“You are so smug, Eden Larsen. You aren’t even listening to me, are you? I said I thought it was a performance. That’s what they did to me—Eddie and Marty and Lisa and that bitch who brought us together, who promised us the moon if we did as she said. They told me we had to pretend to kill that boy in the fun house. But it wasn’t real. They swore it wasn’t real.”

I stopped at the end of the hall, considered my options, and turned left. “Uh-huh. So you’re telling me you were so drugged up—”

“I was naive—I wasn’t stupid. After the fun house, I asked questions. I doubted. So when we had to make our kills, Eddie pumped me full of drugs. When I still said I didn’t want to go, he beat the shit out of me. Knocked me out, and the next thing I know, I’m waking up in a forest beside the dead bodies of two street kids. Eddie’s holding my hand and forcing me to make the cuts. We had to do it together. That’s what the bitch said. Do it together, or it wouldn’t work. I threw up. So he hit me, knocked me out again. That was my level of participation in those murders, Miss Larsen. A drugged-out, beat-up, half-conscious ‘partner’ who held a knife while her lover moved her hand to cut up the kids he’d killed.”

“And what would you like me to do about that?”

Stacey swung in front of me, her eyes going from blue to blank white. “My God, there’s nothing in there, is there? When I said you didn’t have a soul, I—”

“You were goading me. Which is what you’re doing now. You want me to feel bad for you. Maybe your story’s true. Maybe it’s not. Maybe you aren’t even Stacey Pasolini, but a phantom conjured to wring a few pangs of sympathy from me.”

I locked my gaze on hers. “I know there are innocents in that swarm of melltithiwyd. But unless you’re here to tell me how I can help them, I don’t see the point. If you didn’t take a more active role in those murders, then you don’t deserve this fate. But you aren’t the only one. There are others more wronged than you in there. The only thing that tells me is that the sluagh don’t deserve a moment of my consideration. The Cŵn Annwn might be a little bloodthirsty, overzealous in their pursuit of justice. The Tylwyth Teg might be conniving and amoral and completely self-absorbed. But the real monsters? That’s the sluagh, and your story only confirms it.”