But that doesn’t mean she’s safe. One moment she can see half again as many bodies, though they are thin and insubstantial, and in the next, they are gone completely. Her head spins. The whole world tries to spin with it, but at the wrong rate, blurring and doubling.

Unacceptable. She jerks her head once, lips curling in a snarl, and forces herself to look. The seasons refuse to progress, time continues to unspool, but she is here and she will make sense of it, the way she has made sense of all the rest.

The world rights itself between one blink and the next.

She is, of course, not alone.

The rest of the Loving Saint’s kind are scattered throughout the yards. They look like paintings, unearthly and flat. They should be incapable of movement, but they aren’t. Their limbs, when they have limbs, slide and jerk and reconfigure as they prowl across the yard. Most ignore her, but a few look up at her attention. With hunger. Without her saint’s mark on her, they will hunt her down and eat her. She knows that, better than she knows anything.

And he will not be far behind them. She can practically feel his hot breath on her neck already.

So she ignores the damned arrayed before her and dives, instead, into the walled garden. It will lead her back inside, through the kitchen door. Inside is safer. Inside is less exposed.

But the garden is not as she knew it.

It is less a garden and more a jungle now. Plants grow verdant and high, blotting out the sun. The air is thick with pollen and sap and greenery, and Treila has to force her way into the thicket, into the dark. It folds around her, welcoming. The dark of the forest, waiting for her still.

Heaving for breath, Treila squirms between the glass needle-covered vines of what looks like an enormous squash plant. At this scale, the needles drag across her skin, not piercing, not sticking. Still, she is covered in scratches on the other side. Her blood clings to the vine. She is shaking as she presses deeper, inside a yarrow plant ten times the size of any natural thing, and huddles as its perfume clogs her nose, makes her shiver.

It will hide her scent, though. It will hide her from sight. It will give her a minute, just a minute, to catch her breath and think.

The knife in her hand will protect her, if she uses it well. If she can get behind her Loving Saint, she can plunge it into his back, and even if his fear was only mortal nerves, she can kill him all the same. But she will have to be careful. He can take whatever form he pleases. She will need to derive some test, some way of knowing.