Chapter 36
Elias fell asleep in the culvert. Water diverted around him, soaking through his clothes, level rising as the rain kept on.
In the days when he’d had a beating heart, he would not have considered this sleep, but Root had explained this was the closest he would ever get to slumbering again.
It felt to him more like drunkenness, as if his thoughts had slowed to a trickle, his inner voice now like murmured conversation drifting in from another room.
He thought of the hissing static on a television set late at night, after they’d played the national anthem.
That was sleep for his kind. It made him want to die all over again.
Someone kicked him. Elias sneered without opening his eyes. His long fingers flexed, the new instinct to claw, to rend.
A fist clutched his hair and dragged him up from the water.
Smashed him against the curved inner wall of the culvert.
Elias’s hands moved even before his eyes were open.
His claws dug into rubbery flesh, and the static left his mind.
He opened his eyes to see Root’s pupils flare with rage.
Disoriented, Elias had attacked it, and that could not stand.
Root lifted him, smashed him to the floor of the culvert on his back, and straddled him.
It twisted Elias’s face aside and pressed down so his nose and mouth were both under the water.
Rain and filth flowed in. Elias fought, tried to save himself, but it went on for an eternity of seconds before Root bent and whispered in his above-water ear, “You cannot drown. You are not a thing of life now. You are a thing of death. Understand it.”
Root released him and stood back while Elias scrabbled to his hands and knees and vomited water. He might not need to breathe now, but he could inhale, and habit had choked a lot of water into the useless lumps of his lungs.
“Son of a bitch,” Elias growled.
Root smiled. Elias thought there should have been another word to describe the look on its face, because this cruel, black-eyed, murderous mask was not the expression people thought of as a smile.
“Hate me, but obey me,” Root rasped. “They are running. We must be after them.”
Elias dragged himself to his knees. The others stood hunched farther along the culvert, eyes like embers in the shadows, watching and waiting.
He thought of the terms of venery, the words coined for groups of animals, which had always fascinated him.
A pride of lions. An ambush of tigers. A murder of crows.
He’d once bedded a poetess who’d studied at Vassar and wanted to misbehave.
Her favorite of those phrases had been a fascination of larks, and Elias thought of her now, and that phrase.
The way the monsters looked at him, that fascination, kindled something in him.
But just as quickly, he dismissed the idea of larks.
They reminded him more of wolves or dogs, but not a pack.
He felt there ought to be a better term.
When the strongest wolf clashed with another among them, the others would stand back and watch, waiting for the outcome. Waiting for their turn at violence.
The term, he thought, should have been an anticipation of wolves.
That’s what these things were. His brothers and sisters now, in death.
It had grown darker outside the culvert, but Elias could see that night had yet to fall. If he could trust the way he felt, another of his new instincts, he felt as if hours of daytime still remained.
“How can we follow them?” he asked. “The storm is blocking out the sun, but it’s still there. Even if we can go now, I don’t have any sense of Maggie. We know they’re bound for Shediak, but a lot of roads head north.”
“Many roads north, but only one to the island.”
Elias stared at it. “Shediak is an island?”
Root bent over him. Something had begun to grow from the flesh beneath its eyes, small pink nodules shaped like tiny mushrooms. They quivered while Root spoke.
“I will not waste hours in hiding. Not this day. We need a puppet to drive us.”
“The Irishman—”
“Is dead or dying. He was shot, useless, and I severed myself from him. We need another.”
Confused, Elias glanced at the gleaming orange eyes of the others in their pack, their anticipation. “I don’t understand. Sundown is still a couple of hours away. How do we find someone new?”
Root slapped its hand down on top of Elias’s skull and dragged him up by the hair again.
Elias struggled to escape that grip, but Root marched him along the culvert.
When he realized what Root intended, Elias tried to plant his feet but didn’t have the strength.
One hand in his hair, the other bunched in the back of his jacket, Root propelled Elias out into the rain.
He’d grown used to the simmering agony of this existence. The curse Maggie the witch had put on Root and the rest of their kind came with a grinding in the bones and a searing on the skin. Elias had grown used to it, but that didn’t eliminate the constancy of the pain.
Daylight felt so much worse.
Elias screamed, staggered, boots splashing in the stream that emerged from the culvert. Clouds blocked the sun and still it felt as if his skin were crackling, blackening. No smoke rose from his flesh, but he felt the day’s light as if he’d been plunged into a woodstove.
“Cover yourself as best you can. Find shelter, but find us a driver before you burn yourself out.”
The burning erased all other thoughts. Elias heard screams but was barely aware they came from his own throat.
The rain did nothing to soothe him. Within seconds, his skin grew so hot that raindrops sizzled and steamed when they struck him.
He careened up the gully, splashing, then scrambled up the hill beside a fat pine tree.
The clouds blocked any view of the sun, but he could feel its face glaring down at him, sensed its location.
For a moment, he put the pine tree between himself and the sun, providing slight relief. Enough to focus.
The gas station up ahead had a canopy over its pumps.
Elias ran for that shelter, but even when he found himself beneath it, the gray daylight reflected from every surface.
A tiny flame ignited on his forearm, and he extinguished it with a slap of his hand.
Twirling, he searched for shelter from the daylight, for transportation, for a driver.
Inside the gas station, the cashier stared out the plate glass window, pale and still as a mannequin at Gimbels.
Beyond him, a hooded red raincoat hung on a hook.
Elias stiff-legged toward the plate glass.
The man shot to his feet before freezing again, his eyes wide.
Elias could see the man wanted to run, but weighed his odds of escape.
The hunger rose. Even with the pain in his bones from Maggie’s curse and the searing of the daylight, the hunger took him over.
Elias grinned. His hands shook. Running felt like flying.
He hurled himself through the plate glass.
The shattering snapped the cashier from his paralysis.
The man began to twist away, knowing this was real, these teeth were real, the pale thing once called Elias Wise, real.
Elias dragged him into the mercifully dark back room, out of the daylight, and ripped him open. Painted his own face with the man’s blood. Ate his heart. Sating his hunger helped to calm him. Murder took some of the sting of the daylight exposure from his skin.
Time passed. Perhaps an hour.
He could feel Root’s frustration, and it forced him to rise.
Elias stared at the split chest of the cashier and the man’s ragged throat, and realized he could have been the driver they needed.
Root would hurt him for this, but what difference did that make?
Pain had become so familiar to him now, in so many flavors.
Elias dug into the cashier’s pocket and located a set of keys.
Out behind the gas station, he found a Chevy panel truck with KELSO ELECTRIC stenciled on the sides.
The keys opened the door and started the ignition.
The rain fell harder, but failed to cool his skin now that he was out in the daylight again.
It did sluice some of the blood away, however.
Behind the wheel of the panel truck, Elias roared with the pain. His bare hands ignited on the steering wheel, little flames dancing over his knuckles. He shifted his hands to beneath the steering column and drove faster.
He’d killed the cashier, but there were plenty of living people in town.
As he turned the corner, headed toward the police station, a tall man staggered into the road in the storm. Bright red hair, long beard, clothes soaked with blood and rain.
Alfie Hannigan. Alive.
For now.
Elias hit the brakes.