She was free, worked loose of it, and tipping toward the earth and a good drop a few feet below. She could see the dark ground start to rush up at her—
Someone grabbed her by the ankle, arresting her momentum as she started to tip forward. This grip was strong, but strange, a cloth texture wrapped over the fingers. Another came a moment later on her other thigh, fighting hard against her body’s forward motion.
Rose hung there, almost out the window, and those grips dug in tighter to her skin. She cried out, unaware that she was even whimpering now, trying to escape this—this—whatever it was.
They seized her and dragged her back through the window, all pretense of being gentle dispensed with. She struggled as they reeled her back in, and someone punched her in the back after she’d rattled the window fearfully by bucking against it. The glass shattered and showered her with a few flecks that cut at her, but she ignored the pain. She was crying already. Someone threw the window frame open full, and now there were enough cloth-clad hands on her that they dragged her back in easily.
“Get a sheet over her!” someone shouted, and the other shadowy figures worked to make it happen. A sheet was thrown over her immediately, and she saw her mam’s face before it came over her, and had the dim realization that her mam was, in fact, the one who’d done it.
The hits that followed were breathtaking. “Don’t kill her!” someone offered as guidance between the blows. She was screaming, crying, trying to fight back but not having an ounce of luck. She couldn’t see except dimly, through the cotton, and the hits—they kept coming, hard and fast against her sides, her back. Something broke, and the fight went out of Rose, and she lay on her bed, covered in a sheet, crying and sobbing, face trying to suck breaths through a cloth wet with her own spittle.
“Drag her out,” a voice commanded.
It was granddad’s.
Rose’s mouth was frozen open in a long, whimpering scream. It came in a low whine though, instead of a fearful, forceful cry. They carried her out, people on every side like it was a funeral procession, carrying her sheet as though it were to be her casket.
Dark thoughts swirled around her. Maybe this was the end. Maybe they’d had enough of her now, and they were going to just get over with the things they’d been thinking about behind her back for months.
It would almost…almost…be welcome.
They dragged her outside, the slight warmth of the house giving way to another round of cold chills that filtered through the sheet. She expected cheers of triumph and jeers of hatred from the assembled townsfolk when they brought her out. But it was silent instead, the quiet hum of any conversation simply dying when they brought her into the middle of the crowd and then pulled back the sheet.
Her mam was standing right there, one of her “pallbearers,” stone-faced and uncaring.
Granddad was at the other side, and his lips were pursed, face knitted with worry. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.
Rose was on her haunches in a sea of legs, a sea of people staring down at her. Her shoulders were heaving up and down involuntarily with her fear, her eyes darting to see implacable gazes shining down on her like beacons from above, watching, judging…
The hawk cawed once again, louder now that she was out in the open air, the frosty cold rolling across her skin, her shorts and thin tank top inadequate to protect her from the frigid late autumn weather.
“We’ve got her,” Miriam Shell crowed from somewhere behind her, and laughed like a great crone, some mixture of relief sprinkled in with…fear? Rose wasn’t sure she heard it right, her heart was pounding so hard.
Rose was crying, her nose running as the wetness froze on her cheeks and her lip. She tried not to show weakness but it wouldn’t be held back. Not even here, among these people who hated her. The pain and terror was pressing in hard, like razors against her, and all she could do was look around at them as they stood like forbidding statues, all of them looking down at her.
“It’s coming,” her granddad said, looking around in the darkness.
“Can you feel it?” her mam asked, face frozen like the chill had dragged it into a death mask, white as pale snow.
“Nae, but it’s about to happen,” he said, rubbing his hand against his chest. He glanced down at Rose.
The hawk called again, and it echoed over the village. Rose looked up, peering at the bird of prey. It was circling, and she wondered if it was a bit out of place here, and at this time of night.
Graham edged into view, not looking at her but for a brief second, and then he looked away. “I wish we could just get this over. If it’s going to happen—” He didn’t finish his thought, and no one else finished it for him.
