Chapter 20
Pain forced Elias awake. He felt the rain.
Felt himself dragged over slick grass, sharp stone, and broken glass, but that discomfort seemed so distant.
The real pain seared his guts and constricted his muscles so fiercely he wanted to scream.
His mouth hung open, lips flayed by the sharpness of his own teeth, and his senses flared as he understood that he was, indeed, screaming.
Root lifted him with one hand, stared eye to eye with revulsion.
They were the same—Elias knew that much—and yet they were not the same.
When the monster had caught him half an hour outside of Buffalo, tracking the scent of Maggie Wise’s blood inside her son, Elias hadn’t gotten a good look before it drove him to the pavement and drank his blood.
Now Elias saw it up close and understood why such things had once been worshiped.
Root must have been more than seven feet tall.
Time had turned its flesh into an ageless thing, but its eyes spoke of unimaginable age and the same yearning to scream.
But Elias saw that Root would not scream, and it disgusted him that Elias had surrendered to pain so easily.
“Hush,” Root said, and flung Elias to the ground.
The impact jarred Elias’s bones, but that pain also seemed numb and distant as a memory. His bones felt as if something clawed at them, and the weight of the air seemed to suffocate him.
“My God,” he whispered, staring at Root, thinking of the things he’d thought and felt on board the train. The sickness, the rotting, the way he’d slipped down into cold nothing.
Dead.
The realization shook him. He remembered it, that moment of dying. But now he was alive again, still Elias Wise but something else as well. Something in agony. Death proved itself more painful than life had ever been.
The wind gusted, rain slashing at him. The intensity of that sound rose, joined by voices screaming.
Now that he’d swallowed his own pain, those voices seemed to merge with the wind, blowing and breathing and swirling around him.
Hisses of steam came from the wreckage as Elias pushed himself up to a kneeling position.
His subconscious stratified the screams all around them, separating the shrieks of pain from the wailing of grief. Somehow it was easy to tell them apart.
The train had derailed. Back along the tracks, a few cars remained mostly upright, but everything forward had crashed.
There seemed no way to know which car had been first to slip its iron traces, but the wreckage told the rest of the story.
The engine lay on its side, cracked open, nose pointed at the tracks.
The baggage car had torn away and come to rest upside down.
The sleeper cars had torn up the ground as they skidded to a halt, also on their sides.
They’d pushed into one another, closing like an accordion.
The dead were everywhere. Bodies battered, skulls split and pouring thoughts and memories out into the rain.
The living were almost as horrifying. An arm shattered, turned backward, a leg torn off at the calf, someone desperately trying to stop the bleeding.
A hollow-eyed husband cradled his dead daughter as his wife struck him again and again, demanding he do something to save the little girl.
His stomach cramped. Snarling, Elias bent so far his forehead touched the ground.
The pain in his bones had settled in, dragging at him like iron chains, the feeling in his guts clawing inside.
Thick liquid dripped from the corners of his mouth.
He began to tremble, and he thought it must be shock until his tongue ran out and slid over his wickedly sharp teeth and the fist in his gut identified itself as hunger.
The stink of blood was in every gust of wind.
It made him shake. He began almost to bounce on his knees and whipped his head around as if he hadn’t already seen the wreckage.
The man with his leg torn off was dying.
His blood pumped more slowly. Elias could taste it in the air, could almost feel the slowing of the man’s heart. The scent made him rise to his feet.
The scattered dead had their appeal, but this dying man, his fading pulse …
the hunger screamed inside Elias. But the wind gusted again and brought a fresher, brighter scent.
He looked over at the father cradling his dead daughter.
The grieving mother had wounds of her own, slashes on her face that might have come from broken glass.
Blood slid down her face and neck like tears.
Her, Elias thought.
The excitement felt like love.
He shuddered with anticipation as he started toward her. Root whipped past him, slid in front of him, and rose to its full height.
“Not yet,” the creature said. It pointed to a small figure lying senseless in the rain. “Rouse him. Do not harm him. We will need that one, and another, fully grown.”
Elias looked at the boy, but motion from the wreckage drew his eye.
