He actually blanched, which was weird considering his color. “You’re really not her.”

“I’m really not.”

He dropped my hands so fast, I felt the muscles in my shoulders snap.

“That is a problem,” he said darkly. He was still between me and the door, which suddenly opened. I hadn’t heard anyone approaching and I barely heard anyone now. Her feet didn’t make a sound. If I hadn’t been looking at the door, I wouldn’t have known she was even there. I stumbled back a step.

“Saga,” he said, which I assumed was her name. She had long red hair, which should have clashed with her pale blue skin but somehow didn’t. Her eyes were gray, almost glittering. She wore a black skirt with a ragged hem and a kind of silver breastplate-corset, molded to her chest and engraved with spirals and vine motifs. She looked like a pirate, except she was barefoot. And her teeth were just as sharp as the wooden stakes and jeweled daggers strapped all over her body. She even had a cutlass on her belt.

“Aidan, is this her?” Her voice belonged to a queen, but her eyes belonged to the forest, or a badger’s den. In fact, a long hood hung down her back, edged with fur. I was starting to feel dizzy again. I was scared and confused and I just wanted to wake up from this drug-induced nightmare. I opened my mouth to let out the loudest, most bloodcurdling, glass-shattering shriek I could muster. I had barely begun when she spoke.

“Avast.”

Her steely voice made the scream die painfully in my throat. Her silver eyes were like pins inserted into delicate butterfly wings; I might as well have been a specimen tacked to a velvet board for her collection.

“You have to know no one would hear you,” she said. “You are most strange. I would expect someone under the protection of the Drakes to be quick-witted.”

She’d just called me stupid. “Hey.”

“That’s the thing,” Aidan interrupted. “She’s not Lucky Hamilton.”

Saga’s pale, flower-fairy face burned with rage, but the fury came and went so fast it could have been a trick of the faint light from the single oil lamp. “Who are you then, lass?” she asked.

“Christabel.”

“And what are you to the Drakes?” She was ominous, violent, like a sudden mudslide sweeping away half a town’s oldest houses.

“Nothing.” I thought of Connor and Nicholas and wondered just what the hell they were into.

“That is unfortunate.”

It suddenly felt unfortunate. Very unfortunate.

“She knows Lucky. I think they’re kin.”

“Is this about drugs?” I asked lamely, remembering the jar in Lucy’s hallway last night. I looked around, eyes uncomfortably wide as I fought an inexplicable surge of fatigue. I searched but couldn’t see any drug paraphernalia, not that I actually knew what it would look like. My mother was strictly into liquor. But if this were a drug lab, surely I’d be able to tell?

“She was driving Lucy’s car,” Aidan explained apologetically.

“Son of a bitch.”

While they stared at each other, I took the opportunity to dart out the open door. I nearly broke my ankle avoiding a rotten floorboard. When I leaped off the porch onto the dirt road, I should have kept running for my life—mountain lions, forest snows, and my utter lack of direction be damned. But I couldn’t move. I could only stare as a creature shuffled out onto the deserted street.

He was a deeper, more vibrant blue than Aidan and Saga, and he had even more teeth. When the wind shifted I got a mouthful of his smell: not just mushrooms but rotting mushrooms, not just damp but stagnant swamp. I gagged. Something about the way he moved made my hands clench and sweat soak the back of my shirt. He didn’t say anything, just licked his lips. His eyes caught the faint light from the moon when the clouds parted. He inhaled deeply and snapped his jaws again, saliva dripping from his teeth.

Then he came at me, snarling.

And I knew I couldn’t outrun him.

I tried anyway.

I whirled, trying to get back to the relative safety of the porch and the broken house and the slightly less crazy, less blue people inside.

I didn’t make it.

He grabbed my hand, yanking me backward as I was running forward. My shoulder jerked painfully. I screamed. I was locked in place, twisted unnaturally, and he was trying to lick my hand.

Gross.

And weird.

I pulled harder, feeling sharp, sudden fear in every part of my body—my head, my knees, my spleen, and, most of all, my stinging hands.

And then Aidan was there, faster, stronger, and crazier. He grabbed the blue man’s wrist and broke it, snapping it as easily as if it were a dry twig. The man howled. Something howled back in response from behind one of the buildings, and it wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t animal or human. And it wasn’t alone.

“One of the whelps got loose, did it?” Aidan said, his hands suddenly full of slender, sharpened sticks. No, not sticks. Stakes. One caught the man in the neck and, as he jerked back, another caught him in the chest. Aidan used the heel of his hand to shove the stake through skin and flesh and bone. My stomach threatened to turn inside out.

But it had to wait while my brain threatened the same thing, because the creature clutched at his chest, gurgling in pain before he crumbled into ashes. He looked like soot and crushed embers in the dirt. My vision wavered and my shoulder ached. I trembled all over. Aidan kept me in place, his hand on my wrist. I prayed he wouldn’t break it, too.