Rose swallowed, feeling like a boulder was trapped in her throat. She wished it would get over with too. If they were going to kill her…
Her friends, her family, her neighbors—
…she wished they’d just be on about it. Hang her from a gibbet and be done. The chill was biting, and it wasn’t just the weather. She’d lived here all her life, and now these people—she’d once have thought her people—had turned on her.
To the last.
Her granddad tensed at her shoulder, and she looked back to see him stricken, his face a pained shade. A grunt behind her jerked her attention away, and then someone cried out.
“It’s coming!” Hamilton shrieked, and he lunged through the crowd at her, hand outstretched.
Rose let a little shriek of her own as he reached for her, hand open, palm extended. Someone else grabbed her from behind, landing a heavy, sweaty palm on the back of her neck. Someone seized her hard by the arm, someone else by the back, lifting her. Someone grabbed at her back, clawing at her. Their hand pressed against her and their nails dug in to rip her apart—
She was lifted high now, up in the air, and everyone wanted to clutch at her, to rip at her, fingers digging in like they meant to tear her apart. Her mam found purchase somewhere in there, she could tell by the cold fingers at the small of her back. Her shirt was ripped off without ceremony, there one moment and gone the next, and replacing the cloth were a dozen hands lifting her up, frigidly cold on the small of her back. They pulled at her legs, her arms, ready to tear her to pieces—
Rose screamed, and screamed, and—
She was held there, up in the air, above the heads of the crowd, the freezing night air biting at her belly and chest and throat and face and toes and fingers, and what felt like a thousand grabbing hands on her body as she was trapped there, lifted into the air with no power of her own. She kicked her legs and it did nothing; hands caught her again, anchoring to her as they came back down.
Rose let out another wild scream, and someone hit her in the back of the head. It was like the time she’d leaned over to see what was in the bottom of Granddad’s cedar chest, and the lid had come crashing down on her. She saw stars then, a flash in the cold night, just as she did now.
The back of her head ached where she’d been struck, and thoughts were slower to come. Her mouth was cottony dry and the hands—they were everywhere—clutching at her, grabbing at her, holding to her, her skin burning where they touched…
Burning.
Where they.
Touched?
Now other screams were filling the night, and the crowd was wild and surging, Rose carried on them, her voice blistered and raw. Her skin itself felt like it was on fire, and she looked over to see Mam staring up at her, mouth open in a scream of her own. Rose could almost feel her there, her presence, and then suddenly Mam’s eyes went dark and her body went limp. She reeled away, gone, somehow; Rose knew, could feel her—her entirely—inside the mind, now, and someone else stepped into the void and laid a cold, rough hand on Rose’s skin by her ribs.
They were falling away like dead flies now. She watched Hamilton’s eyes roll back in his head hard, death come for him, and he fell over. Graham’s eyes were flittering up, only the whites visible save for the
peak of his spasms, when a tiny edge of the pupils could be seen, a hint of the brown which she’d once thought she could stare into forever. Then he fainted away limply and crashed, and someone else surged in, trampling over his body to lay hands on her.
“Had to be this…way…” her granddad said over the screams and cries, and she looked over at him just as he keeled over, and she knew he was dead too, his hand leaving her body as he fell. Her skin felt as if it were aflame, hard fire running over the flesh. She half-expected her skin to be glowing in the night like a midnight fire’s last embers, but she was as pale as ever, and nearer to the ground now.
A pitched cry came from behind her, and somehow she knew Miriam Shell had fallen, her day now done, and the stray thought passed through her mind—was that what she had sounded like with Graham?
Rose’s very head was splitting, her mind now lit afire, as though someone had gone and crammed too much in its bounds. There was a mad whirl to it all, a very mad whirl that made her wonder how she could possibly endure this feeling—this burning feeling—even one minute more—
And then it stopped, and she realized she was on the ground, or near to it. She rolled and found a body, another body, bodies piled on top of others. She rolled and saw her granddad’s face, still in death, eyes open and staring back at her, and she wanted to scream, but something else shut that instinct down. Her mam was just there, buried under another body, face invisible, but there was a clear view of her sleeve that Rose could hardly forget. She knew her mam’s wardrobe, every stitch.
