The manager’s mouth opened, and Ku’Sox yanked the gun from him, not angry at all, but curious. “Please make it fast, God,” I whispered. I couldn’t stop this. I couldn’t stop it!

“It works like this?” Ku’Sox said, turning the gun around and blowing a hole in the man’s chest.

I couldn’t tell if the noise or the color came first: the blood and tiny bits of bone coating the register in a speckled red wash of thunderous noise. People screamed, and the Were looked down at the hole in his chest in shock. Red bubbles frothed from his lips as he tried to speak. Then he dropped to his knees and fell forward into a puddle of his own broken insides.

It was ugly, and I leaned against the wall as the rising fear hit me along with the stench of gunpowder and hot metal. I wished this had never happened, that I’d never agreed to help Trent, that I’d never, ever gone to the library two years ago looking for a way to do whatever it was I’d been hoping to do.

I didn’t even remember anymore. Whatever it was, it had been a mistake.

Shutting my eyes wasn’t making it go away, though, and I opened them to find Pierce standing resolutely on a table, his moving fingers wreathed in blackness as his whispered Latin buzzed through my brain, an echo of his rising curse. I turned to the exits, seeing that everyone had gotten out but the few collapsed in fear. “Vivian!” I shouted, seeing her not panicking, but not knowing what to do, either. “Get them out of here!”

Thank God Jenks is gone. I don’t want him to see what I do next.

“What a waste,” Ku’Sox said as he looked at the rifle in his hands, then tossed it from him to clatter across a table. “It killed you far too quickly.” Scanning the nearby tables, he found a woman in white, sobbing, curled into a ball and spending her five minutes in hell.

“You’re still alive, though,” he said, and the woman shrieked as he plucked her from under the table. “I’ll eat you instead,” he said, and the woman came to life as he held her up, ignoring her clawing hands as he pulled her closer, his jaw opening to fix on her throat.

It was like a demented kiss, and the woman had one breath to scream—a terrifying shriek of pain and fear—of shock at what was happening. And then he pulled her from him with a sudden jerk, his face bloody and a two- pound gap of flesh in the woman’s neck. She still struggled though her head flopped at an impossible angle, bits of bloody froth spraying from her torn throat as she tried to scream, her lungs still working though her voice box was now inside Ku’Sox.

I wanted to turn away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to run, to leave it for someone else to deal with, but I couldn’t. It was me or no one.