by Ee, Susan
I almost lose the ongoing battle with my stomach, and all that rich food I ate earlier comes up in my throat. I have to swallow hard to keep it in. My breath feels too hot, and the air feels too cold on my prickling skin.
I want to—need to—close my eyes, to blot out what they see. But I can’t. I’m searching. Looking at every brutalized child for my little sister’s pixie face. I start shaking all over and I can’t seem to stop.
“Paige.” My voice comes out in a broken whisper.
I can barely whisper her name, but I say it over and over as though that will somehow make it all right. I drift toward the pile of mangled corpses like a dreamer in a nightmare, unable to stop myself and unable to look away.
Please don't let her be here. Please, please. Anything but that.
“Paige?” There is horror in my voice as well as a thread of hope that maybe she’s not here.
Something stirs in the pile of stitched flesh.
I take a shaky step back, all the strength seeping out of my legs.
A little boy rolls off the top of a pile and lands face-down.
Two bodies below his original position, a small hand reaches out blindly and braces itself awkwardly on the fallen boy's shoulder. The bodies above the hand rock back and forth, gaining momentum until they tumble on top of the fallen boy.
I can finally see the child that belongs to the fumbling hand. It's a small girl with disproportionately skinny legs. A curtain of brown hair hides the girl's face as she crawls painfully toward me.
She has a cruel cut above her bottom that intersects with another one sliding up her spine. Large, uneven stitches run up her spine, holding her bruised and slashed flesh together. Stitches run up both arms and down both legs. The red and blue of her cuts and bruises contrast sharply with her corpse-white skin.
I am frozen in my horror, aching to shut my eyes and pretend this is not real. But I’m incapable of anything but watching the girl's painful progress across the pile of bodies. She pulls herself forward by her arms, her legs a pair of dead weights dragging behind her.
After an eternity, the girl finally lifts her head. The stringy hair slides back from her face.
And there is my little sister.
Her tormented eyes find mine. Huge for her pixie face. Filling with tears as she sees me.
I crash to my knees, hardly feeling the slam of the concrete.
My baby sister's face has stitches running from her ears to her lips as though someone had peeled back the upper part of her face and then put it back together again. Her whole face is swollen and bruised in angry colors.
“Paige.” My voice cracks.
I crawl to her and take her in my arms. She is as cold as the concrete floor.
She curls into my arms like she used to when she was a toddler. I try to hold all of her on my lap even though she's too big for that now. Even her breath on my cheek is as cold as an arctic breeze. I have a crazy thought that maybe they drained all the blood out of her so she can never be warm again.
My tears drip down her cheeks, mixing our anguish together.
CHAPTER 38
“Touching,” says a clinical voice behind me.
The angel walks toward us with an expression so detached that nothing human can be detected behind it. It's the kind of look a shark might give to a pair of crying girls. “This is the first time one of you has broken in instead of trying to break out.”
Behind him, the delivery guy pushes through the double doors with another load of cadaver drawers. His expression is all human. Surprise, concern, fear.
Before I can answer, the angel jerks his gaze up toward the ceiling and cocks his head. He reminds me of a dog listening to something far away that only dogs can hear.
I hug my sister's scrawny body closer as if I can protect her from all things monstrous. It's all I can do keep my voice working, if not steady. “Why would you do this?” I force out in a whisper.
Behind the angel, the delivery guy shakes his head at me in warning. He looks like he wants to shrink behind his cadaver drawers.
“I don't need to explain anything to a monkey,” says the angel. “Put the specimen back where it was.”
The specimen?
Rage boils through my veins. My heart screams for blood. My hands tremble with the need to squeeze his throat shut.
Amazingly, I rein it in.
I glare at him, dying to do so much more.
The goal is to get my sister out of here, not to get momentary satisfaction. I lift Paige in my arms and stagger toward him.
“We’re leaving.” As soon as the words are out, I know it’s wishful thinking.
He puts down his clipboard and steps between us and the door. “By whose permission?” His voice is low and threatening. Utterly confident.
He suddenly cocks his head again, listening to something I can't hear. A frown mars his smooth skin.
I take two deep breaths, trying to blow the anger and fear out of my body. I gently put Paige down under a table.
Then I launch myself on him.
I hit him with everything I've got. No calculations, no thought, no plan. Just crazed, epic fury.
It isn't much compared to an angel, even one that's a runt. But I have the advantage of surprise.
My blow slams him onto an exam table, and I wonder how his hollow bones don’t break.
I whip out the angel sword from its scabbard. Angels are far stronger than men, but they can be vulnerable on the ground. No angel who is any good at flying would work in the basement where there are no windows for him to fly through. There is a good chance this one can’t take to the air very quickly.
Before the angel can recover from his fall, I thrust my sword at him, aiming for his neck.
Or I try to.
He's faster than I thought. He grabs my wrist and slams it into the table’s edge.
The pain is excruciating. My hand contracts open, letting the sword fly. It clatters across the concrete floor, far from my reach.
