Chapter Twenty-Eight. The River’s Green Eyes #2
“It’s hunting something,” Tian repeated. She winced, a flare in her senses. “It might have found it. Let’s keep moving before it comes back this way.”
Up ahead, the path widened into a row of warehouses, one of which had lights on. The Butterflies stopped at the sound of men’s voices from inside, loud and close enough to the shut doors that they could make them out distinctly.
“We need to put her down. Did you see what she did to Hong?”
“You want to be the one who goes out there?”
“We should just take the pills and clean up and go—let some poor fucker find her in the morning, or maybe she’ll be dead by then, huh?” A nervous chuckle.
Adeline held up two fingers. Two guys. Tian nodded.
“Or maybe she crosses the bridge and gets out. We can’t have her loose, you idiots.”
Adeline caught Tian’s glance. Three. Except this new voice, she recognized.
“What are you, noble hero? Who cares what she does to other people.”
“You want to tell Fan Ge you got the police involved? He’s taking nothing right now unless it’s his son back.”
“Ricky should go check it out. Huh, Ricky? You think you’re a man now? Go handle her, then.”
“Yeah,” the third man drawled. “I agree with that.”
Christina nudged Tian, wondering about the plan, but Tian shook her head and pointed their attention toward the dark bushes.
The two Steels managed to bully their younger brother into unlatching the door.
It slid open in groaning halts and stutters that might as well have been sirens in the night.
Tian tensed, still sensing something no one else did, her eyes fixed on the undergrowth.
The Steels had been saying her. A memory came to Adeline: a girl in the alley with too many teeth, tasting a dead Crocodile’s blood.
Trembling gun first, the gangly Steel boy stepped out. Tian motioned for the girls to back out of his line of sight—and then some.
The boy walked slowly forward, trigger finger twitching. If he knew what he was looking for, he didn’t know where to look for it. He was casting the gun around like a talisman. In the opposite direction, Adeline noticed, from where Tian was looking.
As the boy walked past, eyes opened in the bushes.
With a lunge, a figure all white and red and limbs fell onto him, nails finding flesh.
He screamed. Jade stifled a yelp. The gun went off and then thumped to a side as he grappled with what had once clearly been a girl.
Dark long hair obscured most of her face as she knocked the Steel to the ground.
She was spattered with blood, had gone for the throat, the undersides of his wrists, the soft, exposed, veined places.
Another gunshot went off. Another Steel, aiming through the shutter. The girl jerked—hit?—and rolled off the first boy, wiping her mouth. The men should have closed the door. By the time they realized this, she was already inside.
Gunshots went off like firecrackers—shouts, thuds, crashing. Then the slam of a door, and silence.
Unbelievably: a voice, the one Adeline had recognized. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” He was pacing.
No response. Tian looked at Adeline and held up one finger.
The Butterflies moved now, slowly. Adeline felt what Tian must have picked up: a feral rage suffusing the air, almost electric where the girl had been.
But there was a well deeper beyond that, too, and something accumulated.
Tian pushed the door open farther as they stepped inside, Christina training her gun on the man left standing.
His brother was twitching on the ground, face and chest mauled.
The final standing man had light gashes on his arm, but was otherwise on his feet.
His tattoos seemed to have saved him from the brunt of it.
It took a moment for him to see the Butterflies, then another to understand who they were.
But finally it dawned on him, and he snatched up the pipe behind him and desperately swung.
Tian stepped under and caught his arm with a flash of fire. He jolted and dropped the pipe with a howl, staggering backward with renewed shock.
It was Lilian’s boyfriend, the voice Adeline had recognized.
He looked more than ever unformed and in near pieces, panting and gaping at them like a fish.
He’d been there the whole time at the Steel house.
Adeline remembered his leering presence in the corner.
Her heart thudded, and a keening sense of purpose began to build.
“She ran off down there?” Tian said. “Why didn’t she kill you?”
