by M. R. Carey
Most clearly of all, she smelled Fran’s fear and misery. She hid her face behind her paws, trying to shut the feelings out. Liz would save Fran. Liz was strong enough and clever enough to do everything that needed to be done.
Except that Liz was afraid too. And in pain. And then, very suddenly, not there at all.
Jinx whined, long and low. There was no help for it. Fran needed her, and Fran was her only friend. Her only home. The keeper of her face and name and all that was left of her.
She made herself walk. Then she made herself run.
The knife, Fran thought. I’ve got to get to the knife. But she was out of time. Beth shook herself like a dog, and walked toward her.
It was a very small room, Fran realized suddenly. In her imagination it had always been immense, a place so vast that if you stood in the middle of it you could barely see the walls. But now Beth crossed it in three strides.
Fran looked along Beth’s trajectory and saw the knife. She lunged for it at the same time Beth did, but Beth was faster and got there first, bending down to scoop it up just as Fran’s groping fingers closed on the handle.
Beth straightened again, the X-Acto knife in her hand. She slid the blade out to its full length of about two inches.
“Close your eyes, sweetheart,” she muttered. “I can tell you, based on a fuck-ton of experience, it’s better if you don’t see this coming.”
The knife dipped, and Fran rolled aside. The blade sank into her shoulder instead of her throat. There was a moment when it didn’t hurt at all. She used that moment to pull her knees right back into her chest.
When Beth leaned in again to finish what she’d started, Fran kicked out as hard as she could. Her feet slammed into Beth’s knee. There was no sound, but the contact felt solid and jarring. Beth toppled forward with a hiss of pain and surprise.
But she kept hold of the knife. And since she fell almost on top of Fran, there was nowhere Fran could go to escape the next thrust. Or the one after that. The knife went into her side, and then into her stomach.
Even now it didn’t hurt all that much. What took the fight out of Fran was the sheer, queasy astonishment of the knife blade puncturing her skin, sliding around below the surface of her where it had no right to be. The strength drained out of her as though it was pouring through the shallow wounds along with her blood.
Beth paused, either to shift her balance or just to gauge the effect of that last blow. For a second, they were just staring into each other’s eyes, close enough so that Beth’s panting breath ruffled Fran’s hair. She lined up the knife again, under Fran’s chin. Fran brought up her hand, but with no force or momentum. It touched Beth’s forearm like a caress.
Then Fran looked past Beth, her eyes widening. Beth didn’t turn. Wasn’t about to fall for such an obvious trick.
So when Jinx leaped and hit her right in the center of her back, she had no warning at all.
Jinx went right through her, the same way she’d gone through Bruno Picota. And like Bruno Picota, Beth could see her. A fox in full career, her red-orange brush like a wildfire, turning as she landed and howling her battle howl.
She attacked again, diving right through Beth’s abdomen. This time, seeing her coming, Beth threw out her arms to fend off the weird little animal. She scrambled backward. Her left arm bumped against the storm lantern and knocked it over.
And she dropped the knife.
Fran was in no condition to leap. She could scarcely move at all. She crawled toward the knife in agonizing slow motion, sliding through the spreading pool of her own blood.
Jinx couldn’t fight the monster. She couldn’t even touch her. She felt the familiar jolt of static shock in the moment that they occupied the same space, but that was all. Her hope of invading and conquering, of taking the fight to Beth in the fortress of her own body, came instantly to nothing.
She realized the truth too late. That there was only one mind she was welcome in, one dream where she could find purchase. She and Fran were two halves of the same person, so of course Fran’s body and soul were a home for her when she needed them. It was the same thing, more or less, that let the monster sneak inside Liz. Because the monster was Liz in the same way that Jinx was Fran. But Jinx and the monster had no such kinship.
Jinx knew in that moment that she had failed. Fran was alone and defenseless.
The monster stared at her, and shook its head. Her face and the gesture said the same thing: whatever Jinx was, she wasn’t going to worry about it now. She was going to finish the job she came here to do.
Behind Beth, Fran was crawling across the floor, slowly and awkwardly, supporting herself on one hand with the other bound at her side. Perhaps, if the monster were to be distracted for a few more seconds, she might escape into the dark outside and not be found.
Jinx had one trick left and she used it now. Rearing up on her hind legs she transformed from plain Jinx to Lady Jinx, armed and armored. She drew Oathkeeper and held it high.
The monster’s jaw dropped. A half-laugh of pure amazement was forced from her lips.
You see me now, creature, Jinx cried ringingly. At least in her own mind it was ringing. She hoped the monster could hear her as well as see her. I am the Lady Jinx, of the Woodland Table, and this blade in my hand is Oathkeeper, forged before time began to strike thee down.
Beth shook her head. “You have got to be shitting me!” she muttered.
Jinx advanced in a series of shuffling steps, quartering with the long, broad blade as she came. As with Picota, it just went through Beth without hurting her. But it held her unbelieving gaze for a few precious seconds.
Suddenly the monster threw back her head and screamed. Terrified, Jinx crouched back and hunkered down. She thought Beth must have a battle howl too, and this was it.
