Wadding the paper towel up, Mary took a step back. “I’d like us to return to Safe Place now, okay? There’s nothing more we can do here and it’s getting close to dawn.”

The last piece was just habit, she supposed. As a pretrans, Bitty could tolerate any amount of light the sun could throw at her. And the real truth was that she just wanted to get the girl away from all the death here.

“Okay?” Mary prompted.

“I don’t want to leave her.”

In any other circumstance, Mary would have crouched down and waded gently into the waters of what was going to be Bitty’s new world. The awful reality was that there was no mother to leave behind anymore, and getting the girl out of this clinical environment where patients were being treated, sometimes in dire situations, was entirely appropriate.

I killed her.

Instead, Mary said, “Okay, we can stay as long as you like.”

Bitty nodded and walked over to the door that led out into the corridor. As she stood before the closed panel, her heavily-washed dress seemed on the verge of falling off her thin frame, her ill-fitting black coat like a blanket she had wound around herself, her brown hair feathering from static across the knobby fabric.

“I really wish . . .”

“What?” Mary whispered.

“I wish I could go back to earlier. When I woke up tonight.”

“I wish you could, too.”

Bitty looked over her shoulder. “Why can’t you go back? It’s so strange. I mean, I can remember everything about her. It’s like . . . it’s like my memories are a room I should be able to walk into. Or something.”

Mary frowned, thinking that was a way too mature comment for someone her age to make.

But before she could reply, the girl pushed her way out, clearly not interested in a response—and maybe that was a good thing. What the hell did you say to that?

Out in the corridor, Mary wanted to put her hand on that small shoulder, but she held off. The girl was so self-contained, in the way a book would be in the midst of a library, or a doll in a line-up of collectibles, and it was difficult to justify breaching those boundaries.

Especially when, as a therapist, you were already feeling very shaky in your professional shoes.

“Where do we go?” Bitty asked as a pair of nurses ran by them.

Mary glanced around. They were still in the ICU section of the clinic, but some distance away from where Bitty’s mom had passed. “We could ask for a room to sit in.”

The girl stopped. “We can’t really see her again, can we?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should go back, I guess.”

“Whatever you want.”

Five minutes later, they were in the Volvo heading for Safe Place. As Mary took them over the bridge, she once again bobble-headed the rearview mirror, checking on Bitty every fifty yards. In the silence, she found herself back on the apology train in her head . . . for giving bad advice, for putting the girl in the position of suffering even more. But all that gnashing was self-serving, a search for personal absolution that was totally unfair to the patient, especially one that young.

This on-the-job nightmare was something Mary was going to have to come to grips with on her own.

An entrance onto I-87 appeared as soon as they were on the downtown side of the bridge, and the directional signal sounded loud in the interior of the station wagon. Heading north, Mary stayed at the speed limit and got passed by a couple of eighteen-wheelers doing eighty in a sixty-five. From time to time, lights marking merger zones flared overhead in a rhythm that never lasted long, and what little local traffic there was thinned out even more as they continued onward.

When they got home, Mary decided she was going to try to feed the girl something. Bitty hadn’t had First Meal, so she had to be starving. Then maybe a movie until dawn, somewhere quiet. The trauma was so fresh, and not just the stuff around losing her mother. What had happened at Havers’s had to be bringing up everything that had come before—the domestic abuse, the rescue where Rhage, V and Butch had killed the father to save Bitty and her mom, the discovery that the mother was newly pregnant, the loss of the baby, the lingering months afterward where Annalye had never fully recovered—

“Ms. Luce?”

“Yes?” Oh, God, please ask me something I can answer decently. “Yes, Bitty?”

“Where are we going?”

Mary glanced at a road sign coming at them. It read, EXIT 19 GLENS FALLS. “I’m sorry? We’re going home. We should be there in about fifteen minutes?”

“I thought Safe Place wasn’t this far away.”

“Wha—?”

Oh, God.

She was heading for the damn mansion.

“Oh, Bitty, I’m sorry.” Mary shook her head. “I must have lost track of the exits. I . . .”

What had she been thinking?

Well, she knew the answer to that—all the hypotheticals she’d been running through her head about what they were going to do when they got out of the car were things involving the place where Mary lived with Rhage, the King, the Brothers, the fighters and their mates.

What the hell had she been thinking?

Mary got off at exit nineteen, went under the highway, and hopped back on going south. Man, she was just hitting it out of the park tonight, wasn’t she.

At least things couldn’t get any worse.

Back at the Brownswick School for Girls, Assail, son of Assail, heard the roar even through the sensory overload of battle.

In spite of the chaos of all the gunshots and the cursing and the mad sprints from cover to cover, the thunderous sound that rolled out across the abandoned campus was the kind of thing that got one’s attention.

As he wrenched around, he kept his finger on the trigger of his autoloader, continuing to discharge bullets straight ahead at a line-up of the undead—

For a split second, he fell off from his shooting.

His brain simply could not process what his eyes were suggesting had magically appeared a mere fifty yards away from him. It was . . . some kind of dragon-like creature, with purple scales, a barbed tail, and a gaping mouth set with T. rex teeth. The prehistoric monster was a good two stories high, long as a tractor trailer, and fast as a crocodile as it went after anything that ran away—

Free fall.

Without warning, his body went flying forward and a searing pain streaked down the front of his calf and sliced across his ankle. Twisting in midair, he landed face up in the tangled grass—and a breath later, the partially wounded slayer who’d gotten him with a knife lurched up onto his chest, that blade arc’d over its shoulder, its lips curled into a snarl as black blood streamed out all over Assail.

Right, fuck this, mate.

Assail grabbed a fistful of still-brown hair, shoved his muzzle into that wide-open maw, and hit the trigger, blowing open the back of the skull, incapacitating the body such that it fell on him as a writhing deadweight. Kicking the animated corpse off, he sprang to his feet.

And found himself directly in the cross hairs of the beast.

His movement up to the vertical was what did it, the dragon’s eyes snapping to him and narrowing into slits. Then, with another roar, the killer came at him, pounding over the ground, crushing slayers under its massive hind feet, its front claws curled up and ready to strike.

“Fuck!”

Assail surged forward, no longer worried about where his gun was pointed and absolutely unconcerned about the fact that he was now headed directly into an advancing line of lessers. The good news? The beast took care of that little problem. The slayers, likewise, garnered one look at all the hell-hath-no-fury coming at them and scattered like leaves unto the autumn wind.

Naturally, there was naught directly up ahead that provided any cover. By bad luck, his escape route offered nothing but scrub and brush, without any meaningful protection. The nearest building? Two hundred yards away. At least.