Something explodes with a bang beneath me. A tire. The car jolts, and I nearly lose my footing. Two more tires follow in quick succession, falling victim to the scorpions’ acid. I glance down; the first few scorpions are crawling up onto the hood now.

I spit out a curse, back up a step, and take a running leap for the tree.

I don’t make it. My shoeless feet can’t get any purchase and I slide toward the ground, helplessly clawing for a branch, loose bark, anything I can latch on to. Splinters dig in beneath my fingernails. Below me, the scorpions have covered the hood in a tide of shadows. A few of them start to jump toward me. I snatch my legs up and they miss, falling back into the writhing mass on the ground, but all I’ve got to do is slide a few more inches and I’m toast.

I squeeze my eyes shut. My breath is a high, reedy trembling in my ears. Maybe I should just let go. Stop drawing it out and let them kill me quickly. I don’t want to scream for hours, don’t want to watch myself fall apart before I finally die. And there’s nowhere left to go anyway, nowhere that I’d be able to ever get away from the world full of monsters—either the ones made of shadows or the ones made of flesh and bone like the mayor. But my body overrules my brain and my fingers hook into the tree, scrabbling at it, trying to gain enough purchase to support my weight.

I drop a few inches lower. I open my eyes; another Being is leaping off the hood. One of its pincers latches on to the hem of my jeans. I kick wildly, feeling the solid thunk when my foot connects with it, but I can’t manage to dislodge it. Panic wells up, drowns me, pulls me under.

A hand grasps mine. Elliott. He came back. He hauls me upward, and I push at the tree with my feet, gaining purchase now that I have help. I scramble onto the top, bark scraping at my stomach and arms. The Being on my jeans flails wildly in the air, its stinger plunging downward, missing. Drops of acid hiss and eat into the tree bark.

Elliott spots the Being. There’s a split second, a held breath, the space between one heartbeat and the next when he’s frozen. And in that second, the scorpion leaps from my pants to his leg.

In my head, I hear the screams of the spider-bit girl. I see Braedan’s rotted flesh turning black. I see it happening to Elliott.

A moment ago, I thought I wouldn’t care if he died. It isn’t true.