My chest heaved in an involuntary sob and I gagged, half choking on my own blood. Hell, I should have stayed at Twilight Manor and let Lady Eris bite me. It would have been better for everyone. I swallowed hard, the taste of blood filling my mouth.

My blood.

I suspect that it must taste deliciously of brimstone and ichor, my dear. . . .

It was more than just a cliché.

Not just brimstone. Ichor, celestial ichor. After all, what was a demon but a fallen angel? That blood ran in my veins, too. The Norn had said the answer lay within me. And I was capable of feeling more than fear and anger, capable of feeling so much more.

I met the mermaid’s sorrowful gaze behind the glass, inches away from me. I gazed at her with compassion and held tight to that feeling, letting it swell until it filled me. My shoulder blades itched in the place where wings would have been, and my heart seemed to expand within my chest.

Compassion. Tenderness. Love.

Holding fast to all I held dear, from Mom’s unrelenting faith in me to Jen’s fierce loyalty to Lurine’s mantle of protection, I gathered it and let it spill forth. To the timeless sound of heartbroken women singing the blues and sunlight sparkling on the river. To all that engendered wonder, from the mighty scale of Yggdrasil II and Hel’s undeserved trust to the Oak King’s indescribable majesty. To the ephemeral beauty of naiads and fairies and Garm the hellhound’s slavering devotion to his eternal duty. To all that evoked tenderness, from the chief’s love of this town to Gus the ogre’s crush on my mother to the booger-eating kid who’d helped me gather acorn caps in the park.

Shuddering at the taint of ghoulish hunger devouring my innermost private feelings, I forced myself to offer them up as a sacrifice.

I fed my best and truest self into the maelstrom, and the sounds of fighting faded.

Feeling spent, I levered myself to an upright sitting position. All around the rec room, ghouls had gone still, pupils wide with awe, momentarily sated and blissful.

“What the fuck?” Unaffected by the outpouring of emotion, Jerry Dunham sounded disgruntled. He knelt beside Stefan’s bleeding figure, dauda-dagr raised in his gloved hand, poised for the killing strike. “Let’s finish this!”

Unfortunately for him, there was one other non-ghoul in this fight, and he wasn’t affected by what I’d done, either.

“You’ve got it.” Cody leveled his pistol and fired, and Dunham toppled sideways, dauda-dagr falling from his hand.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Thirty-nine

The spell broken, the fight resumed at a shambling, incoherent pace. Ray D bolted and ran, dragging Mary behind him by the hand. Outside, there was a hoarse shout cut short and then a higher-pitched scream followed by receding footsteps and the sound of wolves yipping to one another in the woods.