted and far away.

A hand smacked me across the cheek. I couldn't feel it. "Stop it, Edythe! Stop it now!"

"Archie!" Carine cried.

Through my near-total absorption, I could taste that the icy sting was still just as present as ever.

But Archie could see I was lost. I could hear him wondering frantically if he could pull me off Beau, or if that fight would just injure Beau more.

"You can see it?" Carine asked.

"There are only two futures left, Carine. He survives as one of us, or Edythe kills him trying to stop it from happening."

Memories of Beau's voice filled my head. Stay... I'll always want you... I'm talking about forever, here.

His quiet voice slid into my head, somehow stronger than Archie's panic, louder than all the chaos inside and around me. The sound of his confidence was a key turning; it seemed to reconnect my brain to my body. It made me whole again.

And I simply let his hand fall away from my lips. I raised my head and looked at his face. Still spattered with blood, still ashy, eyes closed.

"No..." I moaned. I dropped my face to his. I kissed his eyelids, his cheeks, his bloodstained lips. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"It doesn't need to be this slow," Archie complained. "Carine?"

"I made an oath, Archie."

"I didn't," he snarled.

Archie positioned himself over Beau's other arm and held his breath.

"Wait, wait!" I shouted, snapping upright. "He deserves a choice."

My lips were at his ear. I hoped that he could hear me through the agony, through the sound of his own moans. "Beau? I won't make this decision for you. I won't take this away from you. And I'll understand, I promise, Beau. If you don't want to live like this, I won't fight you. I'll respect what you want. I know it's a horrible choice. I would give you any other option if I could. I would die if I could give your life back to you."

My voice broke then, and I started sobbing tearlessly.

"But I can't make that trade. I can't do anything—except stop the pain. If that's what you want. You don't have to be this. I can let you go—if that's what you need." Sobs erupted from my chest; I couldn't hold them back. "Tell me what you want, Beau. Anything."

His eyes strained to focus on my face again. "You," he spat through his teeth. "Just you."

I could barely make my voice work any longer. "Are you sure?"

He groaned again. He coughed the next words out. "Yes. Just—let me stay—with you."

"Out of my way, Edythe!" He started pushing me away.

Fury flooded through me. "I didn't make any oaths, either," I snapped.

I leaned into his throat, held my breath, and prepared for the worst.

I tried to empty my mind as I heard the sound of my teeth tearing through the soft membrane of his skin. I was assailed again by the elation my body felt at the taste, even more fresh where I bit into both of his jugular veins. Again, I had to stop feeling and think. But this time, I didn't consume the blood I tasted. Instead, I forced the venom out of my mouth and into his bloodstream. Blood pooled in each of the fresh wounds, and the explosive pleasure of its taste had the venom flowing like a faucet now.

The other agony I faced was Beau's reaction to what I was doing. With each piercing of his flesh, Beau screamed, over and over and over... In a way, his scream served as a distraction that separated me from the frenzy, and I could maintain my concentration on the job I had to do. I would be successful, for in failing at this, I forfeited any desire to live.

I moved quickly now as I bit again and again, forcing venom into his system at as many points as possible. Down his arms, in the creases of his elbows, at his wrists. At each puncture wound, I swept my tongue over along the bleeding gash. Where my tongue washed venom over the surface of his skin, it sealed shut, holding the blood inside his body. He couldn't afford to lose any more.

His heart had to keep beating, pushing the venom along to every last corner of his body, leaving no cell untouched, no piece of him unchanged.

I could hear the others talking through his screams now.

"Beau?" Carine asked near his head.

He seemed to want try to react to her, but the screams just kept coming.

"Where is your mother?"

His eyes flickered for a second, and then he held his breath in short spurts, slipping the words through at each chance he could get. "In Florida!" More moans of agony. He flinched away from me every time my face made contact. "She... tricked me... Edythe."

The smell of gasoline filled the room.

Eleanor and Jessamine were back from siphoning the accelerant we needed. The sirens still wailed in the distance, but from another direction now. They weren't going to find us.

With a somber expression, Archie flitted across the ravaged floor to the media center by the door. He picked up the small handheld video recorder that was still running. He switched it off.

In the instant he decided to retrieve the camera, hundreds of future fragments flashed through his mind—images of this room, of Beau, of the tracker, of the blood. It was everything he would see when he played back the recording, too fast and disordered for either of us to absorb much. His eyes flashed to mine.

We'll deal with this later. We have a hundred things to do now to make sense of this nightmare.

I could tell he was purposely directing his thoughts away from the camera as he ran through the rather involved chores we now must accomplish, but I didn't push. Later.

"I'm sure that's enough, Edythe," Carine said. The smell of the gasoline Eleanor and Jessamine were applying to the walls was becoming overwhelming.

"Nooo!" Beau wailed. I backed away from him, covering my mouth with my palm.

"Make it stop!" he gasped. Carine had to restrain him again as he thrashed.

He seized on the floor, bewildered by the pain. I couldn't look at him anymore.

"Stop the fire!" he begged. "That's all I want. Make the burning stop, Edythe!"

He glared at me, pleading, blood vessels bursting in his eyes as he strained. "Aghh!"

"Everyone says the same thing," Archie told me gently. "You begged Carine to kill you, too, remember? It was his first decision that counted."

Beau exploded at hearing this. "No!" he raged, and then his eyes cleared, as if he'd gained one last crumbling grasp of sanity. "Shut up, dammit! Shut up! Just let me die!"

The words horrified me, and I thought the stress of the situation would rip me in half.

"KILL ME!"

And then his voice cut off as he stressed his vocal cords to the point of tearing.

"It's time to move him," Carine ordered.

Archie and I lifted him from the blood-soaked floor, trying to support every part of him.

"Try to cover his mouth until we get to the car," Archie told her.

Beau's cries were suddenly muffled as Carine gently held his mouth closed. Now there was one sound remaining that touched me in this endless nightmare.

The frantic pounding, a racing beat...

Beau's changing heart.