Chương 36: 1.35. Stay Perfectly Still

The sorcerer's murderous hands swung upward to meet the careening thief—too slow. Seth landed cutlass-first on the sorcerer's chest, and his broad, inexpert blade punched out the small of the man's back. The sorcerer was dead before he slammed into the ground, a toppling pile of meat, but the wild-eyed thief stabbed him again, in the throat. His cutlass bumped the knob of spinal bone and glanced, and he raised it again."

Seth," Anna roared, which turned him around just in time to bring his blade into guard against the big war pick that would've punched a hole in his skull. A resounding crash of metal on metal, a spark thrown into the evening. Seth scrambled back from the man he'd killed. The cultist leader, addled and furious, swung again into cool air, as if in vengeance for a wrong done him by the world at large, trying to find a foothold on his wrecked leg. A pale pearl of femur showed through the mulched flesh.

Tiago broke from the treeline and sprinted toward Seth and the wounded cultists, his saber whistling with him. And then Anna couldn't pay heed anymore to what the boy and the thief were doing, because the seraph was frenzying, dragging its way down the spear and thrashing its shovel-clawed pseudopods at her.

Its neck winched back and harpooned forward, beak open to a mass of beaks within like a morningstar's head, fractal madness, beaks within those beaks and beaks within them, a hungry avian ferrofluid snapping toward her face. Anna released the spear and lunged to one side and the sudden loss of its counterweight sent the gray feather lurching forward.

The spear's haft thudded to the ground and the beast shoved itself through on momentum until the head gleamed forth now from its back, and with a dry crack there went another fucking spear—how much had Anna spent on all these matchstick fucking things, she wondered—and now came the Sword of the Verdugo, sailing out from its blood-pressured chamber, disgorging across the grass and biting shallow into the monster's shoulder. A Pladuriya warcry belted from Anna's lungs.

She shifted her grip to a two-palmed pushdown into the blade's pommel that slid it halfway through the seraph's arm, gristle and tendon in gruesome glistening exposure. Its responding bellow and its swiping claw shifted only air. Anna was already back and away, yanking her side sword and her kindjal dagger out in razor unison. The grotesquerie bleated in hateful pain as it tried and failed to catch her, to pin down this darting silver shadow with the executioner edge sawn into its shoulder.

Now she had found the dance, she was the wind. She was the dark. She was inevitability. A ducking retreat, a leering false thrust, and she watched the faltering swing, and flowed past it, to its blindspot, and here came the bewildered, hateful pounce she'd hoped for, the beastbrained overcommitment. Finally she struck with all of her, scythed both edges into the same arm her executioner blade protruded from, and the seraph came down with the wet crunch of its arm further mutilating on contact with the stone.

Unable to bear its own weight, the seraph rolled howling across the gory grass. The executioner sword loosened from the canyon of raw ribbony seraph-flesh it had rent on its entrance and issued a metallic clang as it landed on the limestone. Anna's bicep thickened and bent and then snapped taut again and propelled her side sword spinning into the collapsed monster. The blade didn't stick home but glanced off with a shallow tallymark of opened-up skin; fine.

She'd only hurled it to free her main hand for the executioner sword which she snatched from its skittered-to place. The gray feather shuddered halfway to standing. Its many-chambered gullet let loose a basso profundo crow/roar, a wax cylinder of birdsong played at grinding distorted half-speed. Anna's thick blunthead blade sailed in a halfmoon arc and cleaved the trumpeting beast's face in half horizontally, chunks of beak and brain blooming out and tongues lolling, turning its craw to a gruesome orchid.

A shuddering lift of its forelimb; Anna's boot lashed into the sword's crossguard, sank it another inch into the monster's skull. It teetered, and fell sideways, and thus the false deity of the Sondam seraph cult surrendered its hexis to Verdugo al Ydris.

"I need your cuffs, mom." Anna stood stooped and feral over her black-blooded kill, spine and shoulders hunched forward like a fist closing around her thundering heart. A fleck of foaming drool drifted down her chin.

"Mom. Cuffs." Her son's voice finally snapped her from her red haze. Around the summoning stone, the cultists sprawled. The sorcerer lay in a pool of thick, stacking blood. The bald leader with the war pick had become a crackling pyre, filling the clearing with dancing light and the smell of singed flesh. Tiago was holding a third cultist, a live one, with his arms pinioned behind his back. The man's bullet-riddled legs spasmed as he kicked and dragged his heels across the forest floor.

