They had taken Carol. Their plan would be to break her, possess her, then use her to get close to Naomi. They would probably hope to bypass Ryn, use Carol to sow doubt about her among the Bradfords, not that Ryn hadn’t done that job for them already. But turning Carol into a hollow would draw them all to their nest—all in one place at the same time.
That was fine. It was a good night for endings.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Reckoning
The blizzard’s cold came in through every uninsulated surface of the metal trailer, came into Carol through knees pressed too long into the floor, wrists rubbed raw by shackles, her head clouded by the sour smell of her own vomit. If she lay down, the icy floor would suck the heat from her shivering muscles.
A television lit the stark chamber, playing horror movies featuring tortured captives—the kind that made an audience fidget when the drill went into a shrieking actress.
But this was no movie. He’d stripped her to underwear and left a workbench littered with things: carpentry tools, a book of matches, a coil of barbed wire, oily rags, and a single beer bottle.
He wanted her to guess. That was the purpose of the movies: to make her wonder which things in the room were just there, and which he would use.
Frozen hinges on the trailer door wailed, a horrid sound that made the skin along her spine tighten. His flashlight blinded her, forced her to glance away, clanking door and shuffling footsteps her only sign they were sealed in together.
“Hello dear,” sang a man’s voice—his tone was playful like a drunk’s; it had no inhibitions. “Guess whooo?”
Carol straightened under the gaze of a monster, an old habit. “Remember General Gambari? Ever watched him on the news? War criminal. Had whole villages… cleansed.” And she’d been surprised when his eyes hadn’t seemed special: neither empty nor cold, just wrinkled like a father’s. “He came to the States once. I got him coffee.”
“Oh. That must have been nice,” crowed that singsong voice. He kept the flashlight in her eyes, his silhouette examining the carpentry tools.
“I spat in his coffee. I’d say you’re only the third-, fourth-scariest thing I’ve ever spat on.”
“Ah, getting a little ahead of—”
Carol hawked and what was left of her spit flew above the flashlight. There came a satisfying smack, a short growl. Her courage liquefied at the sound.
His shadow knelt. “Did you know,” he said with the clear enunciation of an instructor capturing the attention of children, “that a human can be addicted to anything? Isn’t that fascinating? Why, I once met a man who liked to…” He yanked her manacled hands closer to the darkness masking his face. “…cut his fingernails.”
Rather than biting, he play-chewed—loud lip-smacking noises dragging from Carol a squirm and a short shriek.
“He’d trim and trim and trim, down to bloody nubs. Then the roots. Do you know what the flesh looks like, that gooey stuff where fingernails nestle? He does. He’d hollow his fingernail holes into wet, red cavities, and poke poke poke—looking into his own body in horrified fascination, every electric current of pain as satisfying as an orgasm.” Each of his words, a nursery rhyme to a child; and the shadows on his face weren’t right—there were ridges in all the wrong places. “The right kind of addict will scrub his hands until they seep. Castrate a rapist and he’ll rape with broken-off broom handles. Why do you suppose that is? What’s he really want? Do you suppose for some people, they do these elaborate, bloody things for no other reason than… habit?”
Carol tried to speak. To say something flippant. To goad him. Nothing came.
“You know what I am.” He shined the light beneath his chin and she flicked her gaze down. She didn’t want to see.
He roared: “Look at me, worm!” All the singsong had turned upside down and animal.
“F-fuck you.”
“It’s almost like you want me to start with the barbed wire.”
When she refused to look he bunched her hair into one fist, jerking her face upward. Through slitted eyes, she saw him: a patchwork face of jigsaw stitches stretching down to an emaciated, shirtless torso and, below that, a scabbed patch of bristly hair where a dick might have been. He’d cut it off, mailed it to her office. Not someone else’s—his own.
Carol couldn’t possibly throw up again, her body heaving nearly inside out with the effort. She gagged out, “Go to hell.”
