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I push the plunger and hold it down, praying this stuff works. She starts wailing and wreathing. Her human face changes from pasty white to gold to a sickly green and back again.

Bone snaps and it’s not hers. It’s mine. My right hand is useless. The syringe falls away.

She keeps digging those tusks into my skin.

I’m not sure plan B is even possible. I’m not sure escape is possible. I’m not sure how anyone is going to explain this one to the cops.

Then her eyes roll into the back of her head (both sets of eyes in both heads) and she topples over backward.

Her tusky grip on my wrist, however, gets stronger.

I probably only have a few minutes. I’m trapped by those damn tusks, but I still have one hand free. That it’s the hand with the damaged arm is less important than it would have been, say, half an hour ago.

I grab a regular knife, the closest thing I have to the knife Raj used on me, and proceed to use it to slit the alligator within from gullet to gizzard. Then I pull out the tusks.

They still don’t come off my wrist. It’s like they’ve adhered on.

But the alligator within has curled up and turned black, and because I’ve seen it before, I know that means only one thing.

She’s dead.

I was going to slip out the balcony and rappel down the side of the building, just like they taught us in assassin school, but with one arm disabled and one useless wrist, I’m not going anywhere—at least by rope.

I have to let myself out of the hotel room and slither unrecognizably down the hall.

Not for the first time do I wish assassins of the magical are given their own powerful magic. I have to keep my head down and my movements inconspicuous like any other hired killer.

And I can’t think about the searing pain in my wrist.

I get to the stairwell and stagger down, careful to always look away from the cameras.

All the way, I’m reevaluating my thinking. Maybe I should have killed her the prescribed way. Of course, how do you explain to university and hotel personnel that a famous writer has gone missing and in her hotel room is a dead alligator? It was hard enough to explain that the first time when the chaos demon wasn’t famous.

It’d be even tougher now.

No. I used poor Raj to my own advantage. He’ll get blamed for Margarite’s death (that’s why I used the same kind of knife) and the cops’ll decide that after killing her, he came after me. Maybe, they’ll say, he was going to kill everyone connected to the workshop.

Poor guy. If I could rehabilitate him, I would. But right now, I need a crazy version of Raj, not a brain-washed version. And I have to get back to my room before anyone sees me.

It’s not as hard as it seems. As long as I keep my tusked wrist tucked inside my purse, no one looks at me. I walk as best I can back to campus and back to my room.

Once there, I use an all-purpose pair of pliers in my nondominant hand to try to remove the tusks. It’s so hard to do, I almost have to get help. (The question of who is what stops me.) Finally I manage to get the things off, but not before I hear my stitches rip.

The bone is broken, but I can’t do anything about that now. Tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital, say they overlooked the wrist, and I didn’t notice until morning. By then the scrapes will have bruised up nicely, and they’ll look more like something you’d get in a fight with a human than, say, a tusked alligator.

I clean the new wound, bandage it as best I can one-handed, then take as many painkillers as I can without killing myself and fall into bed.

When I wake up, it’s twenty- four hours later, and Carlotta Sternke is sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I was afraid you were dead,” she says in a tone that implies she wasn’t afraid at all but was, in fact, looking forward to it. “We cleaned up your floor.”

We, it turns out, was Hamlet Thorshov and Norman Zell. Turns out I had misjudged them. What I took for alienation was actually friendship among the most antisocial of writers.

They want to take care of me. I let them discover