"Fucking lobotomite," he barked.

"Fucking corpse slave! Fuck you!" Anna took a jaunty preparatory step with her left foot and sank her right into the man's face, penalty-kick style, flattening him back against Tiago's grip. She unclipped her cuffs and handed them off.

"Anyone else?"

"Over here." Seth's report was underlined by a piteous wail. Seth was stood next to a cultist propped against a tree. His hook-bladed bill lay a few feet away. His hands clutched across his belly were the only things keeping his entrails in. The pain had found him through the initial shock and he was weeping furrows through the dirt on his face. Anna crouched in front of him.

"Tell me something useful," she said, breathing through her mouth to avoid the foul smell his split-open stomach colored the air with.

"Tell me the name of your leader. Tell me who recruited you. And I'll take the pain away." The dying man—the dying boy, he couldn't be older than twenty—pointed at the dead bald man.

"Diego," he stuttered.

"Diego what?"

"I don't know," he sobbed.

"I don't know anything." His face was so red and puckered with agony. A strand of bloody snot dripped from his nose. Anna had seen enough; she was not as cruel as she wanted to be. Her executioner sword ended him, quick as she knew how, and she stood. Seth turned from the body. An angry red welt striped his face from chin to brow. His tongue was moving in his mouth, pushing against his cheek. He met her eye and a hush landed between them. A skipped line in a stageplay script—neither knew what to say next.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. Her first impulse was to scream at him, but scream at him why? The second of her children he'd saved. The second child, and she had no grounds to blame him, not this time. Nothing to hide behind. She had fucked up, and he had saved Tiago, and saved her. To pretend otherwise was to be a fucking child.

But the thought of offering gratitude to this interloping burden crawled like a hive of fire ants across her brain. She had to pull this head off and put one on that liked this little slip of a man, that knew what to do with this—this— thing hammering in her chest. Tiago moved first, seizing Seth by the hand and yanking him into a shoulder-forward hug.

"Fucking warrior." His closed fist thumped the thief hard on the back.

"That's my ass you pulled from the fire, Seth il Gutierre. Fucking warrior." Seth went to sheathe his cutlass, but the combat jitters still had him, and it took another try.

"I think I lost a tooth. Branch hit me in the fucking face."

"Do this." Tiago bared his teeth. Seth obeyed.

"Oh."

"Ah, shit," Seth said.

"It's not a front one. You're good." Seth's tongue probed through the hole his premolar had left.

"Ah, shit."

"A gold one'd suit you, man. Proper cutthroat. I'll front it." Anna ignored their developing rapport and strode to the last survivor where he sat trussed in her cuffs.

"Here's the prisoner you were so eager for, il Gutierre. Let's see if he'll tell us anything."

"I'll tell you nothing, rotten soulless cunt." The final cultist's voice had gone flat as an untended beer.

"May the barb of my hate stick in my hexis. May it break your blade. May it catch in the Sorcerer General's lying throat and choke him to death."

"Right." Anna gave a mock-salute to Seth.

"What do we think, master strategist? Shall we uselessly torture this man, or will you let me do my job?" He snorted with invasive chumminess. This was not a joke for him to be in on.

"Go ahead," he said. The cultist sneered.

"S'right. Go—" She vented her frustration into the severance of this dipshit's head from his neck. Tiago plucked a leaf from his machine gun's mechanisms as he packed it away.

"Why the fuck was there a sorcerer in these ranks? Why was nobody monitoring him for activity like this?"

"Whatever's happening," Seth said.

"Whatever's making these seraphs yell Ydris, whoever took your head, whatever that boxed seraph was. Why these guys died for a gray feather. It feels like pieces of something, all together. Doesn't it?"

"Circle might be a clue." Tiago shut his gun's case and crouched at the etched edge of the ritual stone.

"Someone in Fontana might help us decode what this was for." He glanced up to his mother.

"Or Lisa, maybe." Anna did not reply. She strode from the splattered field without waiting to see if the boys followed, found Demetrius, bent her head against his huffing, warm neck until she felt something close to normal, and climbed into her saddle. Four beads filled. Four at a sacrifice of two, a seraph cult cleansed or crippled. This was a good day. This was a triumph. She felt full of broken glass.

Seth and Tiago crept from the forest behind her, talking in low voices as they loaded the case onto Draco's sturdy back. Tiago chuckled at something Seth said and it was like a starting gun, it flicked Anna's reins instinctually, and Demetrius was off at a canter.

