I’m hiccupping with nerves, and I don’t want to go any further, but now I really need to hear that one good answer. “Do you think there’s a chance she can stop the Corrupter?”

“Auggie.” A big, fat tear rolls down Adriana’s cheek. “What if the only way to stop him is for you to die?”

I nod mechanically. Jude thinks so; Gunnar thinks so, too, and the Brotherhood never found an alternative. At this point, I’m out of straws to grasp, and it’s almost a relief. “What if it is? Honestly, at this point, what difference does it make?”

“Please don’t say that,” she whispers, more tears rolling.

“I don’t want to die.” Admitting it is hard, because it feels futile—because mortality isn’t something I’m supposed to be grappling with right now. It isn’t fair, and I want to scream and cry and rage at the injustice of it all. “But the only thing worse than me dying is this thing getting loose in the world. You’ve got no idea what kind of plans Rasputin has for a future where he’s in charge and invincible, but it’s really, really bad.”

“Okay.” Adriana takes my hands and squeezes them so hard my fingertips turn white. “We’ll talk to my abuela.”

We don’t sleep much. I don’t want to be in the house alone, and neither one of us wants to go outside again, so convincing Adriana to stay the night is relatively easy. The problem is that she doesn’t know how she got here, or where her parents think she is, and she’s afraid that if she calls home, she’ll get in trouble for something she can’t safely explain.

“Let me try something,” I suggest, taking her hands again. What I’m about to attempt is something I’ve only done before while hopped up on vampire blood—and not only is it something I’m unsure I can manage, it’s something I’m unsure I want to manage.

My ability to go walking through people’s minds, to visit their memories and spy on their futures, is obviously coming from the entity currently trying to carjack my body. How do I know that every time I draw on the Corrupter’s power, it doesn’t pull the entity closer to the surface? Adriana, with all her talk about balance and harmony in the universe, might even say that if I’m borrowing from it, I’m almost certainly giving it something back.