But when the monster looked down, Jinx followed her gaze—to the calf of her leg and the little knife that was sticking out of her. Fran’s hand was gripping the other end of the knife, twisting it in the wound she’d made. When she pulled it out, the spray of blood that followed it seemed more black than red in the dim light.
Fran reared up on her tied-together legs and thrust again, this time at waist height. But the monster caught her wrist, grabbed hold of her and they went down together. Fran was trying to stab with the knife and at the same time to keep it out of Beth’s reach. Beth was trying to take it away from her without being wounded again. And they were doing this in near-total darkness because of the fallen lantern.
Jinx’s legs shook. Her every nerve was shouting at her to jump into the fight. To help Fran. But she knew there wasn’t anything she could do.
A hand touched her shoulder. She gave a startled yelp, and turned.
Liz hadn’t died under Beth’s merciless assault. She had lost consciousness, lost focus, and fallen—right out of her own body and into the external world, where she lay too weak and spent to move. She could only watch as Beth turned her attention back to Fran, as she stabbed her with the knife, and then as Jinx attacked.
She was too weak and too damaged even now from her first dispossession to beat Beth at her own game. There was just too little of her.
But there was something. When she moved, she discovered with shock and excitement that she didn’t just float now: she moved in the ways that a human body moved, with limbs and a head and torso that seemed to be extended through space in the normal shape and configuration. She was still a phantom, but in falling out of the gray space she had managed to keep some semblance or memory of human shape.
She forced herself to her feet. She lumbered forward, one step, and then two. For something so slight and so vestigial, she found it a tremendous effort to move. It was as if she were lifting up the world.
Lady Jinx lay crouched between her and Beth. She leaned down, and touched Jinx’s shoulder.
Jinx yelped, and spun to face her. When she saw who it was she shrank away from Liz, afraid. She had only ever seen Liz before as a spiritual puffball. This half-human
apparition was something new and frightening.
Liz held out her hand, palm open. Jinx stared at it for long moments before she finally understood.
She handed over her sword without a word.
Beth finally succeeded in getting a double-handed grip on Fran’s wrist. She slammed it against the floor, once, twice, three times. The knife fell free at last, and Beth picked it up. Fran was going for it too, but a solid punch to the side of her head put a stop to that nonsense. It laid the little girl out cold, which Beth wished she’d done long ago.
She reversed the knife, feeling for the line of Fran’s jaw and for the little pulsing artery.
Hey, a voice said. It was her own voice, which was not something she was expecting to hear again until she used it herself. A strange emotion flooded her, a mixture of resignation and boiling, thrilling rage. On the one hand, when was this bitch going to realize she was beaten and just lie the fuck down? On the other, Liz was to Beth the perfect enemy, being everything about herself that she had ever hated. When they fought, when she hurt Liz and beat her down, it was the purest pleasure she had felt since she killed Marc. It filled the void in her the way nothing else could hope to fill it.
She stood, gathering herself, and turned.
The thing that was standing behind her was a ghost only a little more convincing than the ones kids make at Halloween by cutting eyeholes in sheets. The face it wore—Liz’s face—was a blurred smear. But it was carrying a medieval broadsword: carrying it effortfully and awkwardly in both hands, the way an old woman might carry a shopping bag that was much too heavy for her.
It was the sword the fucked-up little fox-thing had used on Beth to no effect at all.
Liz jabbed with the sword, slowly and clumsily. Beth raised her hand to meet it as it came, the way you might pass your finger through a candle flame, mocking its inability to hurt her.
The blade passed through her forearm: a spike of terrible, bone-shattering cold. Her scream of agony shattered what was left of the glass in the room’s already broken window.
The sword was so heavy it felt to Liz as though she should be sinking into the earth with each step she took. How did Jinx hold it one-handed, twist and swing and slice the air with it as though it weighed nothing at all?
The answer was obvious. Because it was a piece of her soul, given shape. It was no different from the armor she wore, the fur on her back, her arms and legs and face. It was made of her.
But in Jinx’s hands, the sword had been useless against Beth. It had passed through her harmlessly, and Beth had barely noticed. Liz had gambled everything on a hunch—that it might be different if the hand holding the sword was hers. That she might be able to close the circuit in a way that Jinx couldn’t. It was a kind of sympathetic magic, or at least she hoped it was: you could only touch the things that were of the same nature as you, whether to help or to hurt, protect or destroy. She and Beth, they were two pieces of one thing, resonating on a single frequency.
And she had been right. When Liz touched the sword, the power flowed. When the sword touched Beth, Beth felt it. The shriek of pain and the shattered glass were proof of that.
Now if only Liz could move a little faster! She had landed one blow, but only because Beth hadn’t been afraid of her. Hadn’t even tried to move aside. She wasn’t going to be caught the same way twice, not by a shambling, weightless thing that walked like a puppet with half its strings cut. They turned a slow circuit, the limits of their battleground marked out by the three bodies stretched on the ground.
Liz swung again—or poked, rather, unable to bring the sword any higher than her waist no matter how hard she pulled against its dreadful weight. Beth ducked aside with arrogant ease and stepped past her, heading for Fran.
