Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

by Ilsa J. Bick

  “You’re welcome.” His snake’s eyes raked her up and down. “How did you do it? Not even Davey could find you.”

  “Davey?” Maybe it was Tom’s imagination, but he thought there was the very slightest difference in her tone. Her laser-green gaze slid to the boy—Davey—then back.

  “Yes. You’re very different.” Finn turned to consider Simon, whose face was a study in anguish, before regarding her again with genuine curiosity. “Is Simon … fond of you? Is that why they let you live?”

  What? Tom felt his stomach lurch into his throat. What?

  “What do you want, Finn?” she asked.

  “You’re able to block me,” Finn said. “How? What is it about you that’s so different?”

  She looked at Finn for a long moment. “I have cancer.”

  The words hit Tom so hard he almost lost it. Probably would’ve—collapsed, screamed, grabbed her, wrapped her up, because no one was touching her, no one would hurt her ever again, and he would fight for her, he would fight—if she hadn’t warned him to keep his mouth shut. No, Jesus, please. His right leg was already shuddering, and now he thought he might actually fall. A red mist crept over his vision. Really, this couldn’t get any worse. There was no hell in the hereafter to worry about. They were living it.

  “A brain tumor.” Her voice trembled, just a little. A scarlet flush stained her cheeks.

  “Really?” Finn only looked intrigued. “Terminal?”

  “That’s what they said.” She moved a shoulder in a shrug. “I’m still here.”

  “Fascinating. Are you epileptic? From the tumor?”

  “No, are you?”

  “No.” The corner of Finn’s mouth twitched. “So you felt it. How are you controlling it? Or are you? You look tense. Barely holding on, is that it? I’ll bet it’s worse when I drive them, isn’t it?” When she didn’t reply, Finn said, “What’s your name?”

  “Don’t!” Peter strained against the three guards wrestling him back. “Don’t do it, don’t tell him! It’s how he gets access!”

  Access? Tom stared at Peter. To what?

  “Peter, it’s all right,” she said.

  “But then he’ll control—”

  “Quiet, boy-o.” Finn’s revolver was in his hand in the same flash of speed with which he’d wielded that parang. “Don’t push it—”

  “Stop, Finn. Don’t hurt him,” she said—and looked at Davey. “Alex. My name is Alex.”

  Alex. Tom saw Davey’s eyelids flutter, and his nostrils flare. What are you doing?

  “Noooo,” Peter moaned. “Alex, no, you don’t understand—”

  “No, Peter,” Alex said. “I think I do.”

  “Do you, Alex?” Finn said, in the gentle, almost wheedling tone of a kindly grandfather. “I doubt that. So let me … show you.”

  Flinching, Alex sucked in a quick, pained breath, her head suddenly snapping the way Peter’s had when Finn hurt him—and Tom couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Stop, Finn. Please,” he said, hoarsely. Peter was grimacing, his head moving in a spastic jerk as his fists clenched. All around, the air seemed to hum as the Changed, including Davey, shifted, the way runners take their marks. He felt the guards grab his arms as he tried to get between Finn and Alex. “Stop what you’re doing, don’t hurt her, don’t—”

  “N-no, Finn,” Alex stammered. Her eyes rolled to the whites. A thin trickle of blood oozed from a nostril. “L-let me—”

  In the tower:

  Tom. She had to save him. She had to let the monster out and do something, and she had to do it now, right now, before it was too late. And if she couldn’t get back to herself?

  It won’t matter. Can’t let Tom die. Stop being such a scared bunny and do this; this is for Tom, for Chris, for Wolf and Peter, for everybody. No one she cared about would be safe if she didn’t try. She had to trust herself, stop fighting who she was, let the monster go, let it touch Wolf. It wanted to anyway, and Wolf would be easiest to reach, because the monster’s interest was selective.

  Steeling herself, she gave the monster substance: built it a gargoyle of a body; went the whole hog, the way the doctors always wanted. Sketch that boogeyman some slit eyes, needle-teeth, scales and wings, claws long as scimitars, a forked tail. Then she imagined the monster reaching out with one scaly arm; felt it unspool from her mind to tap-tap with a single talon. Wolf reacted and turned a look, actually knew she was there—and for a second, she saw Tom with much more clarity through eyes that were not hers. No exchange of thoughts, no insights, but she was in Wolf’s head for a split second.

