Chapter 25
MY FIRST IMPULSE IS TO LET GO OF THE CHAIN, LET brutality infect me, let my jaws grow so long they’ll run him through. I’ll burn when the sun comes up, same as he will, but that happens slow and violence can happen fast.
But I need him alive. He knows where my mom is. And through the queasy stench of decay, I can still smell Veer. If I let go completely, what happens to her?
Don’t bother.
Asphalt shimmering on an August highway. Creosote crackling underfoot.
It won’t work.
Fuck you. I reach for the waiting chain, and—oh. He’s right. My curse is paralyzed, suspended midleap, ears pressed flat to its skull and eyes roving desperately. My knees are still bent back, my elbows still weeping, but it’s not getting any worse.
My body is my own to destroy. Who is he, to be allowed such power over it?
“Where’s my mom?” I demand.
The strands of muscle around his mouth draw back in a ghoulish smile. I look up into his lidless eyes and his deathless, worm-woven face, and my senses are caked with the smell of rot.
“You want to see her.” It’s not a question, and it’s no longer in my mind but spoken out loud in a voice that sounds like it hasn’t been used in centuries. The chasm in his torso pulses.
“Please.” It rips out of me, almost like I’m not speaking at all.
Please. I came all this way, I fought my body for every step, and not even because I owe her.
Though I do, I do, that’s been carved into the lining of my organs and I can’t escape it.
It’s because I need her, because she’s my home and she’s all I have left, and because if she’s stolen from me now, then what was the point of fighting my whole life to be enough for her?
What’s it all been for, if she can’t look at me and finally say she’s satisfied?
The flayed man’s torso spasms, and he laughs a raw, scraping noise that sounds like torture.
From somewhere behind me comes an answering howl.
Loping animal footfalls. The smell of rancid yogurt and pink lipstick, silk pillowcases and rose hand cream, but scorched and sticky, caramelized by viciousness.
Before, I would have sworn I’d die before I ever saw my mom turned monstrous. But now…
“Mom?” My voice cracks. I know it’s her.
I’d know her anywhere, even like this. Skinless and bestial, head hung low between exposed shoulder blades, her chest a writhing mass of maggots.
She folds herself at the flayed man’s feet and vomits a sound halfway between a sob and a snarl.
Her dull gray eyes weep a milky mixture of blood and vitreous fluid.
Worms ripple over the mountain ranges of the flayed man’s sharklike fangs. “You’re welcome.”
“What did you do to her?”
“She chose the hunt.” I’m flooded with more images. A desert-bleached neon sign, glass jagged, corrupted by sand. A leg, fleshy, then gangrenous, then stripped to bone, while clouds speed overhead.
“What about my uncle?”
The flayed man coughs, a sound like canyon walls scraping together.
He coughs again, and this one sounds like a botched operation.
I can see the heave of his throat echoed in the empty space of his chest, and then I’m not looking at him at all because I smell blood.
Like instant coffee and engine oil and veins so pickled by chemicals and resentment that they’ve forgotten there’s any other way to be. Then I see what he’s vomited up.
The desert constricts until the only things in the world are my useless body and the flayed man’s worm-ridden tendons and the half-digested heart that he’s puked onto the sand in front of me.
It weeps blood into the cracks of the desert.
Worms untwist themselves from the flayed man’s wrecked tendons and drop onto it, fat pale teardrops burrowing into withered muscle.
“He came to visit too. But he wasn’t ready to hunt.”
Behind him, my mom climbs to her feet. In this form, her bones are no longer brittle, her body no longer frail. She rolls her shoulders, and skinless muscle ripples.
“Mom,” I beg. “It’s me. It’s Ellis. Don’t you want to go home?”
She paces a slow half circle around the flayed man. Her milky eyes lock not on my face but on my throat. “Please, Mom. You know me. You remember me.”
The flayed man paws the dirt. His skinned feet are split in the center, more hoof than human and crowned by the wreckage of shattered ankle joints. “And you? What will you choose?”
The abyss of his mouth ripples. The snarl that emerges burrows into me like cactus spines, and I hear the command in it: Attack.
But he’s frozen my curse. I can’t lose control. Not because I’m stronger, but because he won’t let me. I don’t understand, and then a body hits me and I’m down, razor teeth snapping the shadows at the back of my neck, and I do.
The command wasn’t for me.
“Mom!” I get my legs under me just in time to dodge her flashing teeth, coming for my neck again. She lunges and I rear back, arms up to protect my face, and I’m on my back, claws slicing through layers of muscle and tendon where I try to push her away.
