The envelope slips from his fingers and slides across the floor, coming to rest near my feet.
His shoulders are bunched to his ears. His whole body is a knot of muscle trying to force a single breath. My grandson. The boy I raised. The boy whose scraped knees I cleaned.
My hand lifts toward him, an inch. The other part of me holds it down, eyes locked on the letter. The black spider sigil, its wax broken, stares up at the ceiling.
My feet move. Not to him. To it.
The letter is a question. A black hole on the floor. The hole pulls harder.
I kneel. The floor is cold through my dress. My hand reaches out, hovering for an eternal second between his shaking shoulder and the white paper.
My fingers close around it. It is heavy. Cold.
I pull it from the envelope. The parchment is thick, official.
I ignore the broken sounds from the man beside me, my eyes tracing the text. The ink is a uniform, perfect black. The letters are hard, square things, stamped into the page with a pressure that feels like it should have split the parchment.
CLASSIFIED - FOR YOUR EYES. AND THEN THE FIRE.
Council Member Derrick
THE MIMIC EXISTS.
The creature you call the Snatcher has a name. We call it the Mimic.
This thing consumes flesh and memories of the dead.
No mythology describes it. No folklore predicts it. It shouldn't exist, but it does.
It is a biological anomaly, and it is learning.
It wears the dead like a coat, and it could be standing in your own room.
It could be anyone. Your neighbour. Your loved one. You.
The public cannot know.
Watch everyone. Trust no one who knows things they shouldn't.
You have been warned.
The Inner Circle
BURN THIS.
I look down at the hand holding the letter. It is the hand of an old woman. But it feels like a claw. A specimen examining the label on its own jar.
James looks up at me. The broken sounds in his throat die. The terror in his eyes is replaced by something else. Something colder.
My fingers go numb. The letter slips from my grasp. My hand finds the door latch. A desperate, scrabbling sound.
James moves. I see the decision in his shoulders. The tightening of his jaw. The soft lines of the boy I raised harden into the angles of a hunter.
He drives his shoulder into my back. The air leaves my lungs in a dry, pathetic puff.
We fall.
My head connects with the floorboards. A dull, final thud.
He holds me for a heartbeat, his breath catching. He is waiting for a reaction. The pain. The protest.
He gets only my eyes.
His hands on my shoulders go rigid.
He looks down at his hands on my shoulders, and then at me, as if just realising what he is touching.
He recoils. A frantic, backward scuttle, his leg making a hollow, scraping sound on the floor.
He turns, the muscles in his back revealing his intent. Escape.
I move. My hand finds his ankle. My fingers are a tangle of brittle twigs. Useless.
He freezes. I see the war in the tendons of his leg. The instinct to flee. The lifetime of love that holds him in place.
"Don't leave me," I say. "I'm afraid."
He folds to the floor beside me.
We sit in the wreckage. His mouth opens, just a fraction. A word is there. He closes it.
He looks away, his eyes finding the letter on the floor. Then they lift to me, his features twisting between the love he cannot forget and the horror he cannot ignore.
The question is a piece of glass he has to cough up.
"My grandmother. When did you..."
"In a shed," I say. The words are Nora's, but the coldness is mine. "Darkwater. After the patrol found her."
He closes his eyes. I offer no comfort.
"Why," he chokes out, "why are you looking at me with her eyes?"
"Because she is a part of me now. Her love for you is a fire in my chest. It hurts."
"What are you?"
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"A hollow thing. A Vessel. There is only the hunger. And then the ghosts."
"Who was the first?"
My mouth opens. The name is there, a shape on my tongue. Eli.
I close my mouth. The silence is my only honest answer.
A laugh escapes him. He scrubs a hand over his face. "Of course you don't."
His eyes drift to the iron keys in his hand as if he's forgotten they are there. "Belladonna," he mutters. "She came to me. Said she was with them."
"Them?" I ask.
"The Inner Circle," he spits. "The ones who sent the letter. The ones hunting you."
His eyes lock onto mine. "She said she thought you were the Mimic. That you weren't my grandmother."
His voice cracks. "I didn't believe a word of it. A mimic? A secret circle? It sounded like a madwoman's fantasy. I told her grief had broken her mind. That she was inventing monsters to explain away her pain."
His mouth crumples like he's tasted something rotten. "I almost hit her for saying it."
"I told her to prove it," he says, having to push the words out. "Thinking it would force her to see how crazy it all sounded."
"So she did," he continues, his voice flat. "She said the Circle sent a warning to her father. A letter. She told me to go look."
He moves to stand, to put distance between us. The emptiness he is about to leave is a physical threat. I lunge, a desperate crawl across the floorboards. My hand latches onto his trousers. A weak, useless grip.
"Wait." The word is a rasp. A sound torn from Nora's throat.
He looks down at me, his jaw working soundlessly, one hand rising as if to ward me off.
"I can be her," I offer. "I can keep her here for you."
He takes a half-step back, his nose wrinkling.
"She doesn't have to be gone," I say, pressing closer to his leg. "I have all her memories. I can be a perfect copy."
My forehead finds the hard leather of his boot. I press against it. The smell of the forge fills my head. Strong. Real.
This is how you survive. Be small. Be pathetic. A threat is killed. A pet is kept. He won't leave a pet. He won't.
James stares at my pathetic form on the floor, and the fight leaves him. His shoulders slump.
"I'm so tired, Grandma," he says.
A fire of pure, aching love, Nora's love, burns in my chest. "Then don't. Let me be here. For you. For Pip."
His hand lifts, a slow, trembling thing. He is going to touch my head. To forgive me. To accept me.
