Page 2 of Strength of Desire

From the corner of my eye, I could see him staring at me, but he didn’t move. God help me, I needed to get him away from me, before I did something rash.

“Go!” I shouted. “Get the fuck out of here.”

He jumped, finally seeming to come out of his trance. His lips parted again, like he was going to say something. I turned my head even farther and swallowed, forcing my eyes to study the far wall of the gym. After another ten seconds of silence, he left.

I watched him walk away from me, every fiber of my being wanting to call him back. He looked at the moraghin by the door and shuddered. Ash leaned in to say something to him, but Cory didn’t respond. He just pushed through the crowd of students and finally,finally, disappeared.

Only then could I relax—slightly.

I needed to find Isaac. Needed to figure out what was going on, and whether I needed to kill again. With moraghin on the grounds, this day could easily become a blood bath. Vesperwood wouldn’t be safe until we knew for sure what had happened, and why.

So why did Cory Dawson, an eighteen-year-old kid, scare me more than all the moraghin combined?

2

CORY

“Cory! Cory, over here!”

My head was still full of everything that had happened in combat class, but the sound of my name cut through the haze in my mind.

I looked to my right and saw Ash and Felix sitting at the end of a long line of chairs at the back of Vesperwood’s grand ballroom—one of the only rooms big enough to hold the entire student body, and the faculty and staff as well.

The ballroom was huge. High windows lined the walls, sending beams of stark winter light down onto students’ heads and the polished parquet floor. Frescoes covered the lower walls, along with tapestries that I suspected were worth more than all the real estate in Churchill, Iowa combined.

Students chattered excitedly in row upon row of seats. The whole room hummed with nervous energy, and the fact that there were eight professors posted around the room, looking worried and ready to do battle, wasn’t helping anyone relax.

I made my way over to my friends, still feeling light-headed. I offered a weak smile and sank down gratefully into a seat on Ash’s right.

“How are you?” he and Felix asked at the same time, but Ash’s line of questioning continued with, “You’re fine, right? You have to be fine. Cinda wouldn’t have let you go if you weren’t. Thank God, if you’d been infected, I’d be stuck hanging out with Felix all the time, and I might actually have to start listening to his lectures. A fate worse than death, am I right?”

He grinned brightly, though his smile was tight at the corners. Felix rolled his eyes behind him. “One assumes that if Cory had been infected, that you’d alsofeel bad for Cory, what with the whole impending death and madness thing.”

“Well, duh. That goes without saying.” Ash looked back at me. “But you are fine, right?”

I laughed shakily. “Yeah. All clear. Cinda said I was free to go.”

I was still trying to make sense of what had happened. One second, I’d been staring at the wadded up jacket Noah had shoved at me in the gym, and the next, there was this incredibleheatright in front of me—all around me, really—and then this noise, like something wet and fleshy dragging across the floor—and then I’d looked up to see this…thing…in front of me.

It was humanoid, but very clearlywrong. Rows of jagged teeth instead of molars protruded from an elongated jaw, with canines that looked like they would prevent the creature’s snout from closing all the way. There were tears in the flesh of its chin, and the creature’s tongue, too long and covered in black sores that oozed yellow pus, dangled to its neck—until it flicked up and swiped back and forth in front of my face, like it was tasting the way I smelled.

The stench of it was appalling. Rotting flesh and fetid vegetable matter. Like roadkill left too long in the sun, decomposing by the side of a highway. Like a swamp belching gas from its putrid depths. I could hardly breathe from fear, and a tiny corner of my mind was grateful for that. The smell might have made me pass out otherwise.

The thing was tall. Too tall. It towered over me, with gangly limbs like stretched out taffy, if taffy were coated in pustules and leaked oil-slick droplets of blood and pus and—I couldn’t actually tell what that greenish fluid was, but rivulets of it ran from two torn-open scabs on the creature’s arms.

Its legs were mantis-like, long and thin, bent backwards at the knee like a goat’s. Its hands and feet ended in claws rather than fingers or toes, and as I stood there, scared stiff and completely useless, it brought one scaly, damp hand up to touch my cheek.

And then Noah was there, and the creature was dead at his feet. I couldn’t even tell you how he killed it. I was frozen, my mind refusing to take in what was happening right in front of me. The raven had shown up again too, and it clucked at the carcass in disgust as Noah turned his attention to me.

I saw fear in Noah’s eyes. Plain and simple. He didn’t even try to hide it. The disgust he’d had for the creature had transferred to me, too, and something inside me crumbled. I didn’t want Noah to look at me that way.

I hadn’t even understood what he said to me at first. I heard frantic syllables, but my clumsy brain couldn’t turn them into words. And then Noah touched me. Put his hands on his skin, forced his way through his disgust until he was sure of…I still wasn’t clear what he wanted to be sure of, to be honest.

Whatwasclear was that Noah wanted nothing to do with me. He’d jerked his hands away from mine like they burned, then sent me up to the infirmary with Erika, unable to even look at me.

Did he know what I was? Did the dean tell him I was an incubus? Maybe he thought I was just some rabid dog to be put down, like Sean. Maybe he thought I was going to go berserk and attack the class like those creatures had.

“Moraghin,” Keelan had gasped as he and Min staggered into the infirmary, carrying Erika between them. “In Combat class.”

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