There’s a soft noise at my feet. So quiet I almost don’t hear it.
Pap.
I look down.
A black-red drop sits on the tile floor. Splattered from the impact.
Another falls from my chin and hits the ground. Pap. Soft but sharp on the tile.
Something hot and wet trickles down my cheek and gathers at the point of my jaw, where it soaks into my pulled-down mask before finally falling. Again. Pap.
I open my mouth—probably to say, What’s happening?— and half my face goes loose. There’s air on parts of me that shouldn’t feel air. Nick won’t stop staring.
Slowly, I touch my face.
My right cheek has torn all the way back to the muscle of my jaw. An open wound streaks from the corner of my mouth halfway to my ear, exposing the Grace-fang and all the teeth, tongue, and receding gums. A flap of loose skin dangles.
Pap. Pap-pap-pap—then the whole piece sloughs off and hits the ground with a wet splat. It’s festering at the edges. Pocked with decay. Yellow and black and gray and red.
I watched this happen to the martyrs.
I stare until Nick pushes a ragged shirt against my face. The white in my vision swallows almost everything, and I slump to the floor. I tilt my head forward to keep the rot from taking up my entire throat and choking me. I let it all fall into the shirt until it soaks through and trickles between my fingers, warm and slick.
“Just tell me if he was lying.” When I speak, all this shit splatters my hands. It trails off my chin, and I can’t catch it all. There’s so much. “And I swear I’ll clean this up and leave.”
I will. I’ll bundle up the piece of my face and bury it out back with my tooth so nobody will find it. I’ll make sure my mask covers the wound and pack it with tissue so it doesn’t bleed through. I’ll clean it up and go.
Instead of answering, Nick picks a notebook off the table. My hair falls into my face, and I remember the bobby pins he gave me. Why did I ever take them out? I reach into my pocket with my free hand—I need to keep my hair out of the blood, it’s just one more thing to clean—and find my knife instead.
The click of a pen is almost deafening. Nick writes for a second and, very carefully, hands me a little note.
It reads, I’m sorry.
He did.
Cormac wasn’t lying.
I take a deep breath because it’s all I can do right now. In, out. Blood and sludge comes out with the air.
Maybe I need to start getting used to this. It’s only going to get worse.
“All right,” I say, and it sounds like something final.
I hand him both the note and the knife. When I free the knife from my pocket, bobby pins fall out and scatter on the tile. Nick doesn’t move to take it, any of it, so I put it all on the floor between us instead. I don’t know what the hell this means, so I’ll leave that up to him.
I just don’t want that knife in my pocket when he’s the one who gave it to me.
Do you want to know why we do this?
Love. It’s always love.
—Reverend Father Duncan of Washington, D.C.
I don’t want to think about what I said to Nick. I don’t want to think about what he said to me.
We clean the floor of his room in silence, refusing to look at each other. Then I hide in my own room to peel off the rest of the rotten parts. It doesn’t hurt, the same way peeling a sunburn doesn’t hurt. It’s all dead tissue anyway. No nerve endings. Nothing capable of feeling pain. I spend a minute or so staring at the collected shreds, all the little pieces of me.