“Shut up!” Garret said. “I said that’s enough!” He put his hand between Ellen’s shoulders and pushed, sending her stumbling toward Alice. “Destroy her already, Ellen.”

There was something in his voice that sounded familiar. A faint static buzz.

Dex said Garret joined them in the library, not before they arrived . . .

“I . . .” Ellen raised one hand, then looked back over her shoulder. “Garret?”

“No,” Alice said, stepping around the table to face him directly. “You’re not really Garret, are you?”

“What are you talking about?” Garret said.

“The real Garret could be a jerk, but he wasn’t a bad person,” Alice said. “And he cared about Ellen.”

Garret narrowed his eyes. “How would you know?”

“I have to say I think Sister Alice is correct.” Dex got to her feet. “The Brother Garret who retrieved my arm from the crocodile would not be so callous.”

“The Garret I knew,” Isaac said, “wouldn’t shout at someone else to fight for him. He’d do it himself.”

“That can’t be right,” Ellen said. “It’s him, I know it is. None of you understand him—”

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “But I think Garret is dead. This is . . . something else.”

She tugged on her threads, calling a swarmer into her and pulling on Spike’s power. Winding up like a major league pitcher, she winged the little creature snout-first, right at Garret’s shoulder.

A human would have at least flinched—the swarmer’s beaks were sharp, and getting impaled by one was like having a nail hammered into you. But when the little creature hit, it stuck and hung there quivering, like an arrow shot into a target. Garret didn’t move a muscle, as though he were carved from stone.

“Well,” he said, after a moment. “Enough is enough.”

Garret reached up and grabbed the swarmer. It melted in his hand, vanishing as though it had been sucked into his palm. Alice gasped. Whenever one of her creatures died, she felt it as a physical pain, like a needle in her chest, but this was ten times worse. It felt like a fraction of her energy, of her life, had been torn away.

Garret grinned. His eyes were black from edge to edge.

“Stay away!” Alice shouted as the Garret-thing advanced on her. She backpedaled, moving to put the table between her and whatever creature was wearing Garret’s skin. The other apprentices followed suit, spreading out around the clear space. Ashes was a gray streak, vanishing among the shelves.

Only Ellen didn’t move. She stood directly in the thing’s path, halo flickering.

“It’s not true,” she said. “It’s not true, is it? I thought you were dead, and you came back.” Her eyes were full of tears, and her voice cracked. “You wouldn’t lie about that, would you?”

“Ellen!” Alice shouted, frantically wrapping herself in her threads.

Garret came forward another step, until he and Ellen were face-to-face.