A figure appeared in the darkness inside the upside-down baggage car.
He wondered if it might be his brother, but then he saw the beard, and the breadth of the survivor’s shoulders, and he knew this must be Alfie Hannigan, the big man who’d been aiding Malcolm and Violet.
The Irishman slid through a broken window, then rose to his hands and knees, seeming to search for the will or strength to stand. Shaken up or wounded?
Root rushed through the rain. Alfie lifted his gaze too late.
The creature gripped him by the hair, tipped him backward, and straddled him.
Elias licked his lips as he watched, instinct telling him what was about to happen.
But Root did not sink its teeth into Alfie, only locked eyes with him and whispered to him, gently moved the unruly bits of ginger hair out of his eyes.
The creature stood. Chin raised, it gestured to Alfie. “On your feet. You’ll do.”
When Root turned to glance at him, Elias realized he’d entirely forgotten the order he’d been given. With the creature’s gaze burning into him, he rushed to the boy who’d been traveling with Root. The boy lay unconscious, a gash on his forehead, a lump there that would swell into an ugly bruise.
Elias tapped his face. He meant it to be gentle, a light wake-up, but the boy’s head rocked. He’d become stronger. More dangerous in many ways.
He grabbed hold of the boy’s coat and pulled him into a sitting position.
“Wake up, boy,” Elias said. The boy smelled of dirt and the rot of dead vegetables.
He smelled like autumn harvest. He smelled like November and blood, and Elias wanted to eat him.
Tear into him, gnaw on bones. He’d never felt such a thing before, and it disturbed and excited him like nothing he’d ever known.
But Root needed this boy. It had said so.
“Kid.” He shook the boy again. “Wake the fuck up.”
The child opened his eyes. “Benjy,” he said. “My name’s Benjy.”
For a moment, those eyes seemed clear, sparkling with fear, and then they went dull and the kid’s face slackened.
Elias could feel the heat throbbing in the boy’s veins, and his thoughts grew cloudy.
Did it matter what Root wanted? In the face of the pain tearing at him, the hunger roaring to be released, did it really matter?
Root appeared at his side. “Not him. Not any of the ones I need.” The creature gestured to the survivors milling about the train wreckage. “But you must quiet your hunger. Go on. Kill as many as you wish, while I find the witch’s corpse.”
Elias licked his lips. The froth at the corners of his mouth tasted bitter, but he smiled as he slipped through the rain, stepping over the broken dead.
The wind gusted and brought him the sound of an infant’s wails.
In the most ancient part of his brain, something in him marked the origin of that wailing.
He might find the baby in a while, if the hunger remained.
In the dark and the rain, the grieving parents did not notice Elias approaching.
Only when he stood over them, shaking with need, did the mother lift her gaze.
Maggie Wise had been a selfish woman. She’d loved her children enormously, as long as they didn’t ask more of her than she was willing to sacrifice.
She’d come first, always. But Elias knew ordinary mothers were different from Maggie.
A mother like this one, on her behind in the mud, sensed his arrival on the scene.
Her daughter lay dead in her arms, skull misshapen from impact, but still this woman’s instinct to protect her child remained.
The father saw his wife’s gaze shift, and only then did he look up from his own anguish.
In life, Elias had always been a callous man, but whatever remained of that man—the last spark of him, down inside—recoiled in revulsion as the hunger took control.
He grabbed the father by a fistful of hair, hoisted him to his feet, and then hurled him away.
It wasn’t the father he wanted. Not just now. The father had no open wounds.
The mother’s injuries wept blood that smelled sweet and strong, like iron and cinnamon. Elias smiled with delight as he bent over her. The woman clutched her dead girl as she crabbed backward, trying to hold on to the little corpse and somehow manage to still get to her feet—to run.
“You … you can’t have her!” the mother cried.
Elias snatched the little corpse from the woman’s arms, paying no attention to whatever further damage this violence might have done.
“I don’t want this,” he said, the words thick and strange, as his lips learned to accommodate the length of his teeth. “The blood is cold.”
