Chapter 27
Elias rode on top of the fire truck with Root.
Inside, he’d felt confined, but here he could let the wind and the darkness caress him, which helped to ease the pain gnawing at his bones—pain that grew worse with every northward mile.
It didn’t ease the hunger, though. As Alfie drove them into the town, Elias saw people in the road, and the urge clawed at him again.
His eyes grew moist with elation and revulsion, yet he knew every stop gave Malcolm and Violet time to gain ground.
The winged one dropped from the sky, smashing a woman to the pavement. It lifted her by the hair and one arm, then sank its teeth into her throat. She screamed for just a moment, until it thrashed her back and forth in its jaws and she went silent. Perhaps her neck had broken.
Others screamed and tried to pull it off the woman, but the winged one turned on them. Blood sprayed, droplets gleaming in the dark.
Jealousy burned in Elias’s chest. He wanted that blood, wanted those wings so that he could stab down from the sky and take any life he wished.
Did they all grow them eventually, or was this one different?
Was it older than the others, even older than Root?
He wanted to ask these questions, but the urge made him tremble, and the words would not come, as if hunger made him unable to do anything but prey.
Alfie touched the brakes.
Root leaped from the fire truck. The people looked to the truck for help, thinking assistance had arrived until they saw the blood-painted, pearlescent nakedness of this ancient thing.
Elias watched Root chase a heavy young man toward a brick building that might have been a rooming house.
The pale, ginger man managed only a dozen feet before Root threw him to the ground and stood over him, glorious and unstoppable.
Elias thought that once upon a time, people would have called Root a god, and he savored the flavor of that word in his head.
Root had made him into this. Might that also make him a god, in time?
Elias leaped from the fire truck. An old man carried a child in his arms, a girl no more than six. He cradled her as he tried to run on staggering, arthritic legs.
“Quickly!” Root cried. “We must not linger in this!”
Elias obeyed, killing them fast. And he rejoiced.
More people came along the street, some with flashlights and others with baseball bats and guns.
They’d heard the screaming, it seemed, and had responded.
Elias could not stop his own violence, could not control the need to take at least a sip from each one he killed, but inside, he knew this would only delay them further.
The bang of a door bursting open echoed along the street.
It had come from the church up the block.
Elias looked up from the viscera of someone’s mother to see a new monster emerging from the church, dragging the priest by the ankle down the stone steps to the sidewalk.
The priest should have been praying, or screaming at the very least. Instead, he only sobbed, as if he knew that screams and prayers would be equally fruitless.
This new creature stood perhaps four feet high, broad-shouldered, with arms too long for its frame and fingers too long for its arms. Another followed, female in form, clad in mud-streaked strips of dark fabric.
Its face and visible skin were covered in scars that seemed carved, symbols that told a story Elias could not begin to imagine.
With these others added to their gathering, anyone foolish enough to answer the cries of the dying lost their own lives in moments.
Alfie and the child, Benjy, sat inside the cab of the fire truck as they drove off, leaving the bloodstained town behind. Elias rode on the roof with Root and the two new arrivals, while the winged one scouted ahead.
They were hunting his family, intended to kill them, but there on top of the fire truck, embraced in the dark, he knew that this was his family now.
His heart soared.