“We already did.” He was back to the melodic instructor. “Probably some time ago. No one noticed.” He frowned, uneven patches of his stitched face rumpling like a poorly made quilt. “We just kept trimming, scrubbing, fucking. Same thing, every day, and we’ll keep doing it again and again until we’ve whittled the flesh off our bony fingers and walked until our feet turn black from gangrene. The last man alive will die humping the—”
He coughed. It cut off his words, thank God, but a second cough speckled his blood on Carol’s face. Crimson oozed off his lower lip. His naked chest cracked like dry wood, producing a shudder, and something slick with black blood erupted through him. It appeared as though a girlish hand had just sprouted from his flesh—it flexed there, turned over, and drizzled. Then it sucked wetly back into him and he crumpled.
The flashlight bounced and rolled across the floor. It illuminated his heaped body, then a trailer door left open, and at last a figure who’d been behind him—oh God, what is that. At the briefest glance into its burning eyes, fear overrode her senses and Carol passed out on the icy trailer floor.
~*~
Four kerosene space heaters blew warmly against Ghorm’s flabby mass, keeping him comfortable in the cavern of Primrose’s third floor. Bare wood frames separated the chambers, marking where someday contractors hoped to erect walls. Taped-down cables spread in elaborate webs of Ghorm’s design and black tarp sealed every window. The darkest corner was for his monitors and the pneumatic chair holding him aloft.
Most of the remaining space featured a sterile operating theater and lab belonging to Mr. Saxby, as well a backroom caging his menagerie of rats, monkeys, and dogs, all silent in the face of an inevitable fate. Each animal’s cage door was marked with a time, day, and experiment number, and all cages marked with a time and day prior to this moment were empty.
Ghorm squinted at his email while tapping at a keyboard set atop the great crest of his distended girth. “News from on high,” he intoned. The pneumatics of his chair hissed and he spun his corpulent hollow to face Mr. Saxby and Tooloo both. “The Hidden One sends word. He understands our… reticence… to deal with Erynis. However, he offers us sanctuary and generous payment if we finish off the Bradford girl.”
“I’m unconvinced we require such ‘sanctuary,’ ” Mr. Saxby said. He removed a gold-chained watch from his waist pocket, waiting for the second hand before snapping on thick green gloves and reaching into a cage to extract a wriggling white rat. He held the thrashing animal down, calmly injecting it from a syringe. The animal squealed and curled into a ball, unmoving. “How about instead of begging for the protection of deva, I simply deal with the monster.”
“Absurd,” Ghorm sniffed. “You saw Splat. He came back broken. His hollows ooze from the pores—can’t stitch them up fast enough to keep it all together. His flesh-riding days are numbered. She could do that to us all!”
Tooloo was sunk into her beanbag chair and staring into a large-screen television as she mashed the buttons on a controller, her gaunt face lit by periodic flashes of light and gore. Muting her headset, she spoke without ever facing them: “I’ve analyzed her attack patterns based on her fights with Splat and Burns. Two things.”
Sighing, Mr. Saxby inserted the twitching rat into a jar where it withered, hair sloughing off in fat clumps and skin blooming open like a flower—what remained beneath was a pulsing cluster of eggs feeding off its tissues. “What, pray tell, do you have for us?” He sounded bored; bored with his experiments, frustrated with the ramshackle lab and animal subjects he was reduced to using.
; “One: you underestimate her. You’ve killed two deva, both born in the last six centuries. This one is from the Long Ago; she remembers the time before history shattered. The eldest deva in this hemisphere, the Hidden One, and Set the Pretender? They’re using you because to move against her is… dangerous.”
“Oh please,” Ghorm scoffed. “Deva? Frightened of a little monster? Who cares if she frightened a few Romans and Greeks.”
“As well the Sumerians,” Tooloo hissed, “depending on who you believe.”
“Your second point?” Ghorm demanded.
“She can be defeated. There is a strategy.”
Now even Mr. Saxby paused to listen.
“Her claws are death.” Tooloo stared at her flickering screen. “Neutralize them, poison her, rely on brute force. You’ll never be faster—but you’ll out-heal her. It’s all about those claws, though. They’ll end you—end any of us.” She unmuted her headset and went back to her constant stream of simulated violence, the opium that kept her mind relaxed enough to reason.
“We could just leave,” Ghorm suggested. “There are more places she can’t go than she can. And surely the Hidden One has bigger things to worry about than one measly mortal daughter of a senator.”
