Alex yanked her arm back, cradling her hand to her chest as if it had been burned, and slammed the case door closed with a rattle, heart pounding. She stepped back from the case, waiting for something to come crashing through, but nothing happened. She looked around, embarrassed.

A guy sporting little round glasses and a navy Yale sweatshirt glanced at her. She bent to pick up her shopping basket, using the chance to shut her eyes and take a deep breath. Imagination. Sleep deprivation. Just general jumpiness. Hell, maybe even a rat. But she’d pop in at the Hutch. It was right across the street. She could slip behind the wards to gather her thoughts in a Gray-less environment.

She grabbed her basket and stood. The guy with the little glasses had come up next to her and was standing far too close. She couldn’t see his eyes, just the light reflecting off the lenses. He smiled and something moved at the corner of his mouth. Alex realized it was the waving black feeler of an insect. A beetle crawled from the pocket of his cheek as if he’d been keeping it there like chewing tobacco. It dropped from his lips. Alex leapt back, stifling a scream.

Too slow. The thing in the blue sweatshirt seized the back of her neck and slammed her head into the door of the refrigerator case. The glass shattered. Alex felt the shards slice into her skin, warm blood trickling down her cheeks. He yanked her back, threw her to the ground. You can’t touch me. It isn’t allowed. Still, after all these years and all these horrors, that stupid, childish response.

She staggered away. The woman behind the register was shouting, her husband emerging from the back room with wide eyes. The man in glasses advanced. Not a man. A Gray. But what had drawn him and helped him cross over? And why didn’t he seem like any Gray she’d ever seen? His skin no longer looked human. It had a sheer, glasslike quality through which she could see his veins and the shadows of his bones. He stank of the Veil.

Alex dug in her pockets, but she hadn’t replenished her supplies of graveyard dirt. She almost always had some on her—just in case.

“Take courage!” she cried. “No one is immortal!” The death words she’d repeated to herself every day since Darlington had taught them to her.

But the thing showed no sign of distress or distraction.

The shop owners were yelling; one of them had a phone in his hand. Yes, call the police. But they were screaming at her, not at him. They couldn’t see him. All they saw was a girl smashing their drinks case and tearing up their store.

Alex launched to her feet. She had to get to the Hutch. She slammed through the door and out onto the sidewalk.

“Hey!” cried a girl with a green coat as Alex smacked into her. The store owner followed, bellowing for someone to stop her.

Alex glanced back. The thing with glasses glided around the owner and then seemed to leap over the crowd. His hand latched on to Alex’s throat. She stumbled off the lip of the curb, into the street. Horns blared. She heard the screech of tires. She couldn’t breathe.

She saw Jonas Reed on the corner, staring. He was in her English section. She remembered Meagan’s startled face, the surprise giving way to disgust. She could hear Ms. Rosales gasp, Alex! Sweetheart! She was going to get choked out in the middle of the street and no one could see it, no one could stop it.

“Take courage,” she tried to say, but only a rasp emerged. Alex looked around desperately, eyes watering, face suffused with blood. They can’t get to you now, Darlington had promised. She’d known it wasn’t true, but she’d let herself believe that she could be protected, because it had made everything bearable.

Her hands scrabbled against the thing’s skin; it was hard and slippery as glass. She saw something burble up from the clear flesh of its throat, cloudy, dark red. His lips parted. He released her neck and, before she could stop herself, she inhaled sharply, just as he blew a stream of red dust into her face. Pain exploded through her chest in sharp bursts as the dust entered her lungs. She tried to cough, but the thing sat with his knees pressing down on her shoulders as she struggled to buck free.

People were yelling. She heard a siren wail, but she knew the ambulance would be too late. She would die here in Darlington’s stupid hat. Maybe he’d be waiting on the other side of the Veil with Hellie. And Len. And all of the others.

The world fluttered black—and then suddenly she could move. The weight vanished from her shoulders. She released a grunt and shoved to her feet, clutching her chest, trying to find her breath. Where had the monster gone? She looked up.

High above the intersection, the thing with the glasses was grappling with something. No, someone. A Gray. The Bridegroom, New Haven’s favorite murder-suicide, with his fancy suit and silent-movie-star hair. The thing in glasses had hold of his lapels and he flickered slightly in the sun as they careened through the air, slammed into a streetlight that sparked to life and then dimmed, passed through the walls of a building and back out. The whole street seemed to shake as if rumbling with thunder, but Alex knew only she could hear it.

The squeal of brakes cut through the noise. A black-and-white was pulling up on York, followed by an ambulance. Alex took a last look at the Bridegroom’s face, his mouth pulled back in a grimace as he launched his fist at his opponent. She bolted across the intersection.

The pain in her chest continued to unfurl in popping bursts like fireworks. Something had happened to her, something bad, and she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to stay conscious. She only knew she had to get to the Hutch, upstairs to the safety of Lethe’s hidden rooms. There might be other Grays coming, other monsters. What could they do? What couldn’t they do? She needed to get behind the wards.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw an EMT running toward her. She leapt up on the sidewalk around the corner and then into the alley. He was right behind, but he couldn’t protect her. She would die in his care. She knew this. She dodged left, toward the doorway, out of view.

“It’s me!” she cried out to the Hutch, praying it would know her. The door blew open and the steps rolled toward her, pulling her inside.

She tried to take the stairs on her feet but slid to her knees. Usually the smell of the hall was comforting, a winter smell of burning wood, cranberries cooking slowly, mulled wine. Now it made her stomach churn. It’s the uncanny, she realized. The garbage stink of the alley outside had at least been real. These false smells of comfort were too much. Her system couldn’t handle any more magic. She fastened one hand around the iron railing, the other braced against the lip of the stone step, and pushed herself up. She saw spots on the concrete, black stars blooming in lichen clusters on the stairs. Her blood, dripping from her lips.

Panic reeled through her. She was on the floor in that public bathroom. The broken monarch flapped its one able wing.

Get up. Blood can draw them. Darlington’s voice in her head. Grays can cross the line if they want something badly enough. What if the wards didn’t hold? What if they weren’t built to keep something like that monster out? The Bridegroom had seemed to be winning. And if he won? Who said he’d be any gentler than the thing in glasses? He hadn’t looked gentle at all.

She tapped a message into her phone to Dawes. SOS. 911. There was probably some code she was supposed to use for bleeding from the mouth, but Dawes would just have to make do.

If Dawes was at Il Bastone and not here at the Hutch, Alex was going to die on these stairs. She could see the grad student clearly, sitting in the parlor of the house on Orange, those index cards she used to organize chapters spread out like the tarot before her, all of them reading disaster, failure. The Queen of Pointlessness, a girl with a cleaver over her head. The Debtor, a boy crushed beneath a rock. The Student, Dawes herself in a cage of her own making. All while Alex bled to death a mile away.

Alex dragged herself up another step. She had to get behind the doors. The safe houses were a matryoshka doll of safety. The Hutch. Where small animals went to ground.

A wave of nausea rolled through her. She retched and a gout of black bile poured from her mouth. It was moving on the stairs. She saw the wet, shiny backs of beetles. Scarabs. Bits of iridescent carapace glinting in whatever blood and sludge had erupted from her. She shoved past the mess she’d made, retching again, even as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening to her. What had that thing wanted from her? Had someone sent it after her? If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt. The stairwell was fading in and out now. She was not going to make it.

She heard a metallic clang and a moment later understood it was the door banging open somewhere above her. Alex tried to cry out for help, but the sound from her mouth was a small, wet whimper. The smack of Dawes’s Tevas echoed down the stairs—a pause, then her footsteps, faster now, punctuated by “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”