In one corner of the basement a tiny patch of mushrooms nursed on a wet patch of floor. They were getting bigger. She ran. No, more like she jumped, like an antelope running from a cheetah.
She found a stairway in the corner of the basement farthest from the mushrooms. She stomped up the stairs, flew up them two at a time. At the first landing she finally managed to turn and look back. A broad brown stain was creeping across the concrete floor. The wood banister of the stairwell was cracked. Trumpet-shaped fungi peeked out of that crevice. Sarah ran again, upward, away from the basement. She could hear rustling down there. The sound of rot and blight and smut growing at a horribly accelerated pace.
If it touched her, if she got any of it on her, it would eat her skin. It would get in her mouth, her nose, her lungs. It would fill up her insides and burst her open like a wet, stringy pumpkin. She ran.
Ground floor. The stairwell door opened into another, broader stairwell that lead up into darkness. Office space surrounded her on every side, some of it empty, some full of abandoned furniture. All of those offices were dead ends. She pushed through a glass door and into the building’s foyer. A thick bluish slime covered the front door, colored the light coming in through the frosted glass.
Back to the stairwell. She had only one direction to go. Up. Up and away, away from the monster. She climbed, her breath already coming in ragged gasps.
A bloom of mold ran along one wall, chased her up the steps. Sarah pushed herself, pushed harder. Every step made her knees creek, her shins burn.
Come on. Come on. Come on.
The refrain sounded stupid even inside her own head but she kept it up. Second floor—more offices, a little light from a window at the far end. Nothing she could use. Third floor identical to the second except that little stars were flashing before her eyes. Just how badly out of shape was she? She had gotten plenty of excercise while living with Ayaan. Could four flights of stairs really make her this desperate for a lungful of air?
No.
No, they couldn’t. The mold was already in her. The dust she’d breathed in, down in the basement. It must have already been full of spores. And now the Fungal Freak was causing them to bloom inside her body, just by being near her.
A door slammed down in the basement. She had forgotten to lock it and now the monster was inside. C’mon c’mon c’mon. Sarah gasped for breath and pounded up the stairs, almost ran into a door with a metal release bar at hip-height. She pushed the bar and the door opened up on blue sky. Sarah’s arms shot out to help her keep balance but the door wasn’t just opening on empty space. She had come to the roof. She looked out across the tarpaper and gravel, stared at the clogged-up ventilation hoods like tiny minarets. The roof. Last stop.
There was nowhere to go. The buildings on either side were too low to leap to, she would break her legs. The fire escape didn’t reach the roof.
Last stop. Sarah looked back and saw something drippy and wet on the stairs below her. She stepped out into the sunlight and tripped over a hidden step.
She fell forward, her hands outstretched to catch her but they just slid across loose gravel. Her chin smacked the tarpaper and she lost blood. Dark spots blobbed across her vision. She couldn’t seem to get her breath, couldn’t seem to move her arms, her legs, she felt like a dead spider with her limbs up in the air.
Slowly, very slowly she relaxed her body, her stiff limbs. Slowly, very slowly she sucked in breath through one nostril. She closed her eyes and saw green flashes. She opened them again and saw her fingernails had turned yellow. Faint black spots swam down there in the quick. As she watched her thumbnail creased down the middle—fungus underneath was pushing up against it. The nail turned white and started to split. Pain made her screech.
She heard a heavy tread on the stairs. Someone was coming up, coming after her.
She focused on the pain in her thumb. Used it. She saw it as a white sparkle, a sunburst in her hand. This wasn’t her special sight, it was just pure visualization, but it worked. She used that energy to propel her back up to her feet. She drew her Makarov, flicked off the safety, assumed a firing stance with her arm outstretched and pointed at the doorway she’d just come through. She yanked breath into her filling lungs, fought her own body to stay upright long enough to put one bullet through whoever came through that door.
