Beast of Wonder by Lilith Saintcrow
“Hang on a second.” Evan carried her as if she weighed nothing, his arms two muscle-hard bars, hands strangely gentle. Her chin and nose, mashed against bloody cloth and tattered leather, crawled at the nearness.
The old man turned his head slightly, one shoulder dipping. A knot in the sheet kept it mostly about his large frame, but the hem was now draggled with effluvia. It stank down here, too.
Cara suspected there would be a lot of this smell. Shit, blood, and the brass-cartridge reek of death. She pushed her face deeper into Evan’s shoulder, and that softened him for a bare instant.
“You got somethin to say?” the old man husked. “Lodi’s little friend, huh.”
“Nothing to say, Mr Gregory. Just going to take her out of here before you clean house.”
The old man scoffed. But he lowered the gun a little.
“Dad.” Curtis had his wits back, it seemed. He was still on his knees amid the dead, but he cleared his throat and held his soft manicured hands up, pleadingly. “I don’t know what you think…look, I can explain.”
“I did what you said.” The doorman suddenly spoke up. “I did what you said, Mr Gregory. I brought…oh, God, I brought your body here…” He leaned aside and retched.
Evan paused. “Hold on,” he murmured, and his boots crunched and slipped a little as he chose his footing, step by step, carefully down the nightmare hall.
The gun barked once, and the doorman howled. Evan made a short sharp irritated noise.
Mason Gregory sighed. “You brought my body, and a few of your closest friends, right? Because you knew there would be a delivery. How much did he pay you, huh?”
Cara didn’t want to look. It was no use, she knew anyway. The doorman clutched at his belly, bright blood welling between his fingertips. He screamed. Evan kept going, slow and terrible, putting each boot down decisively, crushing an arm, a leg, a hand if they happened to be in the way. He paused briefly, lifted a knee, and Cara knew what he was going to do a fraction of a moment before his foot jackhammered down and bone crunch-splattered, a wrapped melon dropped on a hot sidewalk.
The doorman, silenced forever, subsided into twitching nerve-death.
“No,” Cara cried out miserably, the sound swallowed by Evan’s shoulder, and Curtis moaned, a short, hopeless sound.
“Daddy…” Frantic babbling now, words tripping over each other. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it, she didn’t tell me it was poison Daaaddyyyy—”
Evan kept going. Step-crunch, step-slip. Step-slip, step-tap on bare plain concrete, his heel slipping a little in something too greasy to be blood. The fluorescents buzzed and Curtis began sobbing. Cara squeezed her eyes shut.
“Eh.” Mason Gregory spoke again. They were almost at the end of the hall. “Do I know you, blond boy?”
Evan turned his chin slightly. “No, sir,” he said, calmly. “No you do not.” He pushed at the bullet-riddled door with his shoulder, and carried Cara through.
He began to climb the stairs, one slow, graceful step at a time.
Seven stairs up, another gunshot echoed in the depths of the sub-basement.
Evan kept going.
Chapter 20
Outside, the sleet had turned to struggling snow, the flakes getting bigger and spreading a soft noise-killing blanket. They starred the windshield, gathering in the corners, and it had warmed a little. Just enough to promise more snow, a layer of innocence covering the bags, the concrete, the secrets in basements.
The car was still there. He settled her in the passenger seat, fastened the seat belt, and closed the door. Cara huddled, shaking, numb, and watched the snow collect in corners. Full dark had fallen, thickening in alleys, the sky paradoxically blooming faint orange with reflected electricity.
When he dropped into the driver’s seat she winced. There was no parking ticket on the windshield, just the snow. The engine turned over, the headlights flicked on, and the car was a forgettable mid-grade sedan, its door-locks thudding down as it pulled away from a cockeyed, ice-starred fire hydrant.
Evan rested his hands on the wheel. His ring, grimed with blood, no longer gleamed. “Can’t wait to clean up,” he said, finally, and turned the wipers on. A burst of flakes went by on a flirting wind. “How about you? You okay?”
No. Her hands scrubbed at each other, lifted to her mouth. She wiped at her lips with cold fingers, her teeth threatening to chatter. Warm air soughed through the vents—the engine hadn’t even cooled all the way. “You knew them. You knew them both.”
