“Cyrus, wait,” I begged as he ran toward the basement door. I wanted to go first, for some crazy reason intent on shielding him from seeing something terrible.

I was two steps behind him on the stairs. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling illuminated the apartment, and on the other side of the light I saw pale legs, barely distinguishable from the sheets, splayed at an unnatural angle across the bed.

The sight didn’t stop him, didn’t register, just as the sight of the bloody bedclothes didn’t keep him from climbing onto the half-bare mattress beside her and slapping her face lightly. “Mouse? Wake up. Wake up.”

“Cyrus…” I began, but he couldn’t hear me. The girl’s dead eyes were open. They seemed to stare accusingly at me.

“Mouse?” Grief sounded strange in his cultured, British voice. “Wake up. Please.”

He buried his face close to her ruined neck, ripped from ear to ear by claws or teeth. He laid an open hand on her bloodstained hair, but his fingers curled into a fist and he lifted his head, making a sound that was a wail and a scream and a sob all in one.

My back to the cinder block wall, I slid to the floor. I’d never seen an emotion so genuine and powerful from him as this. I’d never imagined him capable of this kind of sincere feeling.

He loved her. It struck me like a cold hand slapping my face. Had I known? Had I sensed it and intentionally left her behind? The thought made me sick. If I had done such a thing, I’d abandoned a human to die a cruel and humiliating death, and I’d done it out of spite.

You didn’t know. The voice of sanity in my head didn’t belong to me. It was Nathan, in a moment of rare lucidity. And he was more concerned for me than for himself. That broke my heart more than it should have.

Nathan. I don’t know if I can help you. I was tired, tired from my journey and tired from witnessing this carnage. I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for years.

Nathan’s elusive clarity disappeared again, leaving me no way to escape Cyrus’s raw hurt, which so closely resembled the agony in Nathan’s soul.

“I’m sorry,” Cyrus whispered, cradling the girl’s limp body to his. “I’m so sorry.”

Burdened by Nathan’s pain and my own guilt over the death of this innocent girl, I closed my eyes. There was nothing I could do to fix my error, no way to comfort Cyrus or make things better. The life of this girl was snuffed out forever, and I’d caused it. Her death would hang like a noose around my neck for the rest of my life.