Chapter Nineteen
It was to hard to think while dying.
…blisters popped on the backs of her hands as she fumbled at the window. She was crying, but the heat of the flames dried them on her lashes before they could cool her cheeks. Smoke stung her nose and eyes. Every breath made her lungs crackle like bacon…
The Hound yanked Hill’s lead, and that—at least—was something to do that wasn’t…
…the world had narrowed down to the beep of the machines and the strange, forced pressure of air in his lungs.
Even the soft murmur of his wife’s voice as she filled him in about people he didn’t know, whose lives he’d forgotten, had fallen silent.
Maybe she’d left. He was mostly dead already.
He could feel it spread through him like rot despite the machines and the drugs' attempts to ward it off.
He stumbled along behind the big, dog-headed man, vaguely aware that the rest of the pack hung around their heels to watch the woods suspiciously. The thing was…
…earth underfoot instead of stone. It crumbled and he fell. For a second it felt like flight, then he bounced off the first spur and felt his ribs give.
Hill had spent his life working out how to function through things that felt like he was dying. He hadn’t been, but it had felt just as real and overwhelming as the…
…warmth. Softness. Milk. A sound that wasn’t a heartbeat, but felt the same. It had hurt a little, but now it didn’t and…
That one made Hill stagger. It was the first kind death, the first that hadn’t been shackled about with fear and resistance. It felt like he could have sunk into it and given up.
He wasn’t sure, as he went down to his knees on the wet mulch, that he should have fought it. Davy wasn’t here. Fraser’s money or his mom’s connections couldn’t help him. What happened to polters to take them from a danger to useful?
“Up,” the Hound on the other end of the bridle snarled. He twisted it hard and the bit sank sharp, broken molars into Hill’s already ragged tongue.
…she screamed
Hill got his hand under him…
The gun tasted sour and oily on his tongue. The muzzle scraped the roof of his mouth as he tightened his…
…and pushed himself up. He swayed uneasily on his feet as he tried to focus.
He couldn’t pull together enough of him to…
…the wheels of the truck tore up the bike first. She thought that would save her. The driver would stop before it ran over her. It would stop. It didn’t.
…do anything, but he could listen.
“Where are they?” one of the Hounds asked. It seemed strange to recognize anything human in that snarled, chewed-on voice, but he sounded afraid. “Are you sure they’ll be here?”
“The birds said this is the closest corpse near harvest,” the lead Hound said. “You want to ask them more?”
Apparently not.
Hill pressed his tongue down against the bottom of his jaw and tried to lift his head. The bone bridle felt like it was strung with weights, dragging him down and making his back ache, but he managed to catch a quick glimpse of their surroundings.
That didn’t help much. Trees and the night sky. They weren’t far from the house. He could still hear the party, but too far for him to stagger in this state. His feet caught in torn-up earth, and the lead Hound had to grab his shoulder to keep him upright.
A second later Hill saw the corpse they’d been talking about.
A teenager sprawled across the path, head and body twisted in opposite directions.
His slack, discolored face didn’t look surprised, but Davy had died that way a few times now.
He had been. The dirt bike he’d taken his spill from hung nearby, strung up on the fallen tree trunk he’d not quite been able to take.
…his heart had stopped. His chest felt like it was going to explode and…
“He’s ready for harvest,” the lead Hound said. He dragged Hill forward and kicked his feet out from under him. A paw on the back of Hill’s neck pushed his head down into…
Into the dead man.
He tried to scream, but nothing but garbled howls came out through the bridle. The Hound shoved harder. Hill grabbed at him, clawed at the corners of his mask as this particular horror cut through the rest like a knife.
“Stop it.” The Hound slapped his hands away and forced them down to match the dead man’s sprawled limbs. It wasn’t exact, but the Hound made him fit. “This is how we all die. You just fucked it up.”
There was someone else in the body. Hill didn’t know how there was room for them both, but somehow it worked. Somehow it worked. He was scared, but they were screaming because…because they weren’t dead.
Not yet.
“It’s done,” the Hound. He glanced at someone who must have been already there, waiting on them, and cocked a curious ear. “Will you do the honors?”
There was a grunt and then a cold hand under his chin tipped his head around—still in the dead body—so he stared up at Seb. He felt a brief stab of excitement, but the expression of flat irritation in Seb’s eyes quashed it.
“I told you,” Seb said. “Call me before the men with nooses and sticks get you. You should have listened.”
