“She’s quite correct,” Martin said. “You’ll gain no benefit from this. Let her go, and I swear if you’ve hurt that man.….”
“He’s unconscious,” the tall man said. His voice was deep, but sounded strange to Martin, perhaps an accent of some kind? “We’re here for the girl. No harm has to come to anyone in this if you’ll be reasonable.”
“I’ve come to hate the word ‘reasonable’ in the last few days,” Martin said. “Get the hell out of my house, now!” He fired the pistol. There was a sharp crack and the bullet grazed the jacket shoulder of the leader of the masked kidnappers. The masked man did not flinch.
“That was a warning shot,” Martin said.
“Yes,” the tall masked man said. “I know.”
“I can shoot the fleas off a mongrel at a hundred yards,” Martin said. “Now let her go and get out of my house!”
“Can I please take him, mama?” the shortest of the intruders asked the tall leader. He sounded younger too. “I want you to see!”
“We don’t have time for this!” another of the masked men said. “We didn’t need to wake anyone up to take her.”
“As I recall, it was you who seemed to make an uncharacteristic amount of noise,” another kidnapper opined.
“Take him, my сладкий соловей,” the tall leader said.
“Don’t hurt him!” the kidnapper accused of making a loud entrance shouted. The youngster in a mask was halfway up the stairwell before Martin even realized it. He fired the gun at the boy’s feet. “Stay back, I’m warning you!” he said. “I have no desire to shoot a child, but I will if I have to.”
“You can try, old man,” the masked boy said. “Go on, try to shoot me.”
“Lesya!” the tall leader called out. “No, you’re not ready for that!”
“I am, Mother,” the boy said. Martin was confused by the words, but as the youth took another step up toward him, Martin fired at the center body mass, as he had been trained to do. The boy pivoted on the balls of his feet and the bullet whined past him, splintering part of the banister rail as it passed. Horrified, Martin fired again and again at the approaching masked figure, who twisted closer and closer, miraculously dodging the bullets. “Lesya” mis-stepped on the narrow stair and one of Martin’s shots was true, blasting a bloody hole in the youth’s upper shoulder. There was a very feminine-sounding gasp of pain and the intruder stumbled, falling to one knee.
“Lesya!” the tall leader screamed. Martin looked down at the child on his knees, shuddering in pain and shock. When he looked up, the tall leader was on him, as if she had magically appeared. “грязное животное!” the masked leader snarled, his voice also slipping and sounding strangely feminine now. “How dare you hurt her, you filthy animal! She’s a child!” The gun was plucked out of Martin’s right hand and twisted as the weapon was pulled away. He felt the bones of his fingers and hand snap like dry twigs, felt terrible pressure and burning pain as the nerves caught up with the damage quickly. The next blow from the masked man snapped Anderton’s ribs and drove them deep into his organs. Martin moaned in pain as he fell to his knees.
“Damn it, Inna,” the noisy intruder shouted and raced up the stairs, as the others followed.
The small intruder holding Miss Applewhite touched her temple. “Sleep now, dream.” The governess made a soft cooing sound and slid to the floor. The tall masked man had Martin by his night shirt and was about to strike him again.
“Let him be, or I swear I’ll snap her neck!” Constance’s voice came from behind Inna. To Martin’s eyes his granddaughter had seemingly appeared out of thin air, but Inna and the other Daughters knew the Stapleton girl was making exceedingly good use of the stealth skills her mother had taught her. The Russian Daughter continued to hold Martin as she looked over her shoulder.
“Constance?” Martin groaned. He must be losing his faculties. His sweet, innocent granddaughter was holding the marauder he had shot in some kind of wrestling hold. Her eyes were steely and sure. Martin struggled to make any of this nightmare make sense, even as Inna understood only too well what was happening.
Constance had her daughter, Lesya, in a submission hold; it would take her only the slightest pressure to crack the girl’s spinal column and kill her. Lesya struggled to stay awake, but blood was gushing from her shoulder wound.