“No!” Mr. Saxby snarled, the mask of pleasantry gone. “You think my research cheap? I’m no longer tinkering, Ghorm—what I’m planning will knit two worlds together! I am subsisting on rats and chimpanzees, but I need human skin and sinew and teeth, and…” He dashed a beaker into the corner, where it shattered. “…proper equipment!”
Ghorm sneered. “You think I don’t yearn for finer things? I’m trapped in this dank cavern when I could be lounging poolside, or on safari.”
“Spare me,” Mr. Saxby moaned.
But Ghorm couldn’t help reminiscing. “There is this lovely island, and they get the most exquisite prey shipped in—only the finest. Lithe, intelligent coeds; none of these hopeless indigents, no, they’ll let you gun down a svelte little doctor or lawyer and their taxidermists do top-notch work. I had three trophies before I spent the last of my money. Had to sell them. I miss them; they were a matching set.”
“Completely unreasonable waste of money,” Mr. Saxby grumped. “I could organize a hunt in the Appalachians for a fifth of the cost, you extravagant fool.”
Ghorm sniffed. “It’s not a real safari unless it’s hot enough to be served cold drinks and you’re fanned by cabana boys.”
“So at least it’s settled,” Mr. Saxby said. “We stay. For the money. If you’re worried about the monster, we’ll fetch some vicious dogs using what’s left of the advance.”
There were still a few dozen gold bars left, plus a little paper money. “You think hellhounds, then? Why not use one of your dogs?”
He snorted. “These are family pets—chosen for their docile attitudes. We’ll start with something half mad. I’ll rework the flesh, you program the… proper motivations. We’ll store them in the basement and set them on our monster once it’s time.”
“And what, pray tell, do we feed them?” Ghorm demanded.
Mr. Saxby shrugged. “We’ve buried nine drifters and a federal investigator since we nested here.” He positioned his camera, photographing the rat as it decomposed into more eggs, each wriggling with strange inner life. “The dogs will eliminate our drifter problem, and the drifters our dog-food problem.”
“Truth,” Tooloo said.
Ghorm tilted back, sucking his teeth. “Fine. Who cleans up their waste?”
“Splat,” said Mr. Saxby and Tooloo at once. He was always given the messy jobs: disposing of bodies, washing under Ghorm’s fat flaps.
“I accept,” Ghorm said, magnanimously enough that Mr. Saxby rolled his eyes. “Tooloo, you have a knack for picking out vicious humans. Go see if your talent extends to dogs.” Ghorm’s chair hissed as he spun to face his monitor before she could protest.
Swearing, she turned off her console and opened the safe that secured their dwindling supply of gold one-kilo bars and cash. Swiping a stack of bills, she slipped through the steel fire door.
Ghorm sighed and glanced at the open door. “For the six-hundredth time, Tooloo, shut the door. You weren’t birthed in a barn.” Returning to his screens, he muttered, “That I know of.” Tooloo didn’t reply, nor did the door close, so Ghorm spun his chair. “I know you heard me, you unfeeling knob! Get back here and—”
But he didn’t sense her. Only two asura inhabited the building: he and Mr. Saxby.
“Something’s the matter,” Ghorm whispered.
Mr. Saxby glanced from his jar of pulsating eggs, tilting his head to the side as one human ear sharpened to a dog-like point. “I hear something.”
A drip, drip, drip plinked from the shadows beyond a yawning doorframe.
“And I smell blood,” Mr. Saxby whispered. “A lot of it.”
“Impossible.” Ghorm’s eyes searched the darkness. “She’s stuck to the Bradford girl; she’s always with her!”
Something oblong rolled awkwardly from the doorway, into the light—Tooloo’s head. It emptied Ghorm of feeling, thought.
Mr. Saxby peeled off his gloves, unsnapping his collar. “Distract her while I change into something more comfortable.”
“How?” Ghorm wailed.
A shrug from Mr. Saxby. “Die slowly, if you must.”
