by Darcy Coates
When Dorran spoke, he sounded like he was having trouble breathing. “The door is open.”
“The garden door?” Clare frowned. “How—”
“Don’t move.” He let go of her. Clare pressed her lips together, hand still outstretched, waiting. His coat rustled, and she knew he must be feeling through his pockets.
He hissed his frustration. “The garden’s key is gone. They must have taken it when they caught me.”
Clare twisted to face the wine cellar’s entryway. She couldn’t see it, but she could picture the cavernous archway leading directly into the worst parts of the house… and inviting its denizens out. “We can still shelter in the garden. We’ll lock it from the inside, and even if they have the key, they won’t know how to use it.”
“Unless there is another intelligent one,” he murmured.
Clare hadn’t considered it before. Cold sweat stuck her shirt to her back. It seemed too cruel to think that Madeline wasn’t the only mindful monster that called Winterbourne home. She licked dry lips. “We need the keyring.”
“Did you bring it with you?”
“No.” She cursed herself. “I left it in our room.”
“Then we will go there.”
She wanted to tell him that it was too dangerous to think about moving through the house, but screams interrupted her thoughts. The noises came from the opposite direction that they had before, rising from the stairwell that led into the furnace room. Dorran pressed her shoulder then took her hand again. He pressed her towards the chamber’s entrance leading back into the main part of the house.
Something had opened the garden’s door and presumably destroyed its lights. Clare silently prayed it hadn’t killed the plants, as well. That would be Madeline’s style, though. Clare could imagine her leaving instructions with her minions to destroy her child’s chance of survival in the event that Madeline died.
There was no time to dwell on the possibilities. Dorran, familiar with the passageways, increased his speed, and Clare had to jog to keep up to his long paces. She marvelled at his ability to run into what might be certain death. The edge of an archway grazed her shoulder, and Clare knew they were moving out of the servant’s areas.
Dorran’s outstretched arm hit a door, and it burst open with a bang. Finally, Clare could see. She sucked in a breath in appreciation of the sunset leaking through Winterbourne’s half-boarded windows, but the air caught in her throat. Something moved ahead.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“What—” Dorran pressed his mouth shut.
A hollow lay on the floor. It lifted its head, jaw quivering with a muted hiss. Gangly arms reached forward and began to drag its body towards them. The monster’s body ended at its waist. A clump of intestines spread behind it, painting a trail of red across the tiles like a repulsive paintbrush. Behind it, Madeline’s effigy had been destroyed. The bones and ropes of hair were strewn across the marble floor, torn apart as though in a fury.
Clare’s mind went blank. The sight was too horrible and too perplexing to take in properly. She couldn’t imagine what was capable of severing a hollow in half. Normally hollows focussed on biting into the nearest flesh, rather than inflicting widespread damage.
The hollow lifted itself as high as it could, hands slapping on the floor as it eagerly crawled towards them. Dorran finally moved, pushing Clare towards the stairs. They circled the foyer in a wide arc, avoiding the creature that unerringly rotated to face them.
A chorus of chattering voices rose from all directions. The light was bad enough that Clare could barely make out the stair rails, but she still ran. One monster appeared behind them, clambering along the walls, its head bulging like a deformed bulb. Clare just ran—snatching at Dorran’s sleeve to keep him close, breaths shallow and raw. Her whole body ached.
They skidded as they reached the third-floor landing, and Clare barely grazed the wall as they raced for their room. The chattering calls suddenly broke into screams, awful and unending, so loud that they seemed to rattle the paintings on the walls. Their room was directly ahead. She’d left the door open when she went in search of Dorran; firelight glowed through the opening. Something snagged at her shoulder, fingernails grazing through fabric, then disappeared again.
Then they were through the door, and Dorran slammed it behind them. Clare snatched the keyring off the floor where she’d dropped it. They turned the door’s latch and stepped back as the scratch of fingernails roved around the door’s edges.
We did it. Clare doubled over, breathless and shaking. Madeline is dead. We’re safe. It’s so close to being over.
She reached out to Dorran. “Are you all right?”
“Hah.” He tucked her in against himself, holding her. He smelt like smoke, dust, and hollows, but Clare didn’t care. His hands trembled as he let her go. “We should search the room.”
“Yeah.” Clare blinked to clear her eyes. They still couldn’t let their guard down. The door had been left open.
The meddling was in small doses and, in some cases, almost undetectable. But Clare’s anxiety was high, and as she looked about the space, the sense of wrongness only intensified. The curtains were all closed. She was sure at least one had been open when she had left the room. The blankets by the fire looked more rumpled than she remembered. She pictured a hollow picking through them, crawling among her bed, and felt sick.
Dorran went straight to the fire poker. He indicated for Clare to stay in the room’s corner, where she would be sheltered, but she narrowed her eyes, picked up the shovel from beside the fireplace, and shadowed him.
The search took only a few moments as they scoped out the normal hiding places: behind the curtains, the wardrobe, under the bed, and in the bathroom.