“Let him go,” Constance said through gritted teeth. She shifted to put the stairwell wall behind her. Amadia, Itzel and Leng Ya were below her on the staircase. Everything had a nauseating sense of familiarity to it. Constance had dreamed all the outcomes, and knew whatever she did it wouldn’t matter, it all led her to the same singularity of fate. She felt damned, doomed.
Constance’s dreams now contained the addition of a woman and a man, both in deep shadow, both struggling to grab her and pull her into their darkness. When they grabbed her, Constance felt her own personality draining away, drowning in the immense oceans of their power, their age and their will. She stood on a tiny island of self between them. She had seen her grandfather die, her mother die. She had to change that outcome, no matter the cost to her.
“If you tend to your daughter soon, she will live,” Constance said, “but if you force us into a stalemate, she’ll die.”
Constance didn’t get a chance to finish. Lesya slipped free of the hold, and using her one good arm, tossed Constance away. Constance crashed through the hard wood of the banister and fell toward the floor below. She managed to right herself and landed, crouched on her feet.
“Silly,” Lesya said. “Your mother never taught you the counter to that hold? She is a poor teacher. My mother did.”
Inna tossed Martin over the rail and he tumbled to the floor, head and neck first, near Constance. He was not moving. The Russian scooped up her daughter. “We will get this cared for at once, my darling nightingale. You did very well, but it was foolish what you did with the bullets. You are not ready for that yet.”
“But I dodged three,” Lesya said, and nodded into unconsciousness.
Constance was beside her grandfather. Martin’s breathing was a gurgling wheeze. She moved her trembling fingers over his torso. Broken ribs, lacerated organs, internal bleeding and spinal injury from the fall. Her grandfather was dying. She looked up the four assembled Daughters of Lilith with tears in her eyes. “You can save him, please.”
“Take the girl,” Inna said. “We’ll be on our way to the ship.”
“No,” Amadia said, stepping away from the Russian. “This is madness, my old friend. We are not like this, we are behaving like the Sons; we are kidnapping, murdering for no reason. This girl and her mother are not our enemies, they are like us. This man was defending his flesh and blood, as any of us would do. No more. I’m done doing Alexandria Poole’s dirty work.”
The Russian was silent.
“Amadia,” Itzel said, “please, my friend, we have no choice.”
“The very first thing we all learned,” Amadia said, “is that you always have a choice. You live with the consequences of those choices. I’m choosing.”
Amadia flipped down to stand beside Constance and Martin. “You want her, you will have to kill me first,” Amadia said.
“Very well,” Leng Ya said. “You stand alone, Amadia Ibori. If you try to stop us from fulfilling the mission, I have no desire to kill you…”
“Oh, Ya, you and I have wanted to kill each other since the day we met. You detest me,” Amadia said, “and I have no love for you.”
“True,” Ya replied. “But I shall not, unless you give me cause by interfering in our duty. You seem to be incapable of understanding one must often do odious things for the collective good. You revel in your uniqueness, and that makes you a poor member of any group that you associate with. I find it most disgusting.”
“Please.” Constance looked up to Amadia. “I’ll go with them, I won’t fight. Just please save him, and my mother. She’s in terrible danger. It’s the Sons, and he’s with them.”
“These women, they mean to kill you, you know that?” Amadia said. Constance nodded.
“Please save them,” the girl said again. “Tell them both I love them, and they were worth what comes next.”
Amadia knelt by Martin. Constance gently helped her lay him on his back. His breathing was not regular, and he made a whistling groan. The other Daughters descended the staircase. Constance kissed Martin’s forehead and then stood, her legs like water, and walked to join her kidnappers.
“I am ready to face my fate,” Constance said.
“Last chance to change your mind, my dear friend,” Inna said. Amadia said nothing and began to work on Martin. “Very well,” the Russian said, “to the ship, and back to London.”
“Thank you,” Constance said to Amadia.
“Don’t thank me for this, child.”
The Daughters departed, and Amadia and Constance exchanged one final glance before the girl and her captors disappeared.