“It’s me.” I’m trapped between two forms, only half metamorphosed, but she’s all animal. “Please—”
Her snout twists and my forearm goes white-hot. Blood froths over her teeth. I wrench my arm free and kick myself upright, praying she missed the artery. When we face off again, my mom crouches low on her haunches, a predator’s growl leaking between her teeth.
She’s not in there anymore. She’s going to kill me.
I think of the knife in my bag and Uncle Bill’s conviction and all the reasons I swore I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, it wasn’t time yet. And when she leaps for me again, I know I have to.
I sidestep and launch myself at her. She skids on the hard-packed ground, writhing under my weight. Her heart pulses frantically, dirt-spattered and exposed. My teeth are long and sharp enough, even half-transformed like this.
My snout is poised at the cavity of her rib cage when she whines. Tragic, desperate. I look into her face and see those eyes, her eyes, gray, unfocused, weeping. Is this how I show her I love her?
I turn my face away from hers, back to the heart I’m meant to skewer. The flayed man took my compassion and made it cruel. Made it some vengeful game.
I can’t do it. Not even if it kills me.
The flayed man growls. “Pathetic.”
Then he’s knocking me out of the way, aiming for her heart, and I realize what he’s doing a split second before he does it and I won’t let him.
She’s my family and he’s nothing, and he won’t take this away from me.
I coil all my strength into my legs and barrel into him.
The flayed man rolls free of my mom, and before I can think what it will do to me, I wrench my fist through the wreckage of her rib cage and impale all four red-purple ventricles with my claws.
I pull free and sink into the dirt. My face is wet. Someone is screaming. I only realize it’s me when my throat gives out.
I brace for the burn of the flayed man’s fangs. But he doesn’t attack. He sniffs my mom’s corpse, dives his snout into the reliquary of her chest. I squeeze my eyes shut.
Footfalls, and his scent draws closer. When I open my eyes, his circular void of a mouth is level with them. Fresh hot blood coats his jagged teeth.
Her heart is in his mouth.
He grins wide and snaps his jaws shut. My mom’s blood spatters my face, warm and wet. The flayed man’s esophagus bulges as he swallows.
“You’re pitiful.” A vast, impersonal you that means all of us, anyone like me. He pronounces it like it’s the worst thing he can imagine. “Self-absorbed, petty. Fearful. Killing’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it?”
I won’t answer. I can’t answer. My throat is slick with tears.
“Isn’t it?” he snarls. His mouth flares, and endless rows of blackened teeth rise to meet me, writhing with fat worms and remnants of my mother’s heart.
Something’s rising in me too. Something primal. Something angry.
Petty, boring, pathetic, selfish. I’ve heard all that before, and no cruel words or rotted worms can scar me or scare me more than my mom can.
And she’s gone now. He took her from me and chewed her heart up like it was nothing.
I want to rip him apart, piece by piece.
I want to show him what it’s like to be eaten alive by guilt and shame.
I want failure to kiss him on the mouth and make him bleed.
“I can see the future,” he hisses. “I’m going to eat your heart, and then I’m going to eat your friend too.”
For a second, I’m derailed, but then I realize it’s all a con, a threat, a maneuver.
These are the kinds of games humans play.
Name-calling, negging, lies. Here is a creature who thrives on the hunt, on the slip of heart muscle through his teeth, here is a legend passed on through generations, who can stalk into my mind, who can conjure corrosion before my eyes, and he’s playing games.
My anger soars higher and higher, searing white-hot with injustice.
But like a fire, there’s only so much for it to eat, and when it falters, fear rushes in.
Would it be so bad to die? the fear whispers.
If I just close my eyes, soon none of this will be real.
If only I wasn’t so alone.
And then a howl.
Not an animal one, a human one, rage and vengeance.
She comes out of nowhere, something thick and silver in one hand, and without a hitch in her step she swings it over her head.
The tire iron misses the flayed man’s skull but cracks onto his shoulder, and he goes down with a screech and a spray of blood.
“Eat that, motherfucker!” Veer shouts. Her eyes are huge, her voice is too loud. Terror, shock, probably both. She tries to offer me a hand. God, I want to take it. But what happens when the flayed man’s paralysis lifts? Where does that leave me and the hunger ready to crawl out of my skin?
“Get out of here.” I hate the way my voice sounds, raspy and muddled. “I can’t—”
The flayed man rises from where she crumpled him. Veer’s scream smears red across my vision.
I was angry before. Now, I’m not anything. I’m just an animal.