He cast the child aside. The mother stared at him, understanding.
Her mouth dropped open, but she seemed unable to find the will to scream.
The father had found the will, however. With a lunatic’s roar, he plowed into Elias from behind, knocked him forward, and the two of them fell on top of the mother.
As the three of them tangled together, the smell of her blood filled Elias’s head, and he began to tear at them both, clawing for her, anything to taste the red of her, even to lick the cuts on her skin.
A little spark of Elias remained, but the hunger screamed so loudly that its tiny voice might as well have been extinguished.
His fingers found the husband’s abdomen, ripping, showering him with blood and heavy coils of viscera.
With a hiss, he hurled the ruined father aside again and reached for the mother, dragging her down as she attempted to flee.
His teeth found her throat. The blood on his tongue sent him into a paroxysm of pleasure, shaking, moaning.
He slid his red-smeared face down her shoulder, tore open her clothing, kissed her collarbone.
As she flailed at him, Elias plunged his fingers into the spot just below her breastbone, dug in, and spread her chest open with a wet, wrenching crack.
He buried his face inside her, teeth rooting deeper, hot sweet red painting his face as he found her heart.
Kill as many as you wish, Root had said.
But when he found himself sated for a moment, and slid his face out of the hole in her torso, he saw what he’d done, and he tumbled away from her.
He lay on his side, wide-eyed and numb as it washed over him.
Strange, sticky tears that smelled of rot pricked at the corners of his eyes.
Down inside, that spark of the man, Elias Wise, screamed to a heaven his voice could no longer reach.
The rain swept over him, rinsed some of the blood away, but nothing could cleanse him of this. Of what Root had made him.
He could kill the creature. Whatever monster he’d become, a dead thing forged of pure hunger, if he had any purpose left to him, surely it must be that. Kill Root.
But as he lay there in the mud and rain and the mother’s blood that pooled around him, the despairing cries and urgent shouts of survivors seemed to rise in volume, reminding him that they were all around. A scent tickled his nose. Iron and cinnamon.
Elias sat up. Not far away, a big man with a thick mustache lay his coat over the corpse of another passenger and made the sign of the cross. He bowed his head in prayer, heedless of the rain. The man’s hands were covered in blood, as if he’d tried to save the life of one of the wounded and failed.
Elias licked his lips.
He rose and started for the big man.
The wind gusted, and something stopped him.
A different scent. Not blood at all. A familiar scent, part perfume and part human musk.
He turned toward that scent and saw Root walking toward the upside-down baggage car.
They’d moved beyond the wreckage of the three sleeper cars, but now Root had turned back in that direction.
There were survivors in his path. They saw the creature and screamed, or scrambled away from it.
Some fled. Root ignored them, but two men started to shout at it, blaming it for the crash, turning their fear and pain and confusion upon the creature.
A conductor and a passenger, both young men, tall and strong and panicked.
Either of them alone would likely have cowered with the rest, but they fed each other’s fear and anger, and the two men would not step out of his path.
The conductor clenched his fists—the largest fists Elias had ever seen—and edged to one side, putting Root between himself and the passenger.
Root laughed at them. Its voice echoed through the rain. The men attacked, and the sound of laughter was replaced by that of bones breaking.
For that moment, Root had been distracted.
Elias started for the ruined baggage car. And the figures he saw in the storm, in the night. The wind buffeted his face, and he caught the scent again, the familiar smell of the woman he’d left behind.
Violet.
Elias’s wife and brother had survived the crash.
They were just outside the baggage car, trying to drag the crate of Maggie’s remains out through the upside-down broken window.
The crate—Elias’s mother—that had been the cause of all this.
Root wanted Maggie’s corpse, and it would surely murder Violet and Malcolm to get it.
Elias started toward them, picking up speed, aware he had only seconds before Root returned its attention to the task at hand.
The spark of Elias Wise cared for them, feared for their fate, but as he crushed dead passengers underfoot and bolted through the rain, he knew it was the hunger that drove him.
It ached in him, drawn by Violet’s scent.
He wanted her now in a way he never had before.
Bleeding.