The tarpaper beneath her started to vibrate. It had to be a hallucination, she decided. Not enough oxygen was getting to her brain and it was starting to break down but she couldn’t let that stay her hand, she couldn’t...
It wasn’t a hallucination. If it was it was the most convincing one she’d ever had. The whole roof was shaking, the whole building. She focused on the black rectangle of the doorway, she focused on the green splotches that were blossoming on her sweatshirt, anything to keep her mind steady.
The stairwell door split into pieces and then disappeared into a yawning gulf of empty space. Down, it went down. Half the building collapsed with a sudden roar like the world’s back breaking, a prolonged snapping and squealing and rumbling as stone and brick and steel twisted in on itself and cascaded down the stairs. The wooden beams supporting the upper floors had given way to fungal rot and half the roof just fell in and Sarah was in the air, her feet weren’t touching anything, and something pinched her arm, she looked, and half the roof was on top of her arm and then it was gone, half of the building and half of the roof was gone.
Sarah was a little surprised that she didn’t go with it. She was on a part of the roof that remained, tilting down at a slight angle but stable for the moment. She was lying on her side under a heap of rubble and her right elbow was shattered. There was blood, a lot of blood, and pieces of bone sticking out of her arm. Oh no, she thought, but there wasn’t a lot of emotion there. She was too stunned. She would get infected, she knew, wounds like that always did. She would get a secondary infection and there were no more antibiotics in the whole world. She was going to die.
The demon—the lich—the monster put one hand up on the remaining part of the roof and hauled herself up to stand over Sarah. She had no mouth. The monster had no mouth. Was it going to eat her? Or maybe they would just make her one of those handless ghouls she’d seen.
The monster leaned forward. Pieces of mold and fungus fell from it, vegetative debris that pelted Sarah’s chest and face. Sarah couldn’t breathe. This close... this close the monster could kill you just by default. Sarah’s lungs were full, her chest kept heaving like it was trying to vomit something out but she was stuffed full of softness and dampness. She was choking to death on mold and slime. She felt like someone had pushed rags down her throat until she couldn’t hold anymore.
The monster reached down and touched her face with one enormous hand. The fingers stuck to Sarah’s cheek where they touched and made a wet suction-cup sound.
You can hear me, can’t you? the monster said, inside of Sarah’s head. You have the gift.
Sarah tried to nod. She couldn’t move the muscles of her neck, they were too clenched with the effort of trying to get some oxygen in her lungs.
You can hear me… I can’t tell you how much I need someone like you. Someone to talk to. I can’t save your life, now. But I can bring you back to be with me. I won’t let them change you, not so much. Would you… would you like that, to be my... friend?
Sarah lifted her left arm. It was hard. The arm fell back to flop on the tarpaper. Try harder, she told herself.
She lifted her left arm, with the Makarov’s incredible weight in her unwieldy hand, and shoved the barrel into the thick layer of mold and fungus over the monster’s forehead. She squeezed the trigger, waited for the weapon to cycle, and squeezed again. Cycle. Again. Cycle. Again.
Chapter Eighteen
Ayaan fired a bolt of dark energy into the legs of an oncoming ghoul and the meat slid right off her bones. The sinew and cartilage beneath darkened and cracked and she fell face forward across the packed dirt of the barnyard. The wizard just laughed.
“There’s more where she came from and look, even now she does my will.” It was true. The now legless ghoul kept coming for Ayaan, her skinned hands digging into the soil with slow but total determination.
Ayaan spun around and blew the head off a tall ghoul that had been creeping up behind her. Flesh peeled off his skull in dry strips and fell away, his black tongue flopping to the ground in one piece. He went down for good—but while she had watched him die others had flanked her as she had known they would.
Skinless hands closed around Ayaan’s flesh, pinching her mercilessly. The eyeless dead wrapped their arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She kicked and struggled and threw her center of gravity around but every time she slipped out of their dry grey arms another would come up to grasp at her hair or her wrists. She managed to get one quick shot off that seared a ghoul to death where he stood—the naked muscles of his chest and neck withering visibly, the individual strands of fibrous tissue splitting and peeling and blowing away like dandelion fluff—but it wasn’t enough.