He gets up at leisure while I grab a scalpel from a tray. The scalpel feels flimsy and useless. I give my chances of winning, or even injuring him, slim to none.
That just pisses me off all the more.
I throw my scalpel at him. It nicks his throat, causing blood to bubble out and stain his white coat.
I grab a chair and swing it at him before he recovers.
He tosses it aside as if I had thrown a crumpled ball of paper at him.
Almost before I can realize that he’s coming for me, he slams me down on the concrete and starts strangling the life out of me. He’s not just choking my air, he’s cutting off the blood to my brain.
Five seconds. That’s all I’ll have before losing consciousness with no blood flowing to my head.
I shoot my arms up between his like a wedge. Then I slam them out against his forearms.
It should have worked to bust me out of his strangle. It always worked during training.
But there isn’t even a slight easing of his grip. In my panic, I didn’t take into account his super-strength.
In a desperate final attempt, I clench my hands together, fingers interlaced. I draw back and hammer my fists down on the crook of his arm with everything I’ve got.
His elbow jerks back for a moment.
But then it pops right back into place.
Time’s up.
Like an amateur, I instinctively claw at his hands. But they might as well be steel clamped around my throat.
My heart pounds thunderously in my ears, getting ever more frantic. My head feels like it’s floating away.
The angel’s face is cold, indifferent. Dark spots bloom on his face. My heart sinks as I realize my vision is fading.
Blurring.
The edges getting darker.
CHAPTER 39
Something slams into the angel. I get a brief impression of hair and teeth, animal growling.
Something warm and wet splashes onto my shirt.
The pressure o
n my throat is suddenly gone. So is the weight of the angel.
I suck in a huge, burning breath. I curl into a ball, trying not to cough too much as the lovely cool air surges into my lungs.
There is blood on my shirt.
I become aware of wild grunts and growls. There is also the sound of retching.
The delivery man is retching behind his cadaver drawers. Even while retching, his eyes keep darting to a spot behind me. His eyes are so wide they look more white than brown. He’s staring at the place where the sounds are coming from. The source of all this blood soaking my clothes.
I have a strange reluctance to look even though I know I have to.
When I do look, I have trouble comprehending what I'm seeing. I don't know which thing to be shocked by, and my poor brain thrashes from one thing to another.
The angel's lab coat is soaked in blood Around him lie chunks of quivering meat, like bits of liver torn and tossed on the floor.
A chunk of flesh has been ripped out of his cheek.
He’s thrashing so much he looks like he's in the throes of a very bad nightmare. Maybe he is. Maybe I am too.
Paige hunches over him. Her little hands grip his shirt to get a better hold on his trembling body. Her hair and clothes are splattered in blood. Her face drips with it.
Her mouth opens, showing rows of shiny teeth. At first, I think that someone has grafted long braces onto her teeth. But they’re not braces.
They’re razors.
She bites into the angel's throat. Worries it like a dog with a chew toy. Pulls back from the gushing torn flesh.
She spits out a chunk of bloody meat. It lands with a wet thunk on the floor next to the other bits of flesh.
She spits and gags. She is revolted, although it’s hard to tell if the revulsion is from her actions or from the taste. An unwanted memory of the way the low demons spat after biting into Raffe barges into my head.
They weren’t meant to eat angel flesh. The thought slips through the cracks in my mind and I instantly shove it back.
The delivery guy retches again, and my stomach churns, wanting to join him. Paige opens her mouth again in animal ferocity, ready to dive back into the quivering flesh.
“Paige!” My voice comes out thin and panicked, the end rising as though in question.
The girl who used to be my sister stops midway down to the dying angel and looks at me.
Her eyes are the wide baby brown of innocence. Drops of blood hang suspended from her long lashes. She looks at me, attentive and docile as she's always been. There is no pride in her expression, no viciousness, no hunger, no horror at her actions. She looks up at me as though I had called her name while she was eating a bowl of cereal.
My throat is raw from the strangling, and I keep swallowing back a cough, which is handy because I need to swallow back my dinner too. The puking sounds the delivery guy makes aren’t helping.
Paige unfolds away from the angel. She stands up on her own feet, without leaning against anything.
Then she takes two graceful, miraculous steps toward me.
She stops, as though remembering she was crippled.
I don’t dare to breathe. I stare at her, resisting the urge to run up and catch her in case she falls.
She spreads her arms out toward me in a pick-me-up gesture, the way she used to when she was a toddler. If not for the blood dripping down her face and streaking her stitched-up body, I would have thought her expression as sweet and innocent as it's always been.
“Ryn-Ryn.” Her voice is on the verge of tears. It's the sound of a frightened little girl, one who's sure her big sister can make the monsters under her bed go away. Paige hasn't called me Ryn-Ryn since she was a baby.
I look at the angry stitches crisscrossing her face and body. I stare at her bruises—red and blue all over her poor face and body.
It’s not her fault. Whatever they did to her, she’s the victim, not the monster.
