She is seventeen the first time she kills.

They stand in an alley stained by neon lights and midnight shadows; her eyes are red-rimmed and her throat ravaged from rage-induced screaming. Isaak Peak is one more shot of stolen whiskey away from hurling his guts when he starts bragging about how he did it, how he killed Kayla Hoffman, how he got away with murder.

It was Kayla who Catherine first met when they bumped into one another in the lunch line and exchanged gap-tooth smiles.

Kayla, who spent more nights at Catherine's house than her own, two girls wrapped in sleeping bags as they stared at that plaster ceiling and traced faces in the cracks.

Kayla, who draped a gold necklace around Catherine's neck in seventh grade and said, "Well, you are my best friend, right?" while her dark cheeks burned with color.

Kayla, who told Catherine exactly forty-two nights before she died that she might be in love with Isaak Peak and begged her best friend not to give her that look because "He's not a bad guy."

Forty-two nights later, they call Catherine in to identify the body because Kayla's mother has passed on, and her father disappeared so many years before. They leave Catherine as the final mooring to Kayla's sinking ship, and she feels herself suck in the same drowning waters as her dead friend when she looks upon her bruised, ruined countenance ringed by a halo of wet curls on a sterile metal table.

"She didn't drown, man, not really," Isaak Peak brags to his leering buddy. They're in the seediest bar downtown Dedwich has to offer, and Catherine is only there because it's the only place—the best place—for a minor to get drinks. The bartender doesn't challenge his boss, a criminal in all but name who takes capitalism a little too far. Catherine is there because she doesn't want to feel or to think. She wants to cripple her mind for one more night, just one more night.

Three hundred and sixty-two nights have passed since Kayla's end, and Catherine sees Isaak Peak drinking cheap, scummy liqueur with a smile on his deceptive face and a girl at his hip, slurring his words as he tells them about poor little Kayla Hoffman. She was so eager to grow up, to please, to part her thighs—and Isaak says, "She didn't drown, man, not really. I held her under. I did what you do with all whining bitches."

It has been four hundred and forty-four nights since Kayla whispered, "I think I love Isaak Peak." Three hundred and sixty-two nights ago, Catherine sobbed over the ruined form of a girl who could have been her sister, and thirty-one nights have dribbled by since Isaak Peak was cleared of all charges based on lack of evidence.

His sits in a bar smelling of spilled beer and pot smoke, and he laughs about an innocent, naive girl's death. He doesn't see Catherine because no one ever does. She is thin and small-boned, bespectacled and sallow, kept together by live wires of grief and rage: a marionette setting fire to her own strings.

The line for the restroom is too long. Peak goes into the alley to take a piss, foul creep that he is, and Catherine follows. She screams at him—up at him—and he grins, two moles under his right eye dappled like spilled ink, and he asks, "Who are you?" Catherine wants him to know. She wants him to know so badly she pushes Isaak, the thud of flesh solid under her quivering palms, and he careens into the brick wall at his back, too inebriated to stand.

Catherine shoves him again, again. She grabs him by the shoulders, her fingers twisting and clawing at his leather jacket, and she slams him bodily against the stone and mortar. She doesn't know where the strength comes from, only that it is a byproduct of something, of two volatile emotions meeting inside her head, thrusting adrenaline into her veins, into her hands, and all she sees is that cocky grin and Kayla's blank, dead eyes.

He puts up a token protest, slapping at her arms, vomiting on their shoes, then his head bounces on the bricks one last time, and Isaak Peak slumps on the bottom of the dirty alley beneath Catherine. She pants, wide-eyed and trembling, as blood crests and spills from the crown of his head. It glitters in the neon.

Something breaks and roars inside her, roars like the rising sea, brackish like the salt on Kayla's dead skin, on Isaak's dead lips, on Catherine's damp lashes.

She runs home, not caring that it's miles away, not caring how her lungs burn or how her broken fingers ache. She is seventeen the first time she feels someone's lifeblood turn into a sticky mess on her skin. She's seventeen when she has her last drink. Sometimes she still sees Isaak Peak's ghost, his specter, that last imprint of him upon this world stuck inside her head like a fucking disease. He wakes her up in the middle of the night, crouched over her bed, two moles beneath his right eye, asking, "Who are you?"

She is seventeen when she first realizes women are the most violent creatures alive.

x X x

Catherine is twenty when she takes her next life.

He isn't Isaak Peak, but he's close, a facsimile of her first monster, older and stronger and more vicious for his intent, rather than his slurred, maligning apathy. They even look somewhat alike: tanned faces, bleached teeth, light hair, odeur de richesse clinging to the fashionably distressed clothes bought with their daddy's cash. Isaak Peak had been on the outs with his family, but Luke Elliott is not, and the privilege shows.

He is a petulant boy in a man's body demanding more, building monuments in the desert even as he refuses to see how the sand devours his legacy like Ozymandias. College track star, quarterback, heartthrob—look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Three girls all claim he's the one, that they're getting married in the spring. Boys snap to attention when he passes by. Luke Elliott scours his name deep with every achievement, builds himself an empire brick by brick, and still he seeks more, more, more.

King of Kings indeed.