“Everyone knows them.” But his chin settled, and a ghost of the man who had brought her an apple peered from underneath the bleaching. He submerged, and Evan straightened in his seat, touched the accelerator. This new man filled out the broad shoulders, was at home under the blood-spattered jacket. “We’re going home.”
“That’s not home.” It was a trap, hungry iron jaws sharpening triangular teeth.
“Still.” His grey eyes narrowed. “I know you’re tired, but there’s one thing left to do.”
“Oh, I know.” The knowledge was there, whole and terrible, under the surface of the world. It took no special sight to touch its shape, run her mental fingers over its hills and valleys. “She’ll let us in. You’ll stand behind me, and you’ll hold my arms while she does what she wants.”
And she’ll be young again. It was the only possible way this could end. Lodi might be old, and tired…but she had done this before. The same sure, clear instinct that had impelled Cara out of the airport, told her to play dumb, and opened the space for the terrible act of resurrection to come through her knew, and that was enough.
The car rocked a little as he braked again. Evan’s knuckles were white. The snowflakes thickened, solidified.
“It’s all right,” Cara said. “I don’t mind. I don’t want to do…things like this. I want to go on. I shouldn’t be here.” You two deserve each other. “You gave Curtis the poison, didn’t you. For her.”
“A lot had to get done.” He exhaled, hard. “Is that what she’s thinking? That I’m just gonna stand there, and…”
“Evan.” Cara turned her chin, gazed sightlessly out the window. “I want you to do it.”
“Well, good for you.” He scowled at ruby brake lights, tires crunching through fresh snow. In a little while, all the tracks would vanish. “Because I like this new body, and I don’t wanna go back to the old one.”
Part III
Mundi Finis
Chapter 21
He pressed the button, again. The gate looked the same, except its razor edges scalloped with frost. The snow had thickened, it would come down all night. Tomorrow there would be a blank page, and nobody could ever resist spoiling one of those. Anything new was made to be marred.
Lodi must have been waiting. “…Yes?”
“We’re back.” Evan sounded tired, but his shoulders were iron-hard under his knifed, shot, torn coat. His jeans had dried; flakes of blood cracked and scattered.
The gate buzzed. “Come in.”
Stepping over the garden’s threshold, the cold fell away. Summer enfolded them, the snow-silence cloven by plaintive cricketsong. A frog croaked, lonesome, held in a luxurious green prison. The plain metal door opened, and Lodi’s lair swallowed them both.
Wooden floor, solid and real. Rich golden light. Unexpected beauty stung Cara’s eyes. It was quiet and clean here, and the horrid things lying under the surface of the world had retreated.
Evan held the elevator door, reaching over Cara’s shoulder. His silence, like his scowl, deepened.
Lodi, rat-haired and sheathed in vivid polyester, lingered bloodshot at her apartment door, peering blearily into the hall. She stamped and huffed with impatience, but a small mischievous chuckle escaped when she saw the state of Evan’s clothing. “There you are. Worried an old woman to death, you did. Well?”
“Package is delivered and loose ends cleaned up.” Evan delivered the sentence in a monotone. He crowded behind Cara, pushing her through the
Lodi’s teeth protruded, gleaming. She smacked her thin lips. “Good, good. And did she speak to anyone but you? Anyone at all?”
“No.” Irritation invaded the word. “Of course not.”
“Good little girl. And a good little boy. Good children for Mama Lodi. Close the door.”
Cara stopped in the hallway, just out of reach. Lodi’s teeth bared. Her right hand, held low, was full of a wicked gleam. The old woman, irritated, glanced over Cara’s shoulder at Evan, her head craning atop her bent spine. “Close the door, idiot.”
The heavy wooden door slammed, rattling the frame, the hall, the floor. Light fixtures danced uneasily, and a shadow passed through the hall. Cara closed her eyes.
“Look at this. A tired girl.” Lodi shuffled forward. “You. Stand behind her. Hold her shoulders.”
“Here?” He was still warm, at least. Even if it was the final trap, he was solid. There were worse ways to go, like disintegrating in an aluminum tube. She waited for the absence to come. It would probably hurt a little, but then it would be—
“What are you doing?” Lodi sounded alarmed.
“This.”
The gunshot deafened Cara. She swayed—he’d kept his hand low, his arm along her side, and the jolt of recoil passed through his flesh into hers. Her eyelids flew open, and Lodi, lips pulled back and yellowed teeth champing, surged forward. The knife was an icicle blade, lifted high, and next would come its descent, plunging, cleaving, cutting, loosening.
