I’ve never chased anything like this, not really. Theo chased me, and I let him, both now and when we first fell in love. Dad chased freedom for both of us in Acresfield County, and I just held on to his sleeve. I barely even chased the idea that I might be a boy. I didn’t want to think about why I never felt at home in my skin, why my name never felt like mine, why I was so apathetic about everything the Angels said a girl should be. I thought I was tired of an Angel’s womanhood, of loyalty and purity, of all the terrible things they tried to cram into our heads. But that was never enough, all the excuses were never enough, and dysphoria had to wrap its hands around my neck and hold me down, baptism in drowning, before I faced the fact that living as a girl would kill me long before the Angels did.

My boyhood threatened to destroy me unless I looked it in the eye. I’m not going to let Seraph do that to me too.

I follow Seraph into the heart of campus, where towering buildings encircle the student union. I throw open the glass doors and step through the mess of chairs in the old food court, up the spiral steps to the fourth floor and through a hidden staircase to the roof.

Up here, Seraph sits on the other side of the skylight, a towering shadow backlit by the sun. A massive creature of wings and sharp edges. Diseased flesh and exposed muscle.

How close do I have to get? What do I have to do to face it? Whisper across the roof, hold its warped face in my hands, look into its eyes and bare my own teeth?

I pause, watching. A long tail made of sinew and bone wraps around its hunched body. I squint against the sun, and I can’t make out any of its features, except the hissing of breath and the flutter of so many wings.

I say, “I’m here, you son of a bitch. What do you want?”

Seraph lunges across the skylight and smashes us both through the glass.

I wake up with a piece of glass in my mouth.

I roll off the mattress and hit the cold, waxed floor, kicking my sheets and trying to spit out blood. Nothing comes out. Nothing? I stare at the ground, but it’s night, it’s dark, and I can’t see anything.

There’s glass stuck in my mouth.

I run my tongue over my teeth, and it snags on my top left canine. It wasn’t always this big. It’s scraped my upper lip raw. I didn’t think I had another smaller, normal tooth smashed backward to make room for it, and I didn’t think it was as sharp as—

As sharp as shattered glass.