Catherine is still bird-like in build and small in stature, but she keeps a tidy artifice, her red hair brushed and braided, her glasses cleaned, her nails clipped. Those who do see her behold nothing but a quiet, delicate young woman of immense scholarly aptitude, studying Shakespeare and psychology and anatomy in her free time. No one realizes the bird has changed, has relived that night in downtown Dedwich over and over and over again. She presses her fingers together as if expecting them to still have that tacky kiss of blood on them. Catherine is something else entirely now.

Three years of intense Krav Maga courses taken in the evening have passed her by, and the adder coils low in Catherine's chest, her body tightly wound, her mind tethered by the continuous ticking of the ugly watch on her wrist. She sits in class, and the ghost of Isaak Peak breathes down her neck.

Who are you?

Luke Elliott sees her and covets because Catherine doesn't see him. He sits next to her in their shared introductory courses and steals her textbooks, saying, "Let's share, yeah?" She doesn't want to share, but Luke brushes aside her refusals. He puts his number into her phone, his pen marks in her books, the scent of his deodorant on her clothes when he throws an arm around her shoulders.

"We're not friends," Catherine snaps when he persists.

Luke Elliott smiles. "What do you mean?" No one has denied him before.

Catherine thinks of Isaak Peak and the sound of his body hitting the ground.

When entreating her fails Luke Elliott, he decides he will simply take, that she is just as confused as the rest of her gender: malleable, pretty, the coquette who must say no but who clearly means yes. He follows her into the empty parking structure, pins her against the side of her car, and the metal bites as hard against her hip as his arousal does.

She snarls, tells him to back off, and he twists one of her arms until tears threaten.

"C'mon, stop messing around," he mouths against her neck, teeth in her skin as if he thinks to devour her. The audacity acts like a ripcord to Catherine's rage, but her monster isn't the same emaciated animal who lashed out in that neon-lit alleyway and savaged Isaak Peak. She is not the injured creature who rips and tears and claws; she has become the snake whose venom confutes her size, and she needs only to bite, to sink her teeth in once, to destroy.

Her elbow swings into his kidney, stunning him, then the heel of her foot slams into his knee. Luke goes down and would have, perhaps, screamed at the twisted angle of his leg, but Catherine's fist strikes his throat and chokes the sound.

It looks like his football career is over. Poor King of Kings. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay—.

Catherine could stop. She stands at the cusp of becoming something other; not something greater or lesser, only other, not her, something as unfamiliar and strange as the alien depths of the ocean. Like the striking balance between shadow and light, there is a delineation, and Catherine sees it, registers the fall of darkness against her toes, her face, her hands.

She steps into it.

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare—.

Furious, she throws Luke Elliott to his back. A breath issues from his lungs as his heavy body slaps the pavement and his arms snap out, swinging wildly in alarm, and though his fist glances across Catherine's jaw, she needs only to strike him in the solar plexus to stun the brute again. She isn't trained to subdue; she's trained to ruin. With a knee grinding into his sternum, Catherine presses forward, forearm on his throat, and leans down.

The quarterback—the former quarterback, the would-be rapist—chokes and scrambles for purchase, and Catherine's hold restrains both his torso and his hands. She stares into his face, as vengeful as the sea and just as detached, seeing Luke Elliott and Isaak Peak and all those hateful, vapid people who look upon her and sneer.

"Do I look like I'm messing around?" she whispers.

His cheeks are blue, his eyes bloodshot.

Luke Elliott's end is not as quick as television makes it seem; strangulation is a messy conclusion, dangerous, seconds passing into minutes, waiting, muscles quivering with exertion, a thin film of perspiration soaking the back of her blouse. He lays still after some time, and Catherine breaks his neck with one clean, solid blow to the jaw, turning his head at the proper—or improper—angle. He is a boy wearing the flesh of a man, spoiling the kingdom that stretches at his feet, baiting the viper with taunts of her impotence.

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Catherine stands. He is not Isaak Peak. There is no blood but for her own, her knuckles bleeding where they scraped the concrete. She uses a sterile wipe from her purse to steal her fingerprints from his flesh, her blood from the stone, the mist of her breath from his face. Tucking the wipe into a pocket, Catherine kicks Luke Elliott's legs aside, gets into her car, and drives away. Her hands shake on the steering wheel as she watches the oncoming headlights flicker across the highway.

The impression of him wakes her in the night, nothing more than a smear of black and ultraviolet constellations, crooning, "Stop messing around."

When they announce Luke Elliott's death in class, some people cry. Some girls embrace and affect loud, wracking, tearless sobs. Some boys hang their heads or clap each other on the shoulder in consolation.

Rhonda Tillman has to stand and leave the room. Others are inclined to think she's in weeping hysterics, but Catherine hears her peals of laughter booming joyous and unrestrained. Marissa Meeks—quiet, pale, considerate Marissa Meeks who always sits as far from Luke as she can—smiles into her hand, eyes shimmering with relief. Catherine sees that smile and shares one of her own.

Her hands no longer shake.

C'mon, stop messing around.

x X x

She is twenty-nine and spell-checking criminal reports when the FBI comes for the Hangman, but Catherine Themis is only seventeen, grieving and naive and angry, the first time she wipes someone else's blood from her fingers and feels the snake rise in her chest. She is seventeen when she steps into the dark and never looks back.