Before

When I woke up, my roommate, Johanna, was dead.

This was neither the first time I'd come to with a body at my feet, nor was it even the first time I had returned to consciousness in a room transformed into a literal abattoir, but it was the first time I woke up relieved to be in a mess. The walls were soaked in effluvium. Every piece of linen on our beds was at least moderately pink with gore. The floor was a soup of viscera, intestines like ribbons unstrung over the scuffed wood; it'd been a deep gorgeous ebony once, but now, like the rest of our room, it was just red.

Carefully, I reached for Johanna's outflung arm, the one desolate limb to have survived what happened to her, and folded it over her chest, closing my hands over her knuckles. She was still here. There were even parts I could recognize. When it struck me, I thought I'd wake up and none of what I did would have mattered, that her body would be missing. But she was still here. It wasn't much but it was something. I'm not religious in any sense of the word. Far as I'm concerned, dirt's the only holy thing in the world. It can make roses out of even the worst losers: in death, we achieve meaning. I stared at the mess. While I could give a dead rat's rotten lungs about divinity, I had a lot more compassion to dole out when it came to the dead-especially when the deceased in question was someone I'd just achieved character growth with.

It wasn't fair.

Being sad, however, wouldn't rewrite the past to give us a platonic happily ever after, although I imagine if I got her necromantic situationship involved, that might change things. Part of me thought about it. Let's be clear about that. Part of me did think about looking for Rowan, about demanding that he see if there was anything that could be done. Johanna had been nothing but kind to me, after all. The fact that she was weird and codependent about it was beside the point. Even in my worst moments, she had cared.

Pity she needed to die. Pity she needed to stay dead. Pity all that was as inevitable as what was coming next.

"Alessa?"

I turned to see a lithe young man at the door. Rowan was thin in the way most smokers eventually became, gristly and lineated with veins, his skin already like a piece of dehydrated leather. But there was an unconventional appeal to his Roman nose, his mobile lips, the eyes like flecked chips of lapis. His expression was affable, unbothered. You'd think he would look more troubled. Johanna was kind of his girlfriend.

Then again, this was also Hellebore. But we'll get to that.

"Good morning," I said. "I can explain."

"Is that so?" said Rowan, his gaze making a circuit across the mess, a single line indenting the space between his fluffy eyebrows. Mine felt matted with blood but it didn't feel like it was appropriate to check. "I'd really like to hear it."

"Yes, well." I took a breath. A glob of something lukewarm traveled down the bridge of my nose. "Actually, that's a lie. I can't really explain it. Scratch that. I was asked not to explain it. So, that makes things . difficult."

"More difficult than being caught committing homicide?" The lanky boy crossed the room to where I stood beside Johanna's corpse, one of my hands still clasping hers. A smile crept up to his mouth, wary as a beaten animal.

"Lots of judgment from someone who was just a fuckbuddy." His sanctimoniousness drew an unexpected venom from me. "I thought you didn't care about her."

"I cared about her as a person."

"If you did, you'd have left her alone." Cruelty was like riding a bike: it became ingrained in you, became muscle memory. There was no losing the trick of it. You never forgot how to drive a knife in and twist. "She loved you, you know."

He flinched like I'd punched him.

Good, I remember thinking, a tang of bloodlust slicking my tongue.

"If you knew what I knew, you'd have treated her better. I take that back. If you knew what I knew, you'd have stayed the fuck away and left her alone." I spat the last word. "You used her."

Rowan stopped about a foot from the steamer trunk in front of Johanna's bed, his knee bumping into the verdigris lid, and tipped one hand at me, turning it palm up. He was the very image of good faith, earnest and smiling. He looked like I'd just anointed him with compliments; there was something almost coy in the way he peered at me through long black lashes.

"Be that as it may," he said. "That doesn't change the fact you killed her."

"Well, I didn't want to."