The hawk sounded again, and the riot of noise in Rose’s head stilled, listening for it. There was a raging energy in her mind, an indistinct mass of howling that Rose could scarcely make out between the screaming of her nerves, ever single inch of her flesh howling at the feeling it’d just been overwhelmed with. She’d never felt anything like it, that burning feeling. The closest thing she could think of was—
You dirty little harlot.
The voice burst out of the din in a distinct shock of outrage.
Rose stopped dead, her slow writhe stunned into quiet and stillness by that voice that sounded like a bullhorn out of the heavens.
It was her mam’s voice.
We have to go now, her granddad said, and it was as though he were there, next to her, or louder, even. She rolled to look and—
There was no one there. Above, the hawk was the only thing that was moving, and it was circling lower, like a carrion bird over a corpse.
Rose tried to push herself up and failed.
Come on then, you.
Move it, girl.
Useless thing.
We have to go, now!
The cacophony was deafening, a chorus of voices with an utter lack of unity. They screamed and squalled in indistinct directions, and Rose clapped her hands over her ears, cold fingers against frigid lobes, trying to shut it out but only making it louder in the process.
Go, you stupid girl!
Get us out of here!
Her mam’s voice cracked through it all, sullen and resentful and filled with icy hate. Idiot child. I should have thrown you off a cliff the moment you were born.
Rose got to her feet, wobbling on unsteady legs. Somehow that voice drove her, and she looked up at the hawk, which sounded once more and then—
Something long and sharp buried itself in the bird, appearing as though by magic, a skewer straight through the creature. It arced and fell, thudding to the ground just beyond her house.
Go, you idiot! someone shouted in her head, and Rose staggered forward, trying to find the fallen bird. She traced a path around the house, but when she came to where she thought it might have landed—
Tamhas lay there, a long spear sticking through his middle, and his breath coming in sharp gasps. Rose stood there, at the edge of the house, and then took a tentative step toward him. He met her eyes, and gasped, and motioned her forward.
She came, strangely drawn to him as he lay there, dying. She knew just by looking at him that his time was short. The spear, whatever it was, had pierced him clean through when he’d been a bird. It hadn’t stopped piercing him now that he was a man again. He raised a hand to her, and something urged her forward, a thousand voices in her head telling her to take his hand.
Rose took his hand, and knelt next to him. The smell of his blood as it pumped out onto the cold ground filled her nostrils, metallic.
His hand was cold against hers, another against her this night. “Needed your…help…” Tamhas whispered, and when he spoke blood oozed down his lips. She cradled his hand, thinking of the kindness he’d shown her so recently. Speaking to a body was a strange and small kindness, yet it was the only one she’d received of late. “You’re the only one who can…” His eyes fixed, pain setting in from her touch, and she started to pull away, but he clutched her hand, like the others, shaking in the night against her skin.
He didn’t last long, his shuddering done, his blood stilled. And Rose dropped his hand, feeling him this time, another voice in the chorus, but not loudly. Like a pebble in a pond, the ripples coming out from it, but the rock itself so small and indistinct as to be lost in the volume of water.
Now go, you idiot! someone shouted in her mind.
Go! Go!
Go!
Get, you fool!
Run!
Rose staggered to her feet and did run, making it to a thicket about fifty yards away before she collapsed into them, leafless branches stinging her, hiding herself from sight and feeling the jagged pains of the night like swallowed glass, writhing around inside her with all these new voices. She whispered, almost, to herself, sobbed quietly, even as the chorus of howls screamed in her head to—
Move!
Go, stupid!
Get out of here!
You’re going to kill us all!
