Page 70 of She Haunts Me Still
He’s creating a frenzy for no reason other than it serves him.
She skims the article, gaze snagging on words as though they’re bolded just for her.Monsters. Nefarious. Sinister.
Bloodthirsty.
And something clicks inside her.
“After that dream, I thought Jacob performed these exhumations for money,” Mallory murmurs. “Maybe it’s worse.”
Saskia frowns. “What do you mean?”
“What if Lily’s heart wasn’t destroyed at all? What if it was used for something else?” She swallows. “Givento something else. And that’s why she’s so angry.”
“Given to something?” Saskia leans back in her chair. “Like, as a gift?”
Mallory shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “Like an offering.”
The word makes her think of Ezra. Mallory stares at the moon-shaped scab on her middle finger, the echo of Ezra’s kiss like salt in a wound. She’s certain the mark will scar, forever branding her body with the offerings she made for him, too.
“Hello?” Saskia waves a hand in front of her face. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
Mallory’s lashes flutter, distracted. “Sorry, what?”
Saskia swivels, her thigh pressing against Mallory’s beneaththe desk. “Isaid—we need to find out exactly what went down at Lily’s exhumation. We should see if there are town records that might explain what happened to her heart after it was cut from…” She sighs, catching sight of Mallory’s drooping gaze, and snaps the binder shut. “Alright, Nancy Drew. Out with it.”
Mallory blinks. “What?”
“You’re acting funny.” Saskia studies Mallory in the dim light. “Did something happen with Ezra?”
Her stomach flips at the direct question. “What makes you ask that?”
“You’re sad.” Saskia stretches out her legs, hooking an elbow behind her chair. “The kind of sad that doesn’t let you sleep or eat or brush your hair, apparently.”
Mallory picks at her nails to hide her surprise at how easily Saskia has read her.I almost loved him,she could say.I was so close to falling, and he burned it all down. The matches were in his hand from the start.
“I thought we had something real,” she finally answers. “But it was actually a waste of time.”
Saskia is quiet a moment. “I don’t think anything is a waste of time. If it felt real in the moment, then it was.” She drapes her arms on their shared desk to lean closer. “But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”
Mallory contemplates what it would feel like to tell Saskia everything. To allow all the regret and shame to spill outside of herself, become a messy tangled thing in the room with them. She wonders if it might hurt less that way.
“Mal.” Saskia nudges her, and Mallory feels her head tip in an involuntary nod.
“Yes,” she says. “There’s a lot more.”
And then, before she can change her mind, she lets it all out.
She starts with auditions and doesn’t stop. Her bloodstained dress in the costume dungeon. Chasing ghosts with Ezra beneath the stage. His mouth around her slashed fingers, the iron injectables in his drawer. His twisted lies. His worse apologies. The wings along his spine. The panic that hasn’t abated since.
“And there’s something else,” Mallory finally says, as she undoes the clasp of her velvet choker and shows Saskia the bite wounds underneath.
Saskia’s eyes turn to amber globes as she stares. “The fuck?Ezradid that to you?”
Mallory nods and Saskia leans closer, lashes narrowed.
“I don’t understand. It looks like a snakebite.”
“He hadfangs,” Mallory replies. “Like a…like avampire.” She swallows, recalling the way she tried to talk herself out of this exact conclusion. Unsure of what it means to even say the word out loud, to reckon with the possibility that vampires don’t just exist in stories. That she might have met one.Kissedone. Let him into her body in every way possible. She pushes a hand through her hair, overwhelmed. “Saskia, I know it sounds crazy, like I’m making it up, but—”
