Chapter 52
Save The One Who Didn’t Love Me Enough
LYRA
“What are you doing?” My mother tugs on my grip as I drag her behind me through the fields.
“Running,” I lob at her over my shoulder and tighten my grip. I only just bite back a Duh.
Wheat whips at us as we run, and I know we’re making too much noise. But so would whatever is hunting us through the field. Right?
I can’t hear it.
“Why?” Mom is whining now.
That’s why I can’t hear. She starts to claw at my hand, trying to get me to let go, pulling against me and slowing us both down.
I tighten my grip and plow ahead, dragging her. “Because of the monster.”
“Lyra, I know you don’t want to go with the thieves, but it will be all right. They’ll take care of you.” The tone in her voice is a sour combination of impatience, pity, and irritation.
“What?” I ask. “Like you took care of me? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I keep dragging her in my wake even as she tries to slow me down.
“Of course I took care of you.” She’s wheedling now.
Gods, holding on to her is like trying to hold on to a wriggling worm. A heavy one.
“This is not how I’m going to die. Not for you.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says. “Thieves don’t kill their pledges.”
I scoff. “Only because we’re worth too much to them,” I mutter darkly under my breath.
Another growl sounds across the tops of the wheat, and I jerk to a stop. Because that sounded like it was in front of us now.
“Lyra—”
“Be quiet.”
She tugs harder. “Let me go.”
The last word comes out just as a shadow looms. I turn to clap a hand over her mouth and throw my other arm around her to hold her still.
But she doesn’t want to be still.
Whatever is after us, it’s big. I can hear the thuds of its footfalls on the ground, the way the wheat cracks under its weight. I manage to hold my mother still and quiet until its footsteps recede.
Just when I think we’re safe, my mother whimpers.
The beast coming for us roars just as she jerks out of my grasp and tries to run away from me. I manage to stick a foot out and trip her, knocking her to the ground. In a flash, I’m on top of her, but she’s all flailing hands and kicking feet, trying to get away.
“Get off me!” she shouts. “I can’t wait to be rid of you!”
I go stock-still at those words.
Poison-arrow-tipped words.
Words no child should hear from the person who is supposed to love them most, protect them from the world, cherish them beyond all else.
Those words sink deep and true and…gods…I can’t do it.
I can’t… I can’t do it.
Another blast of a roar shatters the quiet that fell between us, and I shove off her. “Fine,” I force out between painful gasps. “I don’t need you, either.”
The second she jumps to her feet and turns her back on me, I have my axe out.
With a sickening sort of thunk, I bring the bottom of the handle down on her head, and she collapses in a heap, out cold.
Luckily, she’s a tiny, bony woman, and I manage to heave her onto my shoulders in a fireman’s carry.
Feeling like death is breathing down my neck, I run. Or clomp along awkwardly as fast as I can go with extra weight that is trying to shift and bounce with every step.
“You useless excuse for a parent,” I whisper between heaving breaths.
Another roar is practically on top of me, followed by the pounding of feet or hooves or whatever it has, so close I can feel the ground shake.
Fear grabs hold of me by the throat, threatening to cut off my air, and the instinct to save myself screams through me, urges me to dump the piece of shit I got in the parent lottery and run.
But I won’t. Damn her.
I won’t.
Without warning, I burst from the wheat field into an open pasture that apparently has already been plowed.
In an instant, the roaring and pounding stop, and my mother disappears. It’s so abrupt, I stumble under the sudden shift of weight.
Bending over, I put my hands on my knees, breathing so hard. “Fuck me.”
Which is, of course, when another table appears with another round of hallucinogen in a shot, this one green in color.
“I take it back,” I say to the absent goddess. “Not fuck me. Fuck you.”
Then I down the drink, which tastes like grass, and toss the cup to the ground with a wooden thud in the dirt. Wiping a sleeve across my mouth, I glare at the field. “What’s next? Psychedelic clowns? Eating my own liver? Talking about my feelings?”
Maybe I’m escalating things…and giving the goddess ideas.
Ancient-looking stone walls sprout up out of the ground, bracketing me on either side and running straight ahead for what looks like miles.
Meanwhile, at my back, a very modern, very large piece of farm equipment appears.
Do the replicas of the deities down here gather modern-day knowledge from their real-life gods or goddesses or something?
I’m a city girl, so I’m not sure what the tractor-like thing is called.
Combine comes to mind. All I know is that it’s huge, with a spike-covered cylinder across the front.
Whatever demonic force is in the driver’s seat—which is empty behind the plexiglass screen—sets those spiked blades to spinning.
I back up warily, looking from side to side for a way out. Any way out. But the walls are too tall to scale and exactly as wide as the spinning farm blades.
The combine doesn’t move forward. Not yet.
“Who am I saving now?” I mutter.
“What in the fires of all the hells are you doing here, Keres?” a grinding voice demands.
I feel myself hunch over at the sound of that familiar, bullying tone. “I had to fucking ask.”