Dorran’s breath hissed between his teeth as their search ended at the bathroom’s second door, which opened into the adjacent bedroom. The cabinet they had used to block it was gone. Dorran turned the lock, re-engaging it, and pushed a chair under the handle to hold it in place. “She made sure she would have a back door into our room if we managed to escape her.”
“Figures. She liked to cover all bets, didn’t she?”
“She did.” Dorran stared at the door for a moment then abruptly swivelled and returned to the bedroom. “Oh, Clare.” He took her head in his hands and, for a moment, simply stared down at her. There was a strange, frightened sense of wonder in his eyes, as though he couldn’t believe she was really there. Then he tilted forward to rest his forehead against hers, his skin warm and damp, his breath ghosting over her, his eyelashes close enough to brush against her cheeks.
Clare rose onto her toes to graze her lips across his. It was more of a taste than a kiss. He shivered at the touch.
“You left your room.” There wasn’t any reproach in his words, just the same dull sense of shock.
Clare’s fingers clenched on his shirt, bunching the fabric between them. “She was hurting you.”
“I could take it.” He shook his head a fraction, just enough for his too-long hair to tickle her ear. “I can take anything, if only you are safe.”
“Maybe you could have taken it, but I couldn’t.” She smiled against the bittersweet relief and pain. “What about you? Are you… okay?”
“Of course.” He returned the fire poker to its holder then stared at the low flames. They seemed to entrance him as the lights played over glazed eyes.
Clare took his hand. The fingers felt cold. “It’s okay to feel bad. Today… was not good.”
“No,” he agreed.
Clare licked her lips, trying to pick her words carefully. “I know sometimes you don’t like to talk about bad things right away. And that’s fine. But I’m here to listen when you’re ready.”
He smiled at her. It looked broken. “I don’t know how I feel. I…”
“It’s all right.”
His fingers slid out of hers as he pulled away. “I killed my own mother. I watched as the most important person in my life was tortured. I t
hought I was about to lose everything.”
Clare waited as he worked through his thoughts. It took him a moment. Then he turned back to her, and his smile looked slightly more genuine. “What’s that phrase you used? ‘Today was not good.’”
“It sure wasn’t.” Clare chuckled as she ran her hand over his arm. He flinched, and Clare immediately pulled back.
“I forgot you’re hurt—”
“It will be fine.”
“No, it won’t.” She began tugging at his shirt collar, trying to see the burns. “It must be painful. Unathi’s message—they’re implementing the code today. I hope. You’ll lose half of your thanites and might have other things compromised, too. We need to get this cleaned and dressed.”
He neatly stepped back from her hands, tugging the shirt back into place. “Then I will take care of it.”
He’s done this before. He doesn’t like being seen when he’s in pain. He tries to hide away until it’s over. Because vulnerability was always punished.
For a second, she saw cracks in his outer layer. There was the man she loved—competent, intelligent, powerful, tender towards her, and yet tough enough to endure any attack. Through the gaps, she caught the echoes of a child, frightened and alone, starving for love but terrified to ask for it. It made her heart ache. She gripped his hand and refused to let go when he tried to withdraw again.
“I’m taking care of you.” She kept her voice gentle, coaxing. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
He tried to laugh, not quite fighting her, but still resisting. “You don’t need to do that. Why don’t you wait by the fire? I will clean up in the bathroom and join you in a few minutes.”
“You should know by now that I love you too much to let that happen.” She pulled him towards the chairs, and finally, he relented.
She went through the familiar routine of boiling water and finding the first aid kit. Dorran sat with his back against one of the couches with his shirt hung off one shoulder, so that Clare could work on the burns. They looked deep and had started to blister. She felt sick at the thought of how much they must have been hurting him.
“You don’t have to be so careful,” Dorran said. A faint smile hung around his lips, even though his eyes were tight.
Rubbing antiseptic cream across the burns, Clare moved slowly and carefully, doing her best not to damage the skin any further. As she worked, her mind returned to the escape from the underground cavern. It didn’t make any sense for the hollows to ignore the two vulnerable humans and fight each other.
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe there was only one rogue hollow.
The screams had only ever come from one location at a time. It had been ahead of them in the cavern, moving through the hallway that led to the wine cellar. Then it had attacked the monster on the stairs behind them. Then it had attacked something coming from the furnace room—which meant it had passed right by Clare and Dorran while they stood in front of the garden.
A hollow that prefers hollow flesh. She had never heard of anything like it before, but then, there were a lot of things in the new world that were unexpected. She was sure there would be many aberrations—like the immense monstrosity that had blocked the tunnel—that she simply hadn’t heard of yet.
Whatever had killed the other hollows, it was probably the only reason she and Dorran had made it out of the tunnels. She didn’t know whether to be grateful or repulsed. Clare briefly wondered if it would look like other hollows, bones and skin overgrown, or whether it was something entirely different.
Whatever it is—whatever happened back there—we’ll deal with it tomorrow. After this is all over. After the hollows are gone.
Clare screwed the cap on the antiseptic cream, then she found rolls of white bandages and began unspooling them. “Unathi said the code would be activated at sundown. But it sounded like Evandale was under siege.”