Where have I heard that before?
Something about that thought triggers an image. The image of those chewed-up girls hanging on the tree. Had that crazy couple said something like what I just thought? Is their mad conversation starting to make sense to me?
A thought sneaks into my head like poisoned gas. If Paige could only eat human flesh and nothing else, what would I do? Would I go so far as to use human bait to lure her, thinking I could help her?
Too horrifying to even think about.
And totally irrelevant.
Because there’s no reason to think Paige had to eat anything. Paige is not a low demon. She’s a little girl. A vegetarian. A born humanitarian. A budding Dalai Lama, for chrissake. She only attacked the angel to defend me. That’s all.
Besides, she didn’t eat him, she just… gnawed on him a little.
The chunks of flesh quiver on the floor. My stomach roils.
Paige watches me with her warm brown eyes fringed with doe-like lashes. I concentrate on that and purposely ignore the blood dripping from her chin and the big, cruel stitches running from her lips to her ears.
Behind her, the angel convulses in earnest. His eyes roll, leaving them pure white, and his head bangs repeatedly on the concrete floor. He is having a seizure. I wonder if he can live with chunks of flesh missing and most of his blood on the floor. His body is probably frantically repairing itself even now. Is there a chance that this monster could recover from this?
I push myself up, trying to ignore the slimy fluids under my hands. My throat burns and I feel stiff and bruised all over.
“Ryn-Ryn.” Paige still has her arms up in a forlorn gesture, but I can't quite bring myself to go hug her. Instead, I lurch over to the angel sword and grab it. I walk back a little more smoothly, getting used to my body again.
I look at the angel's blank eyes, his bleeding mouth. His head trembles, tapping against the floor.
I slam the blade into his heart.
I've never killed anyone before. What frightens me isn't that I'm killing someone. What frightens me is how easy it is.
The blade cuts through him as though he is nothing but a rotten piece of fruit. I feel no sympathetic sensation of a soul or a life essence leaving. There is no guilt or shock or grief at the life that was and the person I have become. There is only the stilling of the trembling flesh and the slow exhalation of his last breath.
“Great Lord in Heaven.”
I look up, startled, at the new voice. It's another angel in a lab coat. I get a quick impression of fresh blood soaking his white coat and gloved hands before two more angels push through the door behind him. Both of the new ones also have blood on their coats and gloves.
I almost don't recognize Laylah with her golden hair pulled back in a tight bun. What is she doing here? Isn’t she supposed to be performing surgery on Raffe?
They all stare at me. I wonder why they would be staring at me rather than at my blood-splattered sister when I realize that I still have my sword stuck into the lab angel. I’m sure they have no trouble recognizing the sword for what it is. There have to be at least a dozen rules against humans having an angel sword.
My brain frantically searches for a way out of this alive. But before any of them can start making accusations, they all look up at the ceiling at the same time. Like the lab angel, they hear something I don't. The nervous looks on their faces don't reassure me.
Then I feel it too. First, a rumbling, then a trembling.
Has it been an hour already?
The angels look toward me again, then turn and bolt toward the double doors that the delivery guy used.
I didn't realize I could feel even more unnerved than I was already.
The Resistance has started their attack.
CHAPTER 40
We need to get out before the hotel comes crashing down. But I can’t just let those people get sucked dry by the scorpion-angels. Dragging the ladder to each tank and slowly pulling out each paralyzed person could take hours.
I pull my sword out of
the lab angel. I run over to the fetal columns in frustration, holding the sword like a bat.
I swing the blade into one of the scorpion tanks. It’s mostly to let out my frustration and I don’t expect it to do anything other than bounce off.
Before I can even register the impact, the thick tank shatters. Fluid and glass explode onto the concrete floor.
I could get used to this sword.
The scorpion fetus unlatches from its victim. It screeches as it falls. Then it flops and writhes on the glass shards, bleeding all over them. The emaciated woman crumples to the bottom of the broken tank. Her glassy eyes stare into the air.
I have no idea if she’s alive, or if she’ll be in better shape once the venom wears off. This is the best I can do for her. The best I can do for any of them. All I can hope is that somehow, some of them will recover enough to get away from here before things become too explosive, because I can’t drag them up the stairs.
I run over to the other tanks that are holding victims and smash them, one after another. Shards of water and glass spray all over the basement lab. The air fills with the screeching of thrashing scorpion fetuses.
Most of the monsters in the surrounding tanks wake and twitch. A few react violently and slam against their glass prisons. They are the ones that are more fully formed, staring at me through the veined membranes of their eyelids with the understanding that I am preying upon them.
While I’m doing this, a tiny part of me considers running without Paige. She's not really my sister anymore, is she? She's certainly not helpless any longer.
“Ryn-Ryn?” Paige is crying.
She calls to me as if unsure whether I would take care of her. My heart constricts like an iron hand is squeezing it as punishment for thinking of betraying her.
“Yeah, sweetie,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “We have to get out of here. Okay?”