  She kept the message very simple, stupid: Look. And Wolf did.

  Davey was harder, different, worse—like jumping from Blackrocks, only at night into black goo. His was a dark language that she only caught when it was very strong in the sweep of the go-go, push-push. She went fast, too. A quick dart, in and out, no message. Finn would be there, holding the boy back; otherwise, Davey and all the Changed would have been tearing these people apart. She didn’t want Finn to feel her, not yet.

  Again, that dizzying sidestep, doubling, dropping behind the windows of Davey’s eyes—

  And there was Tom, again, but through Davey this time. Davey’s focus, though—so taut and mica-bright it was like riding a laser—was Finn: Finn’s smell, his eyes, even the voice.

  The old man—his signal?—was there, too, in the background: a thin red river coursing through an intricate landscape. Not the roaring fury of the push-push go-go, though, because there was no killing to be done at the moment.

  She let the monster drift on the current, very briefly; flow from Davey’s perspective to the others, all the altered Changed: Tom and Finn and the square seen from different perspectives and varying points on the same river, like a glimpse of the world through the myriad facets of the eye of a giant fly.

  Because Davey and the altered Changed were Finn’s network, his cell towers, and the unaltered Changed were networked to one another. She knew that because none of the Changed, not even Davey, reacted when Finn hurt Peter. Finn didn’t need to use Davey or the altered Changed to get to Peter in that way. But when Finn wanted to reach those Changed he hadn’t altered, he had to go through Davey. Finn was limited the same way she was: the Changed were all on a different circuit, speaking to one another on a frequency that neither Finn nor she could directly access without a kind of gateway.

  Simple commands piggybacking on a more generalized signal. That had to be how Finn was doing it. For Finn, Davey was the way into the conversation. When Finn urged on the Changed, all Peter got was the bleed, the leakage, same as she. The further away Finn was, the less she and Peter were affected by the push-push go-go.

  One signal, repeated and boosted through one conduit and then into many, just as Jasper said.

  Now, as Finn amped it up; as he showed himself in a surge of the red storm; as she felt the hammer and the thrum and the sweeping power of the push-push go-go, Alex let herself go. Let everything fall, all those barriers and walls, no holding back, because this was the leap her father tried to prepare her for all those years ago at Blackrocks, whether he had known it or not: Jump to me, sweetheart. Take a chance and jump. This was the end and it was for keeps, it was forever, and do it, Alex, do it, do it for love, do it for Tom, save him, because it was the very last and only play left.

  She could feel it, that same ballooning in her mind, the sidestep and shimmy, the shift.

  Gathering herself, marshaling as much of the monster’s frenzied energy as she could, she dropped all the barriers, each and every mental firewall. Alex leapt; felt herself and the monster falling and then crashing into the roaring red tide of the go-go-go-go, swamping Davey, swamping the Changed, as the monster—all yellow eyes and needle-teeth and scaled arms—exploded from its deep dark well and unfurled in a sudden bloody flower to seep into Davey, into the altered Changed, and all the others, even into Peter: gogogogoGOGOGO—

  “N-no, Finn,” Alex said, working to get the w
ords out, and through it, Tom heard the deep venom in her voice, almost a growl. “L-let me … sh-show you!”

  Her back arched; her eyes gleamed; her features twisted into a naked kind of raw fury he knew from battle, when the enemy was swarming over the rocks and you had no ammo and all that was left, everything that separated life and death, was the razor-thin margin of what the body knew and what it would do to cling to every last moment. Alex seemed to grow in front of his eyes into something new, breaking from a cocoon and revealing something not quite human living behind the eyes of a girl whose face was etched with a diamond on his memory and yet never truly known or seen until now. Until the moment she let herself break, let the mask slip, dared to make herself known, dared it all.

  For a split second, time gathered itself, swelled like a trembling teardrop ready to fall—and then the time splintered and broke apart.