He closes his eyes. A tear escapes. He nods.
Then his eyes open.
They drift past me, to the closed door of Pip's room.
A sound tears from his throat. A raw, choked no.
He gets to his feet, putting a wall of cold air between us. "Evangeline," he says, his voice flat. "If I have any hope of getting her back, of being a family again, I can't have you in this house."
He stands by the door, a silhouette against the dark. "I have to go to her. I have to tell—"
The words die in his throat. He cannot finish.
The thought of him painting me as a monster to them, of shaping their memory of Nora into something ugly, is an agony I cannot bear. I throw myself at him.
My hands, her hands, beat against his chest. With every thud, a memory flashes. These same hands patting this same chest when he was a boy with a cough. These same hands straightening his collar on his wedding day.
His hands don't strike. They catch my wrists. His arms encircle me. He absorbs the weak, frantic blows, his body a shield against my desperation.
"Stop," he pleads, his voice breaking, the word a sob. "Grandma, stop."
My blows drive him a step back. His hands come up to brace against the impact.
He stumbles backward.
James doesn't see the poker. His heel catches the iron base. His balance is gone.
His stumble is a quiet thing, until the sound.
The sound of a heavy fruit splitting open.
He coughs, a small, surprised sound, and a red spray of something hot and tasting of rust strikes my open eye, blinding me. When my vision returns, it has narrowed to the poker.
The iron has gone into him. Too far.
My mind rejects it. It is from a different, uglier story. One that shouldn't exist in our quiet home.
The fabric over his navel darkens, turning a deep, wet red.
He looks up, not at the iron point emerging from his gut, but at me, still clutched in his arms.
His eyes find mine, and the disappointment in them is the most horrible part.
Then the pupils flood, and he is gone.
His eyes are still on me, but they are no longer looking at anything.
His body sags, sliding down the length of the poker. His bulk pulls me down with him. I end up kneeling in the spreading pool of his blood.
Her hand, the grandmother's hand, lifts from the blood. It trembles, reaching for his face. The caress dies, her fingers going limp.
A low, keening whine escapes Nora's lips. A sound of pure, animal grief. My teeth grind together with enough force to splinter.
I remain crouched beside him. My weeping is the only sound in the sudden quiet.
She is weak. She will get you killed.
"Her pain is what makes me real."
And it will be a real death. Her body will be stoned by morning. Belladonna will see to it. You are clinging to a feeling, while the world is preparing your grave.
"What do I do?"
You can take him. The pain will stop.
"He is my grandson. I will not desecrate his memory."
Desecrate? You think leaving his body here, to be found by strangers, to be poked and prodded and thrown in the ash pit, is how you honour him? He is a warrior. His strength should not be left to rot in the dirt. It should be used.
No. It's wrong. You don't do this to family.
Family? She is a memory. He is a corpse. But Pip... Pip is a future. Who will protect him from Maximus? Who will find the cure?
I can't save her memory. I can't save his body. But maybe I can save his son. This is the only way. The only thing left to do.
My hand, her hand, reaches out and rests on James's cheek. His skin is getting cold.
Nora's frail form collapses onto his chest. I enter him. My essence sinks into the gaping wound in his back. My cold steals the last of his life's warmth. I feel his muscles, still warm, accept my coldness. I feel his bones, strong and whole, become my own. The process is a shared agony. The poker grinds against a rib. The pain is not his anymore. It is mine. I feel a dull ache where his wooden leg meets living flesh. It is my leg now. I have inherited his brokenness.
James's will is a point of light in the gathering darkness of his mind. A single, repeating command. Keep Pip safe. Keep Pip safe. Keep Pip safe. He doesn't fight me. He doesn't resist. He focuses all of his remaining energy into branding that one purpose onto my invading consciousness.
My new body convulses on the floor. I retch. Something catches in my throat. I cough, and a strand of pale, silver hair, thick as wire, begins to unspool from my lips. It pulls free from my throat in a seemingly endless thread, gathering on the floor in a spiral. The physical manifestation of Nora's nearly eighty years of life reduced to one indigestible strand.
The Echo of Nora is extinguished. The Echo of James is kindled.
It is Steady, its flame a guttering spark.
|
A life consumed awakens the Blight, its pulse a wet, sickening squirm.
~~
A surge of strength, dense and vital, floods me. I test my new hand, closing it into a fist. The sheer density of muscle is a world away from Nora's brittle frame.
Then the cold iron of the poker catches a rib. I wrap my fingers around the slick, bloody shaft and, with a thick, wet sound, draw the poker from my own flesh.
Nora's gifts are voided. In their place, James's gifts are now yours.
His planted feet.
His gentle hand.
His shielding arm.
Something moves inside me. Low in my belly. A thick, heavy lurch. Wrong. It gives a small twitch, the jolt of something waking up hungry. Then his memories surge into me.
A small, trusting hand closing around his little finger.
The sharp, clean smell of a freshly carved wooden bird.
A boy's breathless gasp of wonder as the bird is placed in his hand.
I try to stand. My right leg answers. My left is a dead thing. I put my weight on it and the world tilts. I stumble, catching myself on the wall, my hand leaving a bloody print.
Through the window, I see them. Evangeline and Pip, walking up the path. My new heart, his heart, gives a single, powerful kick against my ribs. They came back. She came back.
Then my eyes catch the poker. The dark stain caked along its length. The raw ache of the hole through my middle, and the repulsive throb of alien flesh already working to erase the wound.
The brief joy is extinguished, replaced by a sick, cold dread that starts in my gut.
The house smells of death. They will smell it. They will see it. They will see me.
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