24
Death
Charleston, South Carolina
May 23, 1871
“You don’t remember me, Maude? How disappointing,” Typhon said. “After all we went through together in that dreary oubliette beneath Golgotha? Promises were exchanged, I saved your life, and this is how you repay me.” The thing disguised as a man tsked. He didn’t do it very well.
“I … remember … being shot at by cultists,” Maude said, groggily. “Madmen taking over the town. I fell into the old dry well. There was a voice, and pain.”
“Yes,” Typhon said, almost hissing. “You do remember, good. I was that voice. I am that pain.”
It was so hard to think, to focus. Maude wanted to pass out. The drug that had introduced her to the Daughter’s Record had put a terrible strain on her body and her mind. Her fever had broken, but it had done its damage. She knelt next to Isaiah and checked his pulse. He was alive, but badly beaten, and in need of medical care at once. His knuckles were raw and bloody; he had put up a hell of a fight.
“He tried to stop us,” Typhon said. “It was a valiant struggle for an old man. He is dear to you?”
“Yes,” Maude said, her hand cradling Isaiah’s cold face.
“Well, he’s dying,” Typhon said, chuckling. It sounded like gravel crunching, and Maude looked up at him with seething hatred. “My condolences—is that the right term, condolences? I’m really out of practice at pretending to be human.”
Rage filled her, and it was the only fuel Maude had left to burn. Calm discipline wouldn’t get her up off the floor right now. She swept Typhon’s legs. It felt like trying to trip the planet, but he tumbled down and back, crashing into the chairs before the fireplace.
The men, Typhon’s agents, detached from the shadows and spilled forward. They were dressed in dark clothing, heavy coats, derby hats shielded part of their faces. None of them seemed to be deformed as the Sons in Charleston had been, but her perception was still twisting and spinning under the aftereffects of the hallucinogen. Everything strobed between real time and frozen, distorted instants.
They were coming at her from every possible direction, except for the fireplace at her back. Maude could no longer afford to restrain herself and she no longer wanted to. Everything that had happened with her father, the terrible emotional blood-letting of the trial, the nightmares eating her daughter alive, the forces trying to abduct and kill Constance, and now Isaiah dying on the floor while she had been wandering helplessly on some damn fool vision quest. Enough.
Maude drew the iron fireplace poker while still crouched next to Isaiah, and swung low with it, using Kenjutsu techniques Gran had helped her master decades ago. The poker tore the legs off the first of the men to close with her at the knees.
As his body was dropping, Maude stayed low in a Suwari No Tori stance and drove the poker upward, under the rib cage and into the chest of the next incoming attacker, burying it there. As he struggled with his last breath, she let the poker go and scooped up a handful of hot ash and a glowing coal from the fireplace. She willed the pain in her hand to a distant and unimportant place, and discovered that the anger helped her with that too. She arose fluidly, turning as she did, and tossed the fine soot into the eyes of three of the men coming at her from the right; she popped the hot coal in the gaping mouth of a fourth, and followed it up with a one-inch punch to his diaphragm that forced him to gulp and swallow the burning ingot even as it sent him flying backward, destroying an end table and then splintering the wooden wall with his impact before he slid to the floor, dead, smoke wafting from his mouth. Her hand, palm down, flashed in an arc in front of her three blinded attackers, and their throats slid open, slit by her razor sharp nails. With her free hand, she retrieved the poker from the dying man’s heart and took an In No Kamae position with it, the poker upright and close to her face, ready for the next attacker. In less than three seconds, six of Typhon’s men were dead.
That was the moment when the world itself rose up and smashed into her. Her perceptions tumbled, melted away, as the remnants of the hallucinogen, her fever, her dehydration, and her exhaustion all crashed into her. Maude stepped back, trying to think, trying to clear her head.
Four more attackers fell on her, striking her jaw, her stomach, her head. Everywhere was a fist or a boot. Maude saw flashes of brilliant light behind her eyes. She tried to roll with the onslaught, but her mind was spinning. Her body remembered what to do but it was beyond exhaustion. The pain and weariness began to wash over her anger and extinguish it. What did she have left other than the anger to keep her on her feet? The iron poker clattered to the floor, free of her numb fingers.
