I’m going to destroy you if it’s the last thing I do.

Can you shut this Steadfast thing off? Please just end the curse and leave us alone.

If I were ever going to murder any human being, it would be you.

Were any of my good memories of you real? I want at least one to be real, so I know I had at least one real thing.

I hate you. I never knew what hate was before, but now I do.

By the time he’d reached her front steps, he still didn’t know what he wanted to say. Standing this close to her house was like standing within a bonfire; the sickly hot light surrounded him now. Mateo tried to imagine it burning the halo away, but he knew that wouldn’t work. In fact, it seemed to him that he could almost feel the halo now—the circle of thorns cutting into his flesh—

“Mateo.” Her voice came from within the flames. He couldn’t actually see Elizabeth yet. She sounded as gentle and sweet as ever; of course, she wasn’t in school either. “I’ve been worried about you.”

All at once, he remembered Nadia so strongly that it was like she was right there with him—close enough to touch. She’d told him that he’d reacted to Elizabeth, that his Steadfast abilities had allowed him to see something unearthly in her. Something true. But when he’d reacted to that, she’d made him forget.

Don’t react this time, he told himself as the hallucinatory flames flickered and parted. No matter what Elizabeth looks like. No matter what she really is. Don’t react.

Elizabeth stepped closer to him, and he saw her—really saw her, for the first time.

She wasn’t the aged, withered thing she ought to have been after four hundred years. No, her body looked like hers—if anything, she was even more beautiful.

But she was hardly even human.

Her skin seemed to be made of molten gold, shining and swirling and dripping along her bare limbs. Her curly chestnut hair was now a truer fire than the imaginary flames that surrounded him. Smoke swirled around her, forming her garment and her shroud. The lines of her face—while recognizably hers—were altered, with the nose almost flat and the cheekbones higher; the eyes were too large, and tilted like a cat’s. It was as if she were half-transformed into some kind of animal—a hunter, a predator. He could imagine blood dripping from that smile. Nothing he had yet seen as a Steadfast—not the scum over the sky, not the strange horned beast in the alleyway behind La Catrina, not even the halo of soot and blades around his head—had disgusted him as much. Or frightened him as much.

Mateo didn’t react. His face remained totally expressionless, and he kept his voice even. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. It’s been—scary.”

“You know you can always talk to me.” In her voice he could hear the rustling of dead leaves, the slithering of snakes. Her wet-gold hands cradled his face, and Mateo had to fight not to flinch. Yet she didn’t burn him; her touch felt just the same. “Tell me about your dreams.”