LYDIA WATCHES AS AURELIE—EVERY BIT AS DELICATE as her name, every bit as delicate as their Usher—slides like silk from the settee, her feet not making a sound as they land on the marble of the floor of her penthouse suite.

“It’s barely past sunset,” Lydia pouts, wrapping a throw blanket around herself.

“Mistress needs me,” Aurelie explains, slipping on an ivory cardigan. Against the light fabric, her dark locks fall in stark contrast, grazing her waist.

Lydia rolls her eyes. It irritates her that Aurelie would call their Usher that after so many years; the girl’s years far outnumbering her own. She looks on as Aurelie plaits her hair into a loose mermaid-style braid, wondering what she sees in the vanity mirror. Were she mortal, would she be dust? Putrid, worm-eaten flesh? Something else?

“Don’t be jealous, mon petit oiseau. This target requires . . . finesse.” She sets the antique metal brush down on the marble vanity, the expected clink lost to Aurelie’s Gift of Silence. Her reflection frowns at Lydia through the mirror.

Aurelie inherited not their Usher’s gift, but instead blossomed to become her own: silent as the sunlight that was her namesake, but far deadlier. Truly the only gift like it in the world; the most prized of their Usher’s collection.

“You mean she doesn’t trust me,” Lydia challenges, her voice taking on the edge of a predator whose territory is being threatened. Indeed, that within her slinks nearer the surface, a phantom flush warming her skin. She lets the blanket drop to the floor as she stands, stretching and crossing to the window overlooking the city. A welcome chill rolls off the glass.

Below, traffic drags itself through the falling snow, muffled by a flurry, the street entirely swallowed in white. She always thought the winter beautiful, even when she was between homes. Perhaps that’s why she found herself so comfortable with Aurelie: the silence. She never asked how Lydia came to their Usher’s fang and she returned the favor in kind.

Lydia startles as fingertips graze her skin, sweeping a few stray hairs off the nape of her neck.

“Hush, now,” the woman whispers into her ear. “You know she trusts you. Where is this coming from?”

Mon petit oiseau. My little bird. The nickname rings in the hollows of Lydia’s ears, the innocuous phrase—indeed, a common term of endearment in French—morphing to carry a bile Lydia could nearly taste, a bile something within her could. She’d first come across the words in a letter, written long ago in the scrawling, even handwriting of their Usher and kept in the girl’s copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. She’d happened upon it when Aurelie was called away on another of their Usher’s tasks and it had sparked a fight. Their first and only fight after they became friends. Temperance loved Aurelie best, the letter made that much clear, and still she sent her prized assassin after dangerous targets to settle petty, ancient grudges. Didn’t she care she might lose her?

Aurelie holds her arms out to Lydia—a peace offering. Lydia turns slowly, stepping just slightly forward, closing what little gap remains between them. She wraps her arms around her friend.

“Goodbye,” Lydia whispers into Aurelie’s ear.

The room falls silent, even the sounds of the traffic below quelled as Aurelie’s blood gurgles from her throat and pools on the floor. Lydia needn’t see to know how wide Aurelie’s eyes were as she’s drained of life. Tears wet the cheeks of both women.

Better my fangs in her neck than another consuming her Heartsblood. A mercy kill.

For a moment, everything exists as if in a mirror: the pooling blood and the dull gray of the knit throw blanket. Then ash, her sunlight lost.