I handed one to Ricky, and as I sat down next to him again, he took my wrist and twisted it hard enough to make me wince.

“I want you to say it,” he told me.

“What?” I asked, but I knew. I knew exactly what he wanted me to say.

“I want to hear the words from that pretty mouth of yours,” he went on. “I’ve been waiting years for that. Tell me who you are.”

He let go of my wrist. I stared at him, working hard to keep the hatred off my face. I couldn’t let him see it yet.

Did he really think I’d take him back into my life? Did he really believe I would allow him anywhere near you, Shelby? After what he’d done to me, after the evil I’d seen in his eyes when he was holding you? I knew what would happen to us. Oh, I knew. Sooner or later, on a day when the cat got tired of playing with the mice, he’d kill us both.

I watched him take a long swallow from his bottle of Budweiser, and he never tasted the powder of the four Xanax pills I’d dropped inside.

“Say it,” Ricky told me again.

So I did. The truth is, I wanted to say it. I felt a surge of power running through me, a power I knew only too well, a power that had come over me twice before in my life. When I transformed. When the beast and I became one. When I evolved into what I really was.

I told you that the monster was real, Shelby.

I told you that from the very beginning.

I leaned into Ricky’s face, and then I whispered the words. The same words I’d painted on the wall in that trailer seven years earlier. The same words I’d painted above Gordon Brink’s bed.

The words I couldn’t run away from. The words that had defined my life.

“I . . . am . . . the Ursulina.”

*

I was twenty years old that July.

I was on my own, my father and brother both working jobs far away. I had no job myself, and I didn’t know when I’d get one, because the economy was terrible. Yes, I’d just completed a two-year degree program, but that wouldn’t do me much good when no one was hiring. I had no job, no money, no one in my life, and I felt the kind of loneliness that becomes like a friend after a while.

I did only two things that whole summer. I stayed home reading books. And I hunted for the Ursulina.