Without a word, without a command they carried her inside the farmhouse. The front door lead through a simply decorated parlor and into the back of the house, to an enormous kitchen. A wood-burning stove blazed merrily in one corner while a barn door up on trestles filled the center of the room. Dark blood stained the wood in several places.
A painted wooden door in one corner of the room stood ajar. Something bright glinted behind it. As the corpses carried Ayaan inside she caught a glimpse of blonde hair, and then the door closed silently. Ayaan had no time to wonder about that—she was too busy fighting her captors.
The skinless corpses threw her down onto the table hard enough to make her head reel. While she pulled her consciousness back together the wizard came in and secured her spread-eagled with stout iron chains. He’d clearly done this before. His wooden arm was no use for the job but he worked the manacles quite adeptly with his callused hand.
“My name,” he told her, perhaps as a courtesy, “is Urie Polder and I eat the dead for the magic they got. Don’t you get me wrong, gal. I didn’t come to this lookin’ for a taste of gray meat.” The ghouls moved to the corners of the room while he busied himself with pots and pans and especially knives. “It was a kinda court of last resorts arrangement, you unnerstand. The larder,” he said, stabbing a butcher’s knife into the wood of the table until it vibrated in place, “was bare. Now that’s an old, old story and I don’t need to be re-tellin’ it. I weren’t the first time I or mine went hungry, but God help me, I hope it to be the last.” He brought a cleaver down to stick in the wood as well. “It was only when I et her heart that I felt it. That was when I felt the holy power for the first time, and I knew what God had given to me, this puissance, this strength.”
“Whose heart?” Ayaan demanded, curious despite her situation.
“I’m a rebuilder,” Polder told her, ignoring her question. “Some folks come on through here and see all the skulls and like and say I’m some nature of demon, but it ain’t true.” He gestured with a knife-sharpening steel. “This is where it begins once and over again, it’s the Garden, right? Only this time, the Fall come first, and now we’re goin’ back to the good place. It’s Eden in reverse.”
He looked up at the ceiling and brought his hands together in prayer. The stick-fingers of his artificial arm wove around the living fingers of his right hand. “Our Father,” he began, “who art in Heaven, ahallowed be—”
A horrible murderous scream interrupted him. He stopped in mid-prayer and looked down at her, though it was clear to Ayaan that the noise had come from outside.
“Hell’s hinges, it'll be afternoon afore I get somethin’ to eat.” He waved at them with his wooden arm and his skinless ghouls filed out of the room to the barnyard. “So you’re not alone, well, I shoulda guessed so much.” It took Ayaan a moment to realize she was being addressed. “Evil comes calling in threes, don’t it just. The furry fellow, you, and who else? Who else is out there knockin’ at my gate?”
Another scream came. Another—they made Ayaan grit her teeth. One long, extended howl that seemed t come from everywhere at once. Then one of the skinless ghouls came smashing up against the windows outside. His denuded face flattened against the glass and then he slid off, leaving a thin scum of milky pus against the pane.
“What’s... what’s that blurrin’ out there, it moves so fast like a car used to,” Polder said, staring out the window. “And there, a green fellow, now what could that be?”
“That's death,” Ayaan said, “for you, anyway.” She lay back on the table and closed her eyes.
The wizard grabbed her leg and shook it painfully. “Now you start talkin’, gal, as I will have none of that. Who is that, and what does he want? His boys are awful fast.” He grabbed up an iron poker and laid it across the crook of his human arm. “Don’t you go astray now, you mind?” he told her. His smile told her he had meant it as a joke. Throwing open the kitchen door he strode out into the barnyard to do battle with the green phantom.
