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"I’ave Balthazar the cover he needed for the swift movement toward the bedside table In a flash he opened the drawer to find--nothing

He looked up to see Constantia sitting still on the other side of the bed Where the drawer of the bedside table on the left was open And where she’d no doubt found the stake now in her hand

Her eyes were al?"

She betrayed ht in the split second before the stake slammed into his chest

The rest was a kind of darkness that couldn’t be seen, a silence that couldn’t be heard Balthazar kneas not dead, but he knew nothing else At tiht of Charity standing above hi wood--but his mind could not process the information It slipped in and slipped out, unheeded and barely reht fell upon hied the stake

Balthazar screah his chest, if not his heart, with the full pain of a deep stab wound He sucked in a breath and found his lungs filled with sain, he realized that Charity had fulfilled his plan to the letter--she’d siainst Constantia He was the one now trapped in a burning house, half a s his skin, only seconds from oblivion

Charity, why?

But he knehy He had killed his sister She was returning the favor

Despair settled over him, heavier than the beam that pinned him down It would be easy to just lie back and let it happen And yet he couldn’t Maybe that made him a coward Maybe the instinct to survive outlasted death itself

Using all his reth, Balthazar shoved the fallen tied, his skin blackened and blistering The tips of his fingers stuck to the stake he yanked froered toward the nearestand threw hilass stabbed into hile with all the rest

The fall hurt, too; the bones in one foreared to stifle a shout of pain Balthazar crawled away fro Constantia and Charity to arrive at any moment to finish hi the influenza epide their lives for anyone else And apparently Charity and Constantia had already written hie of town, to an abandoned building where rats dwelled andafter his burns and broken bones healed Long after the flu epiderow He spent long days watching a rectangle of light from his room’s one l from one side of the room to the other as the sun rose and set