Chapter 360: Vincent Vale.

"Hey," Vince said.

Daphne kept her eyes on the front of the room. Gertrude had arrived, which usually meant chaos was ten minutes out. The lights caught the edges of bodies still moving on the poles, skin and sweat and the low thrum of music under the rising noise.

"Hey."

"I’m looking for Sherry." He settled into the chair like a man with the evening free, weight dropping easy, one arm along the backrest. "Have you seen her?"

Her heart went the second the name landed—hard, sudden, a single violent kick against her ribs.

She took the glass away from her mouth and set it on the table with her hand still around it, because her hand needed something to be doing. Fingers locked on the stem. Knuckles pale.

"Which Sherry?"

She picked it back up. Her eyes moved. The bar. The door. The gap between the tables. The distance to the front where all the noise was climbing.

"You know exactly who I’m talking about." He didn’t move at all. Not a shift of weight, not a blink. "I can smell her all over you."

Daphne put the glass to her mouth and didn’t drink from it. The rim pressed cold against her lower lip. The wine stayed still.

Across the room the waitress pulled her top off over her head in one clean motion. Bare breasts under the lights. The room shouted for her—raw, loud, hungry.

Something is off about this boy. That is not the boy who sat at the back of my class.

This is a shapeshifter. This has to be a shapeshifter.

And May came back to her. May standing in her kitchen with her face wrong, telling all three of them they were leaving tonight, not tomorrow, and refusing to say why. May turning her comms off and walking out into the dark with Sherry and Becky behind her.

This is it. This is what she saw coming.

Daphne looked at the glass in her hand and felt the weight of it. Thick at the base. Heavier than it needed to be. The stem solid between her fingers.

I’m going to hit him with this.

"Why is your heart pounding?" Vince asked.

His eyes hadn’t left her face once. Not for the shouting, not for the bare skin across the room, not for anything.

"Who are you." Her voice held better than she’d expected. Steady enough. "And what do you want?"

She was already counting the room and the numbers weren’t good. Too many bodies. Too few clear paths. The exit felt a long way off.

"My name is Vincent Vale." He said it while the party went up behind him, the noise swelling. "And you know me from School Central. So let’s not do the part where you pretend."

"Vince." It came out of her before she could stop it. "Are you a shape—"

"No."

He let the word sit. Quiet. Absolute.

"I’m a man who doesn’t find it difficult to take the skin off a beautiful woman."

The noise at the front climbed higher—voices overlapping, music pushing against them.

"And if you’re thinking about the glass." He hadn’t raised his voice once, hadn’t competed with the room. The words simply cut through. "Don’t. You’d be handing me something to open your throat with."

Daphne’s heart was going at a speed it had never gone in her life. Each beat slammed against her sternum, hard enough she could feel it in her throat, in the tips of her fingers still locked around the stem.

"I’m giving you one last—"

He stopped mid-word.

The shouting at the front had changed. Gone up past music and past cheering into something with a different edge on it—rawer, higher, edged with something that wasn’t celebration anymore.

He turned his head.

Gertrude was on the floor, flat on her back with nothing on, legs open wide, and the thin man she’d been beating in the road last week was on top of her. Going at it hard in the middle of the room while the girls danced above them on the poles and the crowd screamed around them—bodies pressed close, voices cracking with heat and drink. Her heavy thighs shook with every thrust. Her mouth was open, loud.

Vince turned back to Daphne.

"I don’t like women who let themselves go."

He reached across and took the wine out of her hand. Fingers closing over hers for a second, then the glass was gone.

"What’s her name?"

"Gertrude." Her voice had nothing left in it. Flat. Empty.

He took one sip. The wine disappeared.

Then closed his hand and the glass went in his fist—sharp crack, sudden pressure—and he picked one long piece out of what landed on the table, the edge glittering under the lights.

"Give me a minute." He stood. The chair scraped back. "And it’s your choice. But running will make your death considerably worse."

He walked toward the front.

Daphne came up out of her chair by degrees, matching him step for step, weight shifting silent, and by the time he reached the crowd she had the exit—door frame under her hand, night air already touching her face.

He took the thin man off Gertrude by the back of the neck and threw him.

Threw him properly, the way you throw a ball—full arm, no hesitation—and the man crossed the room in a blur, hit the far wall hard enough that the impact cracked through the noise, and stopped being alive on the way. Body sliding down, leaving a dark smear.

Before anyone in that bar had turned around, the piece of glass had been through ten throats. Quick. Precise. One after another—arteries opening, blood hitting the floor and the tables and the bare skin of the nearest dancers in bright arcs.

Then they ran. All of them. The girls off the poles, the boys, the women, the ones still holding drinks, everyone at once and in every direction—chairs tipping, glass shattering underfoot, bodies slamming into each other, slipping in the spreading blood, climbing over the dying in the scramble for any way out. Someone fell and was trampled. A girl tried to crawl under a table and was kicked in the face by the person behind her.

He got hold of Gertrude’s ankle as she scrambled to get up, fingers locking hard around the thick flesh. Then the other one. He yanked both legs wide, spreading her completely open on the blood-slick floor, her heavy body sliding. She screamed and clawed at the boards.

And pulled. He pulled with full force, hips and shoulders driving the motion.

The sound was wet and final.

A girl trapped against the wall watched the entire thing—eyes locked on the separation, mouth open in a silent scream—and dropped where she stood, legs simply giving out, urine running down her thighs as she hit the floor.

Daphne’s father stayed in his chair. He watched all of it with his glass still in his hand and no idea at all what he was looking at—face still open, still faintly smiling, the same expression he’d worn for the girls on the poles.

Vince let the halves go and turned back to the table.

She wasn’t there.

"That was very stupid of you," he said.

And went out in black smoke—thin lines rising from his shoulders, the same smoke that had come in with him, swallowing the space where he stood until nothing was left but the reek of blood and the empty chair.