"We're not loaded yet," Tiago protested.

"It's okay," Seth said.

"See you at the carriage, Anna." Fuck you, she wanted to say. Don't act like you understand me. But what didn't he understand? What couldn't he see? Why was he being so fucking reasonable? So she said nothing, just waved distractedly. And it was all she could do, as the trees thinned and the road reasserted itself, not to break into a gallop and flee them. Tiago's face caught halfway in time, infant son warrior, and Seth, Seth, his seeking eyes beneath shadowed lids in that thin, angular face.

He saw her looking over her shoulder at him as they parted and grinned through his blood-flecked lips. She wanted to wring his scrawny neck. She wanted to feel his Adam's apple under her thumb. Here was the carriage. Ofelia got to her feet on its roof, waving at the incoming riders.

"All's well?"

"Fine." Anna clambered off her horse.

"I need—I—wait." Ofelia's concern was another burrowing gnat on her psyche.

"Okay." Anna yanked the carriage door open. She huffed as she sought Annalise's head like she'd sprinted all the way back, on the edge of hyperventilation, and when she found her skullcase she practically tore its latched lid off. She didn't even bother to remove her head; she made the change and let the melting skull topple from her shoulders. Then she was Annalise, and she laid a snarled curse on Anna's empty, pixie-cut head, because it only got worse.

She let out a half-sob of breath, affixed her new head, and with this more-familiar mouth she bit her knuckle, hard enough almost to draw blood. She probed for that firm impossibility she'd felt, that annoyance at him, the flaws she'd seen. He was skinny, he was short, he had that resting frowning face, he had that nasal voice he did when he was telling a joke or talking back, his hands were bony and fleet and smelled like lavender, and oh this was not working. She wanted him, she wanted him, she wanted him.

She wanted him so bleeding badly it was hurting her, a heavy pressure pushing out from behind her ribs. He was funny and sharp and cute and when he thought she wasn't looking he stared at her ass like it was the most beautiful ass he'd ever seen, like it was the legion of saints returned, and whenever he made her smile, he got this expression like he'd summited a mountain.

He was everything she'd wanted for a fucking decade, a lance through her loneliness, her first chance at feeling human again, at feeling sexy, and she wanted him worse than she'd wanted anything, and he wanted her, and that made a hot air balloon of her heart, tugging her into the sky no matter how she ground her heels into the dirt. Her thighs squeezed together in a vain effort to smother the throbbing ache in her belly. She felt like a stupid teenager. Voices outside. Greetings and jangling horse tack.

Tiago and Seth were back. She balled her fists into her hair. Get up. Fix yourself and stand. Why couldn't she be Lisa all the time, and tear this last barrier down, and have him? Why couldn't she be Anna all the time, and see this desire for the disaster it was, and spurn him? Why was she stuck in purgatory? If he's so wonderful, you don't deserve him. Orwinese Dray. Walking corpse. She raised her face and looked at her hands. Her gnarled, scarred-over, pale-as-death hands.

Finally she felt the fire flickering lower. This would do nicely. If she couldn't tear him down, she could tear herself instead. With perverse enrapturement she hammered the nail further home: He looks at you like you're a hero—you're not a hero, and when that finally gets through to him, it'll be back to seeing you as the monster you are. Unless you get him killed first. Like how you got Nik killed. Like how you kill dozens and dozens of people, everywhere you go.

Like that horrid helplessness you felt watching that sorcerer preparing to toast your son. Like how you couldn't protect your children from Kevan, you couldn't keep them from going unlit, and it's only a matter of time before you lose them both to this murderous life. Remember the last time you felt this? Remember when you let your idiot dreams of a handsome prince steer you? Remember what happened? You're a horrible mother, and you were a horrible wife, and you would be a horrible lover.

You're old and scarred and used-up, and the morning after you sleep with him is the morning the timer starts to him realizing how terribly you've ruined him. You dragged him closer and closer with your idiotic flirtation. And it's too late now. If you go forward, you'll doom him forever, and if you go back, he'll hate you forever. So stay still—stay perfectly still—and hold these precious days with Seth il Gutierre as long as you can before all of it slips away.

Now she felt marvelously, indulgently horrible about herself, and the burning need had receded, just in time to pop back out of the carriage and face the world—and the thief who'd gravitated into its center—with a smile.