Chapter 32 #2
Flushed with self-recrimination, she took a step backward.
Her right foot plunged into the brook. Violet swore, shaking the foot as she pulled it out of the water, angry and humiliated.
The creatures couldn’t come out. That much must have been true or they’d have killed her by now.
But they had the child in there, and even if he served them, he wasn’t one of them.
Not as long as he could still endure daylight.
“Elias?” she called.
Her voice echoed around the culvert, thrown back at her from within, as had so many of the words she’d spoken to her husband.
Guilt tried to slither into her heart. She pushed it away, but still it left its stain behind like the slime trail of a snail’s passage.
Elias had been so charming at first, and she had fallen for him so easily.
Every time he had come to the club to hear her sing, she had watched him with a fascination that reflected his own for her.
His presence at any table immediately put those around him at ease, made them laugh and feel befriended, taken into the embrace of his confidence.
When she’d allowed him to seduce her, it had been because he seemed to encompass both the world she knew and the life for which she’d always yearned.
The perfect mate—someone whose eyes gleamed with the fullness of his love for her, and yet who shared her dreams. She thought of that Elias, and felt ashamed at the way her love for him had withered and died, and the way her heart had danced as she’d fallen in love with Malcolm, with his face and his heart and his voice, and now with the raw humanity of him.
Hands, mouth, gentleness, and exquisite roughness in equal measure.
Guilt.
She owed Elias nothing. Not that guilt, not her fidelity, not her gratitude.
But she called to him again. “Elias?”
Something moved in the darkness. Even above the sound of the rain plinking into the brook and the hush of the water flowing past, she heard it shifting inside the culvert. Maybe more than one something.
Then he spoke. “Go away, Violet. You can still run. Leave Malcolm, leave Maggie, and run. Nobody will follow.”
She smiled, barely aware it showed her teeth. Not a friendly smile. “Nothing new there. I should go away, and you won’t pursue me.”
A pause, and then, “You know this is different. Don’t be stupid. I’m not … I’m not myself now. But sometimes I can still think.”
Violet took two steps closer to the culvert’s opening.
Something scraped against concrete, and she pictured the long fingers of the Morák.
She had left the shotgun on the floor of the back seat of their stolen vehicle, thinking she couldn’t walk around town carrying it, but that maybe they could go back for it later.
Now she wished like hell that she’d found a way to carry it with her.
With every inch she drew nearer to that opening, the sick feeling in her gut grew.
Her breath hitched in her throat. Her thoughts fluttered into dark places, the worst moments of her life, when she felt the most helpless.
Evil, she thought. This is what it’s like to breathe the same air as something truly evil.
How many Morák were in that culvert? Root and Elias and one or two others, she thought. The boy wasn’t one of them. She could save him, couldn’t she? But what about Elias?
“Is there anything left of you?” she asked her husband.
A loud hiss issued from the culvert, echoing around the gully. She staggered backward, thinking for a moment this had been Elias. Then she realized. Root. It hadn’t liked the question, which seemed at least a kind of answer. Her skin felt oily with her nearness to these inhuman things.
“Nothing, really,” Elias said. “Memories of things I once believed.”
“Things you felt.”
“They’re fading.” The words floated from the darkness.
“Send Benjy out,” she said. “Let me help him.”
“He’s coming out, but there’s nothing you can do,” Elias replied.
Something splashed in the brook, inside the culvert.
Root spoke. “He’s not for you.”
Violet tried to think of what else she might say, some fresh appeal.
The boy burst from inside the culvert, shoes splashing in the brook.
He cut immediately up to his right, trying to scramble out of the gully before she could stop him.
Violet ran and lunged and reached, grabbing hold of his left ankle before he could escape.
Nobody had stepped in to save her when life took its darkest turns, and she refused to let Benjy be twisted into something awful. Not without a fight.
The boy kicked her with his other foot, heel striking her in the face, then the skull. Still, she held on until he managed to get enough leverage to start kicking the wrist with which she held him.
Shouting, Violet yanked him down the dirt wall of the gully. He flailed at her, and she managed to hold him down just for a moment. Face-to-face, she tried.
“Fight it, Benjy! You don’t have to serve them!”
The boy shot his face forward and tried to bite her nose, a guttural snarl in his throat. Violet jerked backward, the boy raised both legs and kicked her in the chest, and she tumbled backward down the gully to sprawl into the icy-cold brook.
When she stumbled to the edge, soaked and heavy, she looked up to find that the boy was gone.
Whatever words he’d passed to Root from Alfie, he’d now run back toward the jail, presumably to deliver whatever message their master had ordered.
Some instruction or other. Breaking the influence Root had over him would be much more difficult than she’d hoped, perhaps even impossible.
“Violet,” Elias whispered from the culvert.
A shudder went through her. She had thought she wanted to see him, but now she knew there would be no satisfaction there.
Whatever conversation they should have had as estranged husband and wife, recriminations or amends, would never happen.
For better or worse, that Elias had died on the train.
Perhaps earlier, when Root had first taken Elias’s blood.
“Don’t come back,” he said.
“I don’t plan to.”
She ran after the boy. The man inside the gas station looked even more concerned than before as she trotted across his parking lot.
Violet told herself it wasn’t too late. As long as Benjy still lived, she could find a way to free him, to purify him and give him back the life that ought to have been his.
She rounded the corner and came in sight of the police station, heart pounding, short of breath.
In the side yard, the boy had reached Alfie, and the two spoke calmly, features expressionless. Alfie patted Benjy’s shoulder, then strode to the police station’s side door and kicked it in. The sound of splintering wood echoed in the rain.
Alfie went in, and the boy followed.
The first gunshot came a moment later.