  And Alex wailed. The sound was a keening, as clear and piercing as the note of her father’s whistle that called to him from the endless night of a dark and desperate place where the monsters lived. But this was also a roar, a call to battle: a swooping crescendo that went on and on and on, one that raised the hair on his head and sent Tom’s heart crowding into his mouth.

  “Alex!” He had to do something; he had to break this, get her out, get them both out! The guards had fallen back; everyone seemed frozen. Without realizing, he’d actually recoiled a step, but Tom now started forward, no clear idea of what he meant to do, only knowing that he must take her away from here—

  But then, to his left and just beyond Finn, Davey’s head whipped, those mad vermillion eyes going wide as he shrieked, his cry twining around Alex’s, becoming one. To his right, Peter was howling a ululating note, and Simon and Penny were screeching, and then all the Changed, altered and not, wailed. It was a cry that rose to an insane bellow and in voices that were many and voices that were one, resolving to a single note, and that voice was Alex, it was Alex, and it said—

  Minutes out of Rule, still in forest but running up the hospice road, Chris abruptly reined in Night. Ahead, a shuddering roar billowed from the trees. It was like something from television, on Saturdays in fall when his father mainlined beer and cursed the Wolverines: that peculiar kind of whooping bellow a college crowd made in a packed football stadium. Yet this cry was also unearthly, a shriek that was one voice made of many, and Chris couldn’t tell if he was listening to pain or ecstasy—or a little bit of both.

  “My God,” he said as the horse pranced and snorted, “do you hear that?”

  “Yeah. And screams, too, not just that … that sound.” Greg’s eyes were bright with urgency and early morning light. “Are we too late? Do you think the bombs …”

  “No. If we can hear that, we’d have heard the explosion.” Or explosions. The idea was that there would be no one left to scream, or at least not for very long. “I think … God, I think those are the Changed.”

  “Chris.” Greg was staring. “The Changed don’t speak.”

  They do now. Something’s given them a voice. The sound was so eerie he was shivering. “I think they’re saying something. You hear it? Actual words?”

  “Yeah. I do,” Greg said. “It sounds like—”

  * * *

  “GO GO GO!” Eyes blazing, crackling with sudden energy, Alex wailed: “KILL FINN KILL FINN KILL HIS MEN KILL FINN KILL—”

  “What’s happening?” Mellie shrieked. Turning a wild circle, she clapped her hands to her ears as the Changed bellowed. “Elias, Elias, what are they doing, what’s—”

  “No!” Finn shouted, but his was a voice in the wilderness, a tiny speck, like listening to a scream lost to the thunder of a whirlpool.

  And then, for Tom, everything snapped, the world cracking wide in a furious maelstrom of sound and movement just as it had the day the world died, and the night they blew the mine and the ground had shuddered under his feet. Only now, instead of a black tornado of birds and a rampaging of deer and bewildered animals and his brain trying to tear itself apart and the mouth of the earth yawning wide to swallow him for good—this time, the end belonged to the Changed.

  As one, all the Changed began to move, storming and rampaging through the square. The Rule people were screaming, slipping, tangling with one another in their rush to escape, but there was nowhere to go. They were hemmed in by the Changed and Finn’s men and a chaos of horses wheeling and rearing, their hooves clashing down on ice and earth to break bodies, crush heads. The Changed wheeled on Finn’s men, most of whom were still trying to raise their weapons two seconds too late. The Changed charged, the weird, altered Changed leaping from braying horses, the others like puppets suddenly cut free of their strings to fall on Finn’s men, swirling and seething and boiling in a mad, chaotic frenzy. The square erupted as Finn’s men fired wild, bullets buzzing in high hornet-like whines. It was like watching a scene from a movie where an army overruns a village; where, soon, there will be no one left.

  On the landing, Alex keened: hands by her head, fingers spread wide, eyes bulging, blood on her mouth from the red river leaking from her nose, as if the something that had burst from her was blowing her apart. To Tom’s left, Mellie screamed again as a girl raced up the steps to throw herself on the woman in a fast, flat dive. Crashing back against a balustrade, Mellie rebounded from the stone, rolled, and tried scuttling away. Swarming over Mellie’s back, the girl latched onto the old woman’s neck with her teeth. Howling, Mellie reared like a horse trying to throw its rider, hands wildly scrabbling for purchase.