Liz turned, but too slowly. Trying to bring the sword around and strike again was like trying to turn an ocean liner. It wallowed in the air.
But then a hand slid through Liz’s—literally through it—to grip the sword’s hilt. The hand had only three fingers. A thin white streak ran through the red-brown fur that covered it.
Together, Jinx said. She had stepped right up alongside Liz, partially overlapping her. Liz’s right side pricked and tingled where they touched.
Together. They turned. Jinx took the weight and Liz took care of the aim. The sword still felt to her like a mountain on the move, but it moved where she wanted it to and that was all that mattered.
As Beth bent down over Fran’s unmoving body, the X-Acto knife once more in her hand, Liz took her with a scything, upward thrust that entered her chest and ripped its way out through her head.
There was no wound. The blade was as insubstantial as air. But Beth felt herself torn, sliced open along a seam she hadn’t known she possessed. There was no pain, but there was something worse than pain. The truth of her, the essence of her, spilled out like water from a shattered dam.
She crashed to her knees. Diminishing. Memories were boiling and subliming out of her as if that gossamer blade was white-hot and had set the core of her on fire. Her children’s faces flared and faded. When they were gone, they would be gone forever. She reached for them and felt only the edges of the hole that was left behind. Their names, even, were gone. Neither the sound nor the sense of them remained. Just an aching nothingness, a bereavement that was evaporating in its turn. Nothing. Nothing would be left.
And then, when Beth had sublimed away into the air like a sigh on a cold day, Liz would step in again and take up where she had left off. As though, in spite of all she had done, all she had suffered, Beth had never even been there at all.
No way, she thought grimly. No fucking way. Why should anyone else have the happiness she’d lost? Why, much more importantly, should Liz?
She forced herself to move. She still had the knife, so that part wrote itself. She cut her left wrist with a deep lateral slash. Her hands were starting to shake, and the world was running like water. Focus. Focus. She could do this. Transferring the knife to her left hand she excavated three deep gouges in her right wrist.
The tremors were building, not just in her hands but in her whole body. The knife slipped from her fingers, but she didn’t need it anymore.
Liz was screaming in her ear, scrabbling once again to get a hold on her, to climb inside her and into the driving seat, but Liz’s best chance of taking her had been when she was looking the other way. Even now, even dying and dissolving, Beth could hold her off for a few seconds longer. For as long as it took. The fox was yelling at Liz to pick up the sword again. Its voice was as shrill as a child’s.
Reaching into her jeans pocket, Beth fished out—with a great deal of effort—the box of Diamond safety matches she had tucked in there before she left home.
Liz shrieked and cursed and laid siege to her. The fox howled. None of it mattered.
Getting the box open took forever. An eternity of groping and swiping, her shaking hands slick with fresh blood, pulsing with exquisite pain. Drawing a match out was beyond her, so she just upended the whole box and pawed at the little pile of splinters until one of them stayed attached to her fingers somehow.
Please! Liz screamed. Don’t!
Beth didn’t have any breath to spare on a reply. She was fading fast. She let the match speak for her. Dragged it along the safety strip until the stinging heat against the heel of her hand told her it had sparked.
She dropped it to the floor, the last, hot seed of her hatred, hoping with all her heart that it would find some fertile ground.
That done, she gave herself over to nonexistence. She did it with a sort of resigned contempt, like someone flinging down their last hand of cards as they left the table and not bothering even to check whether or not they came out ahead.
Dying was something she knew how to do.
When Fran recovered consciousness, she thought for a second that it was summer. The hot air on her face and the dazzling brightness made her imagine she was sitting in a park somewhere on a day in mid-August, and that it was way
past time to find some shade.
Then she inhaled the complex, choking bouquet of combustion and realized the truth. She opened her eyes, blinking to get the sweat and tears out of them, and looked around the room.
It was on fire, and so was she.
The pain in her shoulder and side was terrible, and so was the weakness. She had to force her aching body to move, and it moved like a bad stop-motion effect. She rolled over onto her belly and then onto her back, trying to put out the spreading splotches of flame on her clothes. It actually worked, to her dull amazement.
But that wasn’t going to matter in a minute or so. The fire was taking some time to spread in the center of the room because the carpets were steeped in damp and stewed in mildew, but the bare boards where the carpet had been rolled back had caught nicely and had passed the blaze along to the wooden frames of the doors and windows. The skeletal curtains were going up like fireworks.
Beth was slumped beside her, on her face. When Fran nudged her with her foot, and then kicked her, she didn’t wake. Zac and Molly hadn’t moved an inch from their earlier positions.
Fran couldn’t even see the knife from where she was. It had to be close, but even if she found it and freed her hands and feet in time, she couldn’t carry the other three out of here. She felt the muscle-deep ache of her fresh wounds and the stickiness of her own blood pooled under her. She didn’t have the strength. Even on her best day it would have been a big ask. Bound and bleeding out, she knew better than to try.
She turned her head—wincing as the wound in her shoulder reported in with a sharp stab of agony—to look at the room’s only other occupant. Jinx’s sharp, almost triangular face was creased with anguish. She was squatting beside Fran, keening very softly. That was probably what had woken her.