Her skin looks gray in the wash of blue light. Her hair is blond and fanned across the floor in mussed waves. Her eyes are closed. She’s silent, unmoving—but I can still remember the way her violet-blue eyes spark when she speaks, and the way her voice crackles like lightning looking for something to burn.

“Wrong Ackermann,” I whisper.

I stare down at the mayor. She shouldn’t be here. She was on Cisco Island—what, yesterday? I watched her turn her back on the helicopter, watched her walk away while her son and I were exiled. So what is she doing here?

Something dark and ugly threads through me. I don’t care what she’s doing here. I should get rid of her. Tie her up, at the very least. She seems to be asleep, her chest rising and falling with shallow, steady breaths, but I’ve been around long enough to know that you don’t underestimate Mayor Ackermann no matter how harmless she looks. I don’t have a rope, though, or anything resembling a weapon.

I close my fists, ready for a fight, and dare to inch closer. I nudge her shoulder with a shoe.

Nothing.

I nudge her a little harder, almost but not quite a kick. My muscles are taut from holding myself in, from tamping down the adrenaline and the urge to hurt the woman who took everything from me—no matter how innocent she looks at the moment.

She doesn’t wake. Doesn’t even stir. I get down on my hands and knees and stick my good hand beneath her nose. She’s breathing, but nonresponsive.

“What the hell?” I say out loud.

Something in my left hand twinges. I’m so distracted by the mystery of the mayor that I don’t register the feeling in time to prepare, and when the wave of agony washes up my arm, I’m caught off-guard.

My whole body jerks. There’s a red-hot poker knifing through my hand, rupturing my veins, shredding my skin. The pain burrows into my arm. Claws its way through my chest. Rummages through my veins and arteries and nerves and organs until it finds the center of me, and then it clamps down and squeezes.

I’m screaming. I’m sure of it. But I can’t hear anything above the pain.

I fold downward. Barely manage to catch myself on the floor. The shirt that’s binding my stung hand is shoved off with the violence of the movement, and the bull’s-eye center of the scorpion sting presses against the cool floor.

Darkness bursts out of my injured hand and spreads across the floor, like I’m bleeding shadows. All the lights, all the colors, ripple out of existence as the wave of black touches them.