  To Tom’s right, Peter suddenly launched himself, a fury of golden hair and mad eyes, with Simon—that boy who might have been Chris in a different life—only a step behind: “Kill him kill him kill him—”

  But Davey, Finn’s pet, his very special boy, was closer and already turning, lips skinning from his teeth, manic red eyes wild with rage.

  “No, Davey!” Finn shrieked, one arm upraised, a hand going for his Colt as Davey uncoiled like a caged panther finally breaking from its prison. “NO NO N—”

  Finn, as fast as he was, never had a chance. Davey barreled into the old man, bearing them both, thrashing, to the stone. Finn’s pistol spun away. Pistoning his legs in the frantic way of a man desperate to keep a rabid dog from ripping out of his throat, Finn hammered Davey’s chin with his right boot. A spume of blood splashed Davey’s white uniform; Davey’s eyes rolled in their sockets, and the boy began to slide. Finn wound up for another kick that never connected as Peter and Simon, still roaring, converged. Peter was screaming: “He’s mine, he’s mine!” Grabbing the old man by the throat, he hammered Finn’s head into the brownstone landing, a hard percussive blow. Blood spurted from Finn’s burst scalp, but the old man was still fighting, screeching now like his sister. Planting a boot in Peter’s chest, he pounded Peter back. Tom saw a flash of metal as Finn whipped the parang from its sheath, heard the whicker of a vicious backhanded slice that sizzled like a snake. Peter shrieked and there was a wash of bright red blood, and then Peter was clutching his middle, blundering back as the Changed boiled through the square, heading right for them, coming for Finn.

  All this happened in less than ten seconds, and it finally got him moving. Five minutes, less than five minutes, got to get to a horse, get us the hell out of here! And break Alex, break her free of this! As Tom turned for her, he caught a blur from the corner of his eye. Maddened to a killing fury, Penny was spinning for her guard. Breaking from his paralysis, the guard swung his weapon, a Mossberg 500 shotgun. As that big black bore started coming around in a wide sweeping arc, Tom knew that not only would this man die trying—he would miss.

  “Alex!” Pivoting, Tom lunged first one awkward step on his hurt leg, then two. Incredibly, he saw her whirl in a fan of bloodred hair. For a moment, he thought she was running for him. But she wasn’t. She charged Finn, and the change he saw in her face—that same killing fury he read in Peter and Davey and Simon and all the Changed—stilled his heart. Tom understood, at once, that if
he did not break this now, before she reached Finn, she was lost and he might as well let the Mossberg’s slug find its mark. Hell, he would stand and hold her fast and make sure it killed them both.

  He threw himself in a desperate dive, smashing into her a nanosecond before the shotgun boomed. The slug brrred a hot trail over his head. There was a splash of imploding glass as a window exploded somewhere beyond. He wrapped her up, getting up one arm to protect her head and neck, throwing the other around her waist. They fell in a heap. Tom tried rolling onto his back at the last second so he could take the brunt of it, but he was awkward, in pain, off-balance, and only managed half a turn. They smacked stone that was going wet and red now with all this blood from the Changed and men alike. When they hit, Alex’s shriek cut out. Tom felt his breath blast from his lungs, but he hung on and then he was hugging her close as she thrashed and kicked and snarled to get away. He felt the bite of glass and stone on his back and the wild beat of her heart against his, and he was screaming, too, screaming into her raving, bloody face: “Alex, Alex, it’s me, it’s me, it’s Tom!”

  For an instant—and just an instant—that feral glint in her green eyes sharpened on him. He really did think that if she went for his throat, he would let it happen. In another five minutes and change, Alex wouldn’t be there anyway. For him, letting her go, again, was not an option. If he had to die, better this way, with and by her. But then her head rocked; he had the sense of something snapping either away or back into place, or maybe both. Her eyes, still so green and bright, firmed to a different reality. Firmed to him.

  “Tom.” There was wonder there, a searching, and a whisper that he heard as a shout because he really did have her now, no-holds-barred; this moment was the beginning of forever. “Tom?”