Before he’d taken three steps an accelerated ghoul leapt to his shoulders and slammed him to the ground. He cried out and tried to raise his wooden arm in self defense but the ghoul raised its doctored arms and jabbed his belly, chest and face over and over again, the sharpened bones moving so fast they shimmered in the air. Blood leaked out of the wizard in great gouts and his energy started to flicker.
“Da,” someone said from near Ayaan’s face. She turned to look and saw the interior door ajar again. A skinny little girl, maybe thirteen years old stood there, her face pocked with acne but her hair the color of corn floss. She looked up at Ayaan with very wide eyes. “My Da,” she said, as if that conveyed a full message on its own.
Maybe it did. Ayaan nodded solemnly. “I know. But we have to think now. We have to think about what we’re going to do. Are you alone?” That elicited an obedient nod. “It’s just you and your Da?” Another. Crap, Ayaan thought. This wasn’t going to end well. “Do you know how to undo these chains? This is very important.”
The girl looked out at her father’s corpse—the ghoul still stabbing away at what had become a skin full of blood and liquefied organs—and then stepped into the kitchen. She took an enormous iron key out from under the kitchen table and made short work of the manacles. Ayaan sat up on the barn door table. “What’s your name?” she asked. She had a duty to this girl.
“I am called Patience, if you please,” the girl said, and did a little curtsey. She smiled sweetly. She would have been trained to smile sweetly. Ayaan knew that training would only get her so far. The girl was going to collapse in tears very soon. She stepped down from the table and took Patience’s hand.
“Well, Patience, it’s very good to meet you. Now. Come with me.” She kicked the door closed so the girl wouldn’t have to look at her father’s body, or what was being done to it. Very little of Urie Polder’s face remained.
Ayaan lead the girl deeper into the house, into a room where the breaking dawn barely lit up an over-stuffed couch and a few simple end tables. There would be a root cellar, of course, and probably other places to hide. The hex signs outside would protect the house for a while—at least until the goat blood powering them dried up and flaked off.
Patience flopped down on an ottoman and studied the seam of her little black dress. She found a loose thread and started picking at it. Any second now, Ayaan thought. Any second and the girl would lose her calm.
But what could be done with her? If Ayaan hid the girl, well, then what? Ayaan couldn’t stay behind to protect her. She couldn’t send anyone else to pick her up and take her to a better place. There was probably plenty of preserved food in the house but it wouldn’t last forever. Eventually Patience would have to come out of the cellar and face the big bad world. She would have no chance out there, not without her father’s magic to protect her. Ayaan hadn’t seen any firearms in the house. Certainly not the kind of weapons the girl would need to survive on her own.
Wouldn’t it be better, Ayaan thought, to just put her down?
It could be done so simply, so painlessly. Ayaan could hold the girl against her breast and then just use her power, just a little, to end the girl’s life. Or even better, she could just... just...
Patience was the first living human Ayaan had been near since the Tsarevich remade her. The girl’s energy burned inside her hotter than the stove in the kitchen—Ayaan hadn’t really expected that, that it would be so warm or radiant. She felt quite cold, suddenly, quite chilled, and she longed to have a little of that heat inside her. No malice, no threat came attached to that desire. It was the simplest, most wholesome feeling in the world.
“Come here, Patience,” Ayaan said. “I want to hold you in my arms and make everything better.”
The girl slid off the ottoman and onto her feet. She looked down at the carpet but didn’t come any closer. Tears slicked down her cheeks.
“Come here,” Ayaan said. She took a step closer to the girl. “Come here.” She reached out one hand and touched Patience on the elbow. The little girl’s face came up, her eyes tightly shut as if she knew what came next, as if she was bracing for it.
Behind Ayaan a door opened and Erasmus stepped inside. Ayaan could feel his energy behind her, cold and unwanted. “Well, what do we have here?” he asked in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, and held out his arms. The girl ran to him and embraced him like she would a giant teddy bear, her arms tight around him, her sobs buried in his fur.
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