It didn’t bother him. I could tell by the way he looked her over, as though she were merely a fragile, valuable object and not a dead body, that he’d removed himself from the reality of her death. While the shell she’d left behind was still precious to him, he clearly didn’t associate her with it.

“No. It’s only sand out there. I don’t want an animal finding her.” His voice cracked slightly on the last words, but he didn’t cry. “Get me some towels from the bathroom, so I can clean her up.”

That’s how we spent the rest of the night. Cyrus carefully washed the blood from her skin and asked me to bandage her torn throat and the bite marks on the rest of her body. He combed her hair, despite the gore that matted it, and laid her head on the pillow. Using the technique I’d learned in medical school, we carefully changed the soiled sheets without moving her body from the mattress, then clothed her in the sundress that appeared to be her only article of clothing.

“The sun’s almost up,” Cyrus noted when we were finished, his voice strained and tired. “We should get going.”

“You’re coming with me?” I wondered at his motive. Grief or not, he was still the man who’d gleefully procured victims for his father’s blood lust and killed innocent young girls for his own, sick pleasure. I couldn’t fully trust him.

He nodded, never tearing his gaze from the girl’s dead, staring eyes. Absently, he reached out and gently closed her eyelids with his thumbs. They eased slightly open again, giving her the look of a person asleep.

“I can’t leave her here to—” he swallowed thickly, covering his eyes with one hand “—to rot.”

“Do you think we should bury her?” I looked to the sky. The stars were beginning to fade. I didn’t think we had enough time. At least I didn’t. “The police are going to notice that this place has reassembled. They’ll be here by morning. I’m surprised they haven’t been yet. Do you really want to be burying a dead body when they arrive?”

“Oh, yes. That would be the worst thing that could happen to me, going to the electric chair.” He laughed bitterly, but I don’t think he really understood yet what it was to be human again. How important his life would be to him when he was close to losing it.

He covered his face with both hands, a gesture more of fatigue than grief. “We’ll burn it.” He fixed me with a determined stare. “We’ll burn the whole place down.”