She heard the man-monster, Typhon, speaking calmly over the sounds of his men beating her, again and again. “That was impressive. If you were in your prime right now, you would have taken them all, Maude.”
She tasted blood, managed to counter another punch, deflect a kick, but Maude couldn’t clear the weary buzzing out of her head, couldn’t direct her body to obey. She was acting on pure muscle memory, with very little muscle left behind it.
“These are not my Sons, not like the ones you fought in Charleston,” Typhon said. “These are the Unfeeling. They are acolytes, much like you and your sisters are until you take the Blood of Lilith. They have pledged themselves to my service. Most of them, when the Sons find them, are beaten down by this obscene joke called life. They are usually trained young. You’d be surprised how many cast-off children there are out there in the world.”
Something ruptured in Maude’s side from the kick of a steel-toed boot, popping like a balloon, and Maude gasped in pain. A powerful fist drove her head down, and she almost fell. Her palm shot upward and drove into someone’s larynx with a crunch, another one dead. How many did that leave, three, four? The drugs were still twisting and bending her mind. Maude wanted to vomit so badly, to just close her eyes and give in to the pain, the fatigue, but she knew if she allowed herself to do so, she was done.
“They have suffered much, burned and damaged their nerves, undertaken brutal training, so that they no longer feel, to further divorce themselves from life. For as you know, dear Maude—quite intimately at the moment—to feel, to live, is to allow yourself to know pain.”
Maude fell to one knee. If she just had a moment to focus, if the dull buzz in her head would just stop … if the constant pounding, kicking would pause. There was a way to get clear of this, she couldn’t fall.
“Some Unfeeling undertake a ritual, much as your kind does,” Typhon said. “They drink of my blood, the blood of my creator, and they become one with us, become stronger, harder to kill, and virtually immune to pain. The blood … changes each of them, alters them from the obscene creator’s image of perfection and brings out their savage beauty, their true nature.”
“What … are … you?” Maude muttered. Her blood sprayed everywhere as she tried to speak.
“An excellent question,” Typhon said. “Are you still aware enough for the answer? I’ll assume you are. If it helps
your little meat-mind to understand, I am the monster at the heart of the world’s nightmares made real. The closest approximation would be what the fakirs of the east would call a tulpa. I am a projection of the Great Olde Wurm’s desire, its anger and lust to end the accursed noise of life, given life. I’m the Wurm’s child; I, and my little brother, were created long ago to give birth to more monsters, more agents of death.”
It was getting difficult for Maude to focus at all. For a second she felt she was slipping away from her body again, and was thankful for the retreat. She heard a million million voices speaking to her, calling out her name, and in her head, she saw a white light. No, she had to stay with her body, no matter the pain. She couldn’t run away, she couldn’t give up. Constance, Isaiah, she had to save them. There had to be a way. There was always a way … Gran’s words, Gran’s voice. “Let us help you…” the voices of the Record whispered, “listen…”
“Your accursed ‘Mother’ was once my mate,” Typhon said. “She was magnificent in her primal fury at the Divine for her treatment. She felt betrayed, and rightly so. Our union was violent and brutal and perfect. The Great Dying … glorious. We were in love.” The Unfeeling were snarling and laughing as they continued to beat Maude, the vicious circle blocking her view of Typhon. “Of course, she allowed her anger and her resolve to waiver,” Typhon said, shaking his oddly shaped head. He tried adjusting his illusion of humanity, as a human might adjust his shirt collar if it were too tight. “She came to love this little shit ball, hurtling alone in defiance of the void. Came to love its people. So ‘Lilith,’ as you call her, turned on me, betrayed me and our children. The bitch.”
Typhon tried to peer into the circle. “Are you still alive, Maude?” he asked. “Still sensate? I hope so, I promised my men they could do whatever they like with you once they had broken you. I’m disappointed. I figured you’d at least make it through the Unfeeling. I have my full Sons outside, waiting for a chance at you.”
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