He slapped the side of Hill’s face and pushed himself back up out of the crouch. There was a chain strung around his neck. Hill watched as the dog-muzzled man pulled a whistle from under his shirt. It shouldn’t have been possible for dog lips and tongue to blow a whistle, but he managed it.
It was silent.
It ripped Hill apart like tissue paper, leaving him desperate as he tried to wad what was him back together. That wasn’t his mother. It was his Dad, he thought.
Seb nudged the dead man with the toe of his boot. “You’ll feel better once it’s over,” he said. “They all do. Once the Harvest is finished, you won’t mind much at all.”
He was going to say something else. Then he glanced into the trees, flinched, and quickly retreated. The rest of the Hounds went with him, ears flat and fur slick to their body.
Hill tried to roll his eyes to see what was coming. He couldn’t make them out, just the crunch of their feet on the leaves and the long, hooded shadows the moonlight cast.
“The tally’s off,” someone said. The voice hurt. It sounded like a broken bone felt; it tasted like marrow. Hill tried to spit it out, as if it had gone in his mouth instead of his ears, but it didn’t help. “We came for one.”
“Call it a bonus,” Seb said. His voice was tense, drawn out thin and nasal with fear. “You’ve been doing good work.”
He laughed at that, like it was a joke. No one else did.
Then the men got to work. On the dead boy first. They shucked him out of the body with dry-bone fingers and hooks, then strung him up.
He hung by his wrists as they used loops of rough, hemp ropes that scraped his skin dry and raw, a slough of wet ectoplasm dropped into a reed basket they kicked under him.
Hill, left in the corpse, screamed against the bridle as he tried to work out how to claw or chew or just squirm out of the cold meat. One of the men glanced his way, the moonlight catching on a scrawny jaw and dirty cheek under the stained burlap. Then they stepped away and looked again.
He wiped his brown, bony fingers on his leather apron and limped over to the body. Whatever passed for joints popped and crackled as he knelt down. A dry, rough finger that felt like jerky touched Hill’s jaw, and then the man pushed his hood back.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Albie said. His eyes were hazel. Hill had remembered that right. “I didn’t want you to see me until this was gone.”
Hill didn’t know what that meant. He tried to grab for Albie’s hands, to beg for help. Nothing came out. Albie pulled one of the hooked knives from his belt and tested the point on his finger.
“I never planned to let them hurt you,” he promised, his voice cracked and broken like ribs. “But you have to get home….Home by midnight, you understand.”
Hill wasn’t sure, but he nodded desperately anyhow.
Albie’s dry mouth folded into a smile that cracked his lips. He reached down and grabbed Hill by the hair. A yank pulled him halfway out of the dead man, his feet still—somehow—caught in the bony arch of his ribs. Another yank made him scream and dropped him, wet and sobbing, on the ground.
The rest of the hooded men, there for the harvest, turned with the rustle of heavy burlap. One of them dropped something they’d winkled from the dead man with a wet slop of noise.
“What are you doing?”
“You can’t do that?”
“It’s forbidden. How do they know you?”
“It’s forbidden?”
Their voices, smashed against each other, felt like an abbatoir. On the sidelines, the Hounds yelped and covered their eyes, muzzles screwed up in distress. Seb grabbed one by the ruff and shoved him out of the way as he stepped forward.
“What’s going on?” he yelled. “What are you doing?”
Albie looked down at Hill. His face softened and it was just Dad again, under the dirt and the filthy clothes.
“Let it go,” he said. “Let me go. Now. RUN!”
He snapped the instruction as he lunged forward to block the first of the hooded men who tried to swarm them.
A short, brutal swing of that hooked blade caught under the man’s dirty coat and pared out a white, half-bone arm.
The sleeve flapped, suddenly empty, as the arm dropped to the ground and melted like dew into the dirt.
Hill tore at the muzzle and managed to rip it off. He spat the bit out, bloodied and clotted with tongue. Then he scrambled to his feet and hesitated.
It was his dad. His dad. The reason that he’d done all of this, the big gap in his life. He couldn’t just leave him here to fight whatever the hooded men were.
“I said, run,” Albie roared at him. One of the other men threw a noose around him, the rough rope sparking against burlap.
He managed to get his fingers between the knot and his neck as he reached over his shoulder and dug the hook of his blade into one of the other hooded men as they swarmed him. “It’s nearly midnight! Go home. Go!”