And I think just one last thing.

Damn, I didn’t get to see Evie.

And I fall up and out the other side of the black sheet.

Everything expands until it is touching me everywhere and I feel the Enclave back in the shadows, watching, count their numbers by the way the air shifts when they breathe. All sound amplifies until I can separate the vibrations in the air as they strike my eardrums and name the key to which each is tuned, harmony and dissonance of the Count bragging, city waking outside, wax melting from a candle across the warehouse. Smells untwine, each has a color, fabric, leads to a source that I can see in my mind. I taste the rotting meat dangling overhead, the flaking rust on the upper curve of the Count’s blade, the night’s accumulation of grime on my clothes. I see into the dark, how the Enclave move without the purpose and control they used to own, jittery, gnashing, I see there are more of them hanging from the rafters than walking the floor. But that’s not for me, the pot, a dangle from the ceiling. I’ve got better ways to die.

My eye is open, looking at the blade in my middle, and I raise it and see the Count, and I look at the stairs that lead to the loft, and I see the beautiful ivory girl sitting on a step at the middle of the stairs, a cluster of Enclave around her.

And I tell her what’s on my mind.

– Hey, you look great.

She smiles.

– Kill him for me, Joe.

The Count looks at her.

– Get back in your place, bitch.

I stand up, rising, letting the blade cut deeper, until I am on my feet and it is sunk to the haft, the Count’s knuckles pressing into the edges of the wound.

It’s happening fast. Happening in the spaces between my heartbeats. I’m down and I’m up and he is looking at me and I am stepping backward and punching him in the wrist and now I am standing five feet away from him, the blade still in me, but it is my hand on the haft, pulling it free.

The wound in my belly seals as the steel comes out.

I show the Count his blade.

– Lose this?

He shows me my gun.

– Lose this?

I charge.

He shoots.

My thoughts are chasing themselves, trying to keep up with the pace of events. Thinking of Predo’s death, my thoughts are trying to make my body veer, but I am not faster than bullets and the Count has fired twice, and two bullets should be enough to keep me down while he finishes me, but he’s shooting from his hip like a gangster and he may be hot shit with a scythe blade but he’s probably never fired a gun in his life and he just plain misses and throws the gun to the side.

– Fuck this shit.

And I’m going to cut his head off with his own blade and he drops under the flat arc as I swing for his neck and shows me what he’s learned since he came here, squatting and pivoting, one leg extended, going for my legs, that are not there as I hop and realize I’ve put myself in the air and he comes out of his squat and puts both fists in my chest before my feet touch ground and I twist away from the impact but it still feels like two tiny trucks driving into me and I flip backward out of the air and tumble and my face goes into concrete followed by the rest of me and I can feel the Enclave shifting and coming at us, circling and as I’m rolling to my back I realize I’ve lost the scythe and the Count comes into view scooping it from the ground where I dropped it and I keep rolling as he brings it down like a pick again and again chipping the concrete and leaving divots closer and closer faster than me the tip skittering across my ribs and my hand goes inside my jacket for the amputation blade and that slows me too much and the scythe splits ribs and rips my lung and punches out my back and he hauls on it and it tears my side open and I have my feet and I have my own blade and I feel the Vyrus swarm my wound’s gaping hole like a million tiny electric shocks trying to close it up and we’re at the middle of a circle of Enclave where I will die and I lunge at the Count and he spins away from me and the scythe cuts as he steps past me and my hamstring is plucked so I go to one knee and he’s just better at this than I am, just faster and stronger and used to living at the edge of the Vyrus, and I’d really like to see the look on his face when he finds out his whole world has been destroyed and it was me who blew it to hell.

But I don’t think I’m going to get to.

The curve of his blade is so perfect for harvesting.

It travels flat and smooth, a little sharper and it would be slicing through the dust in the air as it comes for my neck.

And I see that I am on a stain in the concrete, a shape I remember, left there when I laid Daniel on this spot and watched him die. I remember Daniel. How he liked to tease me with hints. Suggestions that I was supposed to replace him. Never taken seriously. I remember him telling me the Wraith was something Enclave summoned from someplace else. Remember the old man of the sewers, the old man whose real name is Joseph. Remember how Daniel only called me by the name I was first born with, Simon. Remember old crazy Joseph of the sewers telling Simon that he’d seen a Wraith summoned. Saying that the Wraith was what we become. Remember seeing that blackness in his eyes. Swimming under the surface. I remember dying in that long-ago basement. Dying because I’d been without blood too long. Because my supply had been stolen. But not dead long. Coming back, Vyrus bringing me back, emptying me out to live, forcing me to live, just long enough to get it the blood it needed to live. Remember being on the verge of dying, Vyrus dying too, and the Wraith. Freezing a man through. Cold like space. At the end. And Daniel saying they summoned the Wraith. And Daniel, I get this idea of him in my old apartment, stealing the last of my blood. I get an idea of Daniel, for years, trailing me, walking in my steps and in my scent, erasing traces of himself. I see Daniel, telling me again, they summoned the Wraith. Telling me again that he starved me, to watch me die, to see if I could survive it, and telling me he sent the Wraith to save me. And I get this idea of myself in that basement, cold like dead, black-eyed, doing something inhuman. Something that wouldn’t have been the strangest thing I’ve ever done.

I see the Wraith.

And.

I’m.

There.

World breaks around me, scrambles, reassembles, and I’m back in the school basement. Holes leaking blood. Naked Doctor Horde about to shoot me. Black at the edge of my vision. Vibrating, writhing, black. And bits of it break off and drift over my eyes.

And I see Amanda in the corner. She’s going to die if I die.

And I think of Evie. She doesn’t know who I am.

And I don’t want to die.

So I do.

Something.

My fingers curl, corkscrew, twist into Horde’s skin, bloodless, piercing, and frost creeps over him and the room pulses with every heartbeat, black, white, black, white, and the black retreats and I close my hands and they are empty fists and my eyes clear and Horde is dead and there is nothing in this world that could have killed a man like that.

The Wraith.

I see the Wraith.

And I see myself.

And the blade is closer.

My hands are on the Count’s stomach.

I feel the dark before I see it. And then it’s in my eyes. Filling my eyes. And I know how to do this. How to become this.

Even if I don’t understand what it is.

Black comes down and the first bullet goes in his back and comes out his chest, opening a blossom of bone cartilage and blood and he starts to turn but a garden of similar flowers bloom there and the scythe shaves some of my scalp as it veers upward and he is thrown into me and I can almost see through the gaping hole that was his chest, right through to Evie, holding the gun that he threw away, pulling the trigger until there’s no point in it anymore.