She lay down in her bed and pulled her blanket over her. It made her uncomfortably warm, but she kept it on, wanting to bury herself in it. Thea had followed her, and she stood tentatively at the end of the bed before sitting down.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Gemma asked Thea. “You used to be such a bitch.”

“I’m still a bitch,” Thea replied. “But this is hard enough to go through. Lexi and Penn are too dumb and selfish to help. I just don’t think anyone should go through this alone.”

“How do you live with it?” Gemma asked.

“What?”

“The guilt.”

“You mean from killing people?” Thea asked.

“Yeah.” Gemma pulled back the blanket a bit so she could look at Thea. “I just can’t stop thinking that he was a person, and … and he didn’t deserve that.”

“If it makes you feel any better, it didn’t hurt,” Thea said.

“How can you say that? I ripped out his heart!”

“Yes, but you’re a siren,” Thea said. “When you feed, you make a kind of purring sound. It’s like a cross between a cat and a lullaby. It has an anesthetizing effect on your prey. So it’s like they’re in a coma almost. They don’t know what happens. They die peacefully.”

“Still.” Gemma settled back down in her blankets, and while she found that fact a bit more comforting, it didn’t erase her guilt. “I still killed a man tonight.”

“That’s the part that’s the hardest to get over,” Thea said. “That we do the actual killing ourselves. You would probably be a wreck if you murdered a cow, too, but you don’t think twice about eating a hamburger.”

“That’s different,” Gemma insisted.

“For you now, it seems that way,” Thea said. “But the longer you live, the more your perception of humans changes. They die all the time, over the simplest things. Life is very, very fleeting for them. The best they can hope for is a painless death, and we provide that for them.”

“You can’t honestly believe that,” Gemma said. “You can’t really think that you’re doing them a service by killing them.”

“Sometimes I can.” Thea sounded sad, staring down at Gemma’s comforter and picking at a stray thread. “What helps me is trying to find people that deserve it.”

“People that deserve to die?” Gemma asked.

“Yeah, pedophiles, rapists, that kinda thing,” Thea said. “We seem to have the strongest effect on them, anyway, so it’s easy to find them.”

“Luke wasn’t a pedophile or a rapist,” Gemma countered. “I bet those other boys that you killed back in Capri weren’t, either.”

Thea shook her head. “That wasn’t me. That was Penn, and even she was feeding more than she normally does. She was collecting human blood to create a new siren.”