Evan pushed Cara aside. She staggered, her shoulder and hip giving twin barks of muted pain, still bruise-tender from falling from the gurney. The gun spoke again, and Lodi staggered too. Grimly determined, the old woman stabbed at Cara, the blade cleaving air with a low sweet whoosh.
A third shot. Cara’s head rang. The name behind the gossamer curtain plucked at her fingers, her toes, at every secret string inside her bones.
“No!” the old woman howled. “Noooooo!”
“Yes,” Evan said grimly. The knife clattered on hardwood, he kicked it away. Cara strained to remember her old name, to hear it through the noise.
A pop. A showering of wet salt. Lodi’s body, twisting and jerking, folded inward, desiccating in fast-forward. Her eyes sank into the sockets, skin thinning and stretching papery over bird-bones. Great rivers ploughed the paper surface, and behind them dust swirled, reeking of cinnamon and natron. Her housedress tore as she kicked and dry-screamed.
It wasn’t the bullets, Cara realized. It was Evan’s refusal to play along that tore Lodi’s grasp on the world free. Refusal, an apple, and a name chosen almost at random.
The mummified skeleton’s hand jerked out. Two bone-fingers pointed at Evan; his large hands flew to his own throat and he dropped to his knees with a jolt that shook the entire structure, echoing through unused apartments, swaying the elevator in its cage, puffing dust from ceilings and corners. His paleness purpled, he struggled to inhale.
A coughing, rasping croak spiraled up and up. The housedress collapsed. Granules split, split again, working themselves finer and finer until some unimaginable threshold was crossed, and the pile of dust began to suck in on itself. A whoosh, another gout of dry-mummy desert death, a hot wind through the hall, and a pop of air collapsing inward.
Cara leaned against the wall, muscle and bone full of soretooth throbbing. The apartment shivered, touching its new mistress; the floor groaned, the walls shimmered, sensing her. Learning. The entire kitchen rattled, appliances stretching, waking briefly from the slumber of humming electrical servitude to take new shapes. The bedrooms exhaled fresh air and sun-warmed linen. The windows rippled—what would they show her, those glassy eyes?
Evan collapsed onto hands and knees. He whooped in a breath, coughed. The polyester housedress shrank with a soft tearing whisper, a rag of much-bleached, much-washed cloth shredding itself.
Cara peeled herself away from the wall. She stepped out of her shoes, sighing with relief as her calves relaxed. The floor was cool and hard, but no grit touched her sensitive soles. She lowered herself slowly, gently, almost like an elderly woman, and put her arm around Evan. He coughed, sputtered, and the name she longed to hear retreated.
Lodi had probably known it, might even have whispered it as she killed the doll she had crafted so carefully.
The knife was close. She could probably lunge for it. She could even softly, stealthily reach. Close her fingers around its wooden hilt. The glassy blade was hungry. Had it been brought to Lodi in exchange for information?
If she touched it, she would know.
“It’s all right,” Cara said. The words, dry, stuck in her throat. She patted Evan’s back, the ruin of his leather jacket. “It’s all right.”
“Cara,” he rasped. Muscle flexed under leather, fabric, skin. “Cara.” To him, that was her name.
She leaned close, her black hair against platinum. Her fingertips brushed a wooden hilt—lovingly polished, the glass blade honed to a whisper. Evan shook, and if she was to escape him, too, there would never be a better time.
* * *
Snow continued to fall, closing around an apartment building few entered and even fewer left. In the courtyard, the frog, deciding it was useless, set to hunting instead of singing and the leaves moved uneasily, sensing winter outside their snug, soft, loamy home.
* * *
finis
About the Author
Lilith Saintcrow has been writing since the second grade, and does not intend to stop.
www.lilithsaintcrow.com
Also by Lilith Saintcrow
A Saint City Novel
Selene
Essays on Writing
The Quill and the Crow
Roadtrip Z
Cotton Crossing
In the Ruins
Pocalypse Road (Coming Soon)
The Marked
The Marked
The Steelflower Chronicles
Steelflower
Standalone
Rose & Thunder
SquirrelTerror
FISH
Desires, Known
Beast of Wonder
Watch for more at Lilith Saintcrow’s site.
Lilith Saintcrow, Beast of Wonder