But they were already dead, weren’t they? Rose wondered as she knelt there on the frozen ground. It seemed impossible that they weren’t; she felt them in her mind, that frightful sick feeling that she’d—
Well, she’d—
She’d eaten the souls of every single person in her village.
And they’d bloody well lined up and forced her to do it.
The first voice in the night was like a stilling calm, icy and laden with contempt for everything. She couldn’t see the speaker himself, but somehow she knew of him immediately, a vision thrust into her eyes about what he looked like—mop of wild, dark hair and shadowy eyes, his face filled with a barely veiled look of contempt. Tamhas’s voice supplied the name, Weissman, and Rose listened to him speak in the quiet night.
“…turned out pretty well, Raymond,” Weissman said with dripping contempt. “This is the last cloister. And look at ‘em! Other than the shifter, they’re all…” He strolled into the middle of the town, Rose watching him from behind the bushes. “…well, good and dead.”
“People don’t just keel over and die like this,” the second man said, following slowly behind Weissman. Tamhas seemed to hand his name to her: Raymond. He must have overheard it while watching as a falcon.
“Au contraire, Raymondo,” Weissman said, all full of vicious energy, like he was glorying in the pile of dead Rose had crawled out of. “And you should know, you lil’ Hades scamp, you.” Weissman spoke in an American accent, and the lack of formality between them told Rose everything she needed to know about who was boss here. “How many times have we walked into a scene such as this, dead everywhere—I mean, this is your raison d’etre, Ray. This is what you do, keel people over and die ‘em.”
“I didn’t kill these people,” Raymond said softly. She couldn’t see him well, but he seemed like he was…struggling with the bodies, all piled together. Rose could see the corpse of Ronnie Gordon, his youthful face already adopting a grey pallor in death. Someone had lifted him up to touch her, too, and she could hear him seething inside her, slithering in the back of her mind like an angry little snake.
“Hm,” Weissman said, not really see
ming too interested. “Well, they’re dead, and that’s what counts. I’m thinking…mass suicide. Like Heaven’s Gate.”
“I was trying to pull them from their bodies, and then, suddenly, they were just…gone,” Raymond said, with soft regret.
“Who cares?” Weissman called into the still night, like the cawing of a crow, black hair like a shining shadow, brighter than the dark around him. “They are dead. Mission accomplished. Let’s move on with our lives like they have. No. Wait. Not exactly like they have, obviously…”
“You’re going to care if a certain succubus who’s been foiling your London operations got ahold of old souls like these, some of whom might know what her power can actually do if she were to…unleash it.” Raymond’s soft voice was like a grenade exploding in the night, and it shut Weissman up hard.
Rose’s ears pricked up. What was this about a succubus?
“I honestly did think Sienna Nealon would be here for this,” Weissman said, and now he was quieter. “That she’d try and stop us, at least.” He laughed bitterly, but it sounded hollow. “My spies still put her in London, hunkering down and waiting for us to come back. I guess she doesn’t give a damn about Scotland, but then…who in London does, really?” He cackled, but again it lacked any real feeling other than a malice that made Rose shiver in the night. “So…she ain’t here. It was probably just poison.”
“Do you see any cups?” Raymond’s soft question was laced with accusation.
“Shut the hell up, Raymond. You’re stepping all over my triumphal mood, you downer lowmarket jackass.” Weissman seethed in the dark. “Can’t you just let me have this moment? If I could stop time to savor this minute, this second, without pissing off Akiyama, I would do it just so I could breathe in this triumph. We have wiped out every cloister in Europe. Every one. They are all dead, all of them—with that, you know, glaring exception of the country of Revelen, but who cares about them? We’ll get to them. Sovereign will get to them,” Weissman amended. “But Europe—the old redoubt of metahumankind? It’s ours, Ray.” Weissman slapped him, genially, across the back of the neck. It didn’t seem very friendly, even to Rose, who had just been handled much more roughly. “Now let’s go deal with your not-so-great niece and put this whole continent away, okay?”
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