It wasn't a defense. I knew that. Neither was the shrug I offered up, my gaze falling again to Johanna's remains. Even defiled thus, her golden hair was somehow unmistakable. Same with the perfect curve of her jaw, dislodged as it was from the rest of her skull. What surprised me though was how much it hurt to see her dead.

"There is gunk coming down from the ceiling," said Rowan after a minute of obtrusive silence.

I looked up. As it turned out, there was.

"That wasn't intentional."

"Alessa, just tell me what happened."

The coppery, sweetly fecal smell of death was beginning to intensify.

He reached out with a gloved hand, desperation pushing up against that smiling facade, the nonchalance faltering, cracking under the pressure of what I could assume to be grief. For a second, I was witness to the fatal loneliness at the core of that grinning, jocular, often inappropriate boy-to the child who must have spent his early life up to his ears in protective gear so as to prevent him from rampant manslaughter. They say that babies can die from touch starvation. I wondered what Rowan had had to kill to be standing here now, what he had had to give up, all to be too late. I wondered if some part of him had died at the sight of Johanna's remains, knowing there laid butchered most likely the only woman who'd ever look at his deficiencies and still see him as enough.

"Please," said Rowan.

Before I could say anything, another voice broke through the air.

"What did you do?"

We turned in tandem to see a figure stumbling fawn-legged toward us, pausing at intervals to flinch at the charnel, the color bleeding from a face already arctic in its complexion. Most people would call her a beauty and they'd be right any other day. There and then, however, she was a car crash in slow motion, that long, drawn-out, honeyed second before an explosion. She was a corpse that hadn't caught up to the fact that her heart had been dug out and eaten, dripping like a fruit. In her face, a kind of obstinate hope somehow. Like if she lived in this incredulous grief for a little longer, it'd grant Johanna a Schrödinger's immortality: keep her not necessarily alive, but not dead either.

"What did you do?" Stefania screamed.

A little to my surprise if not Rowan's, she arrowed straight toward him, literally serrating as she did: every limb began to split into outcroppings of teeth, skin becoming stubbled with molars, speared through with expanding incisors. Her face bisected and then quartered, petaling, each flap lined like the inside of a lamprey's mouth. When she screamed again, it was with a laryngeal configuration that had no business existing even here in the halls of Hellebore: it was a choir, a horror, a nightmare of sound.

"You," she said in all the voices those new mouths afforded her. Tongues waved from every joint. "You fucking bastard."

Rowan threw his hands up, backing away, even though I was the one smeared with a frosting-thick coat of gore. "First of all: fuck you. Second: how dare you? The visual evidence alone, Stefania. It's clear-"

Whatever else he might have said was swallowed by an obliterating white light. The incandescence lasted only for a second but it filled the room, burning away all features. Then it winked out and as our sight returned, we discovered collectively there was now a fourth member of our little tableau.

Standing before us was the headmaster herself, bonneted and in a cotton nightdress ornamented with smiling deer. Though the style was cartoonish, it did little to whet the absolute horror of the sight: ungulate faces were never meant to stretch that way. The headmistress blinked owlishly at us, her eyes magnified by the lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. I froze at the sight of her. I knew what was behind that doddering facade.

"Children." Her voice when she wasn't orating was high and breathy, a bad idea away from being babyish, like a sorority girl courting the quarterback's attention. It was particularly weird coming from someone who looked and acted the way the headmistress did: namely, old. "What are you doing?"

"What," said Stefania, devolving back to her usual shape, a process that involved more slurping noises than I would have preferred. "Headmaster?"

"This is terrible behavior."

"They killed my friend," exhaled Stefania, and the helplessness in her voice was worse than her rage, a note of keening under those panted words. "Headmistress, please-"

"There is a soiree waiting for you," continued the headmaster, putting undue emphasis on the word soiree, dragging out the vowels, turning them nasal, exaggeratedly French. "You should be dressing up. You should be putting on makeup." Her eyes darted to Rowan. "Better clothes. Why aren't you working to look...