“Their bunker is fortified,” Dorran said. “I am certain they will be safe. We will stay here, where we’re safe, until the code goes live. Though, I lost our food outside the garden…”
Clare grinned. “Good thing we have the tins. We’ll treat ourselves tonight. It’s not every day the world is saved, after all.”
“Hah. True.”
Clare adjusted Dorran’s arm so that she could weave the bandages over his shoulder. “Do you think we’ll know when the code goes live? Or will we just have to open the door and see if anything comes at us?”
“I suppose it depends on how much Becca altered it, and if she was able to remove the negative side effects. I imagine we will feel it, though.”
When Dorran was exposed to the code designed to detonate the thanites, it had crippled him. Without the blood transfusion to return some of the nanobots to his system, he would have died.
The Evandale scientists’ plan to protect against those negative side effects involved destroying only half the thanites. The idea was that the damage would be great enough to kill the hollows, who had significantly more of the machines inside them, while leaving enough healing nanobots in the humans’ systems to repair the damage. Clare prayed the plan would work. The alternative was too awful to consider.
The incessant scrabbling had fallen silent, Clare realised. She pressed her lips together. Somehow, the silence was worse than the sound. Like having a cockroach in the room, but not being able to find it. Clare pushed a pin into the bandages, fastening them closed. “All right, that’s—”
Dorran’s fingers rose, touching her lips, asking for silence. His eyes had darkened. She followed his gaze towards the fire.
Something was moving on the other side of the wall. The noises were subtle enough that Clare wouldn’t have caught them on her own. The sounds were close, as if they were coming from inside the walls. She frowned. Does one of the secret passageways run through there? We never heard anything in it before.
Clare silently placed the unused supplies back into the medical kit and shut its lid. Based on how the noises ran together, Clare guessed more than one creature was traversing the passageway. She hated knowing they were so close, but she tried not to let the sounds play on her nerves. She and Dorran had been through the room repeatedly, testing every wall and every fixture as they searched for hidden compartments. There were none. As long as they stayed where they were, the hollows couldn’t reach them.
Dorran kept still, eyes fixed on the wall at the point where it met the ceiling. The sounds were slowly working their way down. Almost as though—
Clare’s eyes dropped to the fire. It had been allowed to dwindle into coals. Specks of soot fell onto them. Her heart skipped a beat. “They’re coming down the chimney.”
Dorran moved before she could finish speaking. He crossed the room in two quick paces, snatching up the carton of kindling.
How? A clump of soot fell, billowing black smoke over the grate. Clare scrambled back from it as it rolled across their bed. The hollows hate heat. They hate light. They fear fire above everything else.
Dorran forced handfuls of sticks into the fireplace. “The novels I brought you—tear the pages out. Quickly.”
“Ah.” She snatched up the novels and tore out wads of paper, scrunching them up into loose balls. She dropped them directly onto the smouldering coals, trying not to flinch as heat scorched her forearms. Then she rocked back as Dorran took her place, dumping more kindling onto the flame.
The coals were hot, and the response was faster than she’d even hoped. Flames spit upwards, growing quickly as they consumed the dry paper and caught onto the kindling, filling the stone enclosure with heat and light, funnelling up to the outside world. Dorran emptied the kindling basket into it then stepped back.
Hollows screeched. The noise was distorted by the chimney, bounced around and echoed until it was deafening. Clare pressed her hands over her ears. Dorran flinched back as something scraped against the stone, growing closer. A scream rose in volume, then a body landed in the flames, blackened but still alive. Its scarred limbs writhed, and its jaw
flexed even as its eyes bubbled and liquefied in its skull.
Dorran pushed Clare back then picked up the fire poker. A single blow pierced the skull, and the screams choked off. Black smoke rose from the body as flesh charred, and both Clare and Dorran gagged. She had never smelt anything so repulsive before; the musk the hollows all bore intensified and mixed with the sickening tang of burning flesh. Smoke began to fill the room, irritating Clare’s throat even when she covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve.
The frenzied scratching noises in the chimney continued, but they were growing fainter as the creatures fled back to the roof. Clare had seen hollows trapped by a simple car door. They weren’t smart, yet these had figured out which chimney led to the bedroom, and they had persisted despite a fear of fire. Are they still being controlled? Or was this just dumb luck?
Dorran convulsed against the overwhelming smell. He leaned close to the fire, using the poker to pull the blackened corpse free from the flames to stop the cooking process. It tumbled onto the hearth, sending clumps of ash rolling onto what had once been their bed.
No, it can’t be luck. And I don’t believe it’s a second intelligent hollow, either. This is Madeline’s legacy. She left instructions for what was to happen if she died.
The body continued to smoke, its toxic smell making Clare wish they could escape the room and slam the door behind them. They couldn’t, though. Not enough hollows would have been able to fit down the chimney to be a serious threat. They would have been sent in an effort to flush Clare and Dorran out of the room.
Or maybe something more. Madeline was clever. She liked to use distractions.
Clare turned, her throat aching. A cold wind grazed across her back. When she and Dorran had returned to the room, the contents had been tampered with—including the curtains being pulled over the windows. The same windows that relied on a single, internal latch to stay closed. And they had to stay closed, because hollows could climb stone walls.