Ghorm’s frigid, syrupy blood pumped through an overworked heart the size of a cantaloupe, which at last convulsed and stopped from fear. Yet before his spirit could flee the dying body, a crack resounded from beneath his chair. “Oh dear.” Something had undermined the floor, and gravity—ever Ghorm’s harshest foe—seized hold, dropping him through the layer of crumbling concrete. He struck one level below, chair buckling beneath his mass.
There she was: perched upside down on the ceiling, the claws she’d used to cut away his floor gleaming in the dim. For eyes there were just two pinpricks of frosty blue light, a stare that was nothing but hate. When she dropped from the ceiling and bowed close, he saw how that light came from her irises. She had eyes of truest black, the rings of blue contracted thin—a sign she’d consumed psilocybin mushrooms, allowing her to spot him even if he fled his body.
“Wait,” he pleaded, daring to catch her gaze. In so doing, Ghorm could stretch a moment into half a year. It was his gift, to hold his victims still while he whispered poison into their minds. Their stares fused. True, this moment would pass no faster or slower for Mr. Saxby, but Ghorm still had a chance. He could hold her hostage to time and plead his case, whittle her down with bargains and assurances.
The words flowed from his mind, modulated low and sweet, honeyed promises that he would not only spare the girl, but protect her—he could provide names of those who meant her harm and enlist defenses for her that Erynis could only dream of. But wait! There was more: she was the victim of a conspiracy, after all, a pawn in a war among deva, and if Erynis vowed to spare his life, he’d spill secrets, bind his will to whatever the monster desired. He said all these words, said them elegantly, in the time it took to blink.
“What is my name?” Her voice was deadly and thin. She’d seized control, ignoring the way he teased the seconds longer, and spoke with words, not thoughts.
“Why, it is Erynis,” he said, mild as milk.
“No.” Her fingernails fanned, each glinting with unnatural light, sharper than a mother’s scorn. “What am I called?”
He tried again to hold her gaze, but time marched onward, steady as the beads of cold sweat trickling down his plump throat. “They— They say many things about you that are plainly false, else you’d—”
“Say it,” she hissed, hand rising, “and you live one second longer.”
Such truth in her words—and so he said it to buy himself one second, with which he might whisper a saving plea or be aided by Mr. Saxby. “The Implacable One.”
“About that, they do not lie.”
For a certain type of immortal, one second stretched nearly to the corners of
eternity. Ghorm stole from it what felt like a month of contemplation, and at its end, he tracked the arc of her nails as they traced the air, so quick their gleam formed a crescent of light edging ever nearer.
Perhaps he could have used his last moments to brood on how it had all gone wrong, or to hope, or to mourn his three perfect trophies lost to him decades ago. Instead, he could think of nothing but the strange beauty of that crescent of light coming to end him.
The instant before she touched him, he surrendered—he let go of the moment, she split him in two, and he heard the great gush of blood from his body splash across the room’s four corners, washing over her ankles.
The claws didn’t stop until they sliced to the center of him, to the essence, which they also split in two.
~*~
Ryn sucked the last of Ghorm from her fingertips, swallowing him into the burning hell that had already ended Splat and Tooloo. It might have pleased her any other time. Tonight, their terror only reminded her of Naomi lying afraid in the snow.
She leaped to the hole above, struggling through because her limbs buzzed with numbness, an effect of the mushrooms. Crouching, absorbed in the drug’s curious tunnel vision, she ignored Saxby’s mutating body and stared instead at crimson staining her hands. Was arterial spray always so mirror-bright or was this also from the mushrooms? She thought she could see her image in them, a reflection of her hair in the blood and the blood in her hair. Naomi’s braid had loosened.
“Have I failed to hold your attention?” Saxby asked.
Ryn glanced up.
“Ah. Glad to see I have it now.”
The room was faded white except for the asura’s scaly black body—a great wyrm with coils thicker than ancient trees and a bull’s horns pushing forward from his plated skull. His every breath was hot and billowed the fringes of her kanaf, all that mass coiled like a spring in the midst of a lab full of cages, workstations, and canisters of compressed gas.
When he spoke, his image vibrated and light zinged between his scales like electricity through a circuit board. “I’ve killed deva. I’ve tasted your kind’s blood, and it is sweet.”
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 29