“You’re behind this, witch? Call a truce just to come in here and kick us in the back?”
“We just got here. Seems like you brought this upon yourselves. We—” A high-pitched giggle interrupted her. Tian paused and turned to look down the warehouse, and the Steel’s machismo faltered.
“We locked her in there. She was going after the pills.”
“What are the pills?” Tian demanded. “They’re the magic of gods, aren’t they? How is it done?”
“They don’t tell us. We just send out the blood and handle the girls.”
“What blood?”
But Adeline had noticed something in the rafters, hanging between the pendulum lights. She held fire up to be sure. Large metal hooks, attached to a loop of rusted railings. This was an old abattoir.
“The tang ki ko that Fan Ge kills,” she said.
“You collect the blood?” Pieces clicked together.
Fragments of hare and crone in her throat and eyes.
“That’s what’s in the pills. Gods’ blood.
Somehow it works on other people.” She tasted copper in the back of her mouth, felt hands crushing her jaw, felt sick.
Lilian’s boyfriend looked uncomprehending. Perhaps he really didn’t know what happened after he hauled the bodies up over troughs and made sure nothing spilled. Perhaps he really had never stopped to connect the blood to the pills he’d forced into her.
When Adeline was younger, her mother had brought her past the municipal abattoir that had until recently been an unsightly establishment downtown.
They hadn’t been able to look in, but a slaughterhouse was heard and smelled as much as it was seen.
She’d heard the goats bleating and the chains, had become slightly woozy from the intense metallic air.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise that those neat little pills required blood.
But now she thought: blood had to be more finite than Three Steel’s ambitions. What would happen when they ran out?
From the far end of the room, another chuckle escaped the locked door.
Lower this time and coarser—a completely different voice.
Tian’s expression had darkened upon this latest revelation.
She weighed this, weighed whatever was behind the door, regarded the Steel with disgust. “Christina, Lan, don’t take your eyes off him. ”
“There’s probably more of them by now,” he shouted after her, as she started toward the door. “That’s where the other girls were kept.”
“I know,” Tian said. “I can feel them.” She had fire out, and it seemed to grow brighter as she went closer. Adeline caught up to her and took her arm.
“You don’t know what’s in there.”
The voice, sobbing now, changed timbre. Higher, thinner, turning into a fit of giggles. Objects were overturned. After a stuttering peal, and the sound of scampering, the sobs returned. Tian glanced at Adeline, who grimaced and tipped her chin. Only one way to find out.
The Steels had wedged the door with a chair. Slowly, Tian’s hand rested on its back. One breath. Two. She whipped it away and twisted the handle.
Both of them flinched, but nothing moved. The smell of blood had saturated the closed room—two more men lay dead or dying on the ground, flesh gouged between their tattoos. Adeline pressed a hand to her mouth as her eyes fell on the girls penned in one corner, seemingly frozen out of fear.
“She left them alive again,” Adeline murmured.
On the other side of the room, the bloody girl sat petulantly on the floor, rooting through upended boxes. Was it just a trick of the light, or did her skin seem almost translucent? She was picking through the debris—for pills, they had to assume. “Hi,” Tian said gently.
The girl paused, her head cricking. She looked up.
A correction entered Adeline’s head. She hadn’t left the other girls alive because they were girls. She’d left them alive because they didn’t have gods.
A second mouth blossomed on the girl’s jaw with a comb of straight white teeth. As she darted for Tian’s throat, Adeline tackled her. Nails raked across Adeline’s face, scraping her still-bruised skin and narrowly missing her eye.
Everything was moving too fast. The girl thrashed and clawed and she had superhuman strength, yes—but her face, her face, shuttering like frames between characters, like the flipping painted masks of a dancing facechanger.
The flesh of her lips was a rosebud, then weeping sores, then slanted carmine, and then sores again, dribbling pus down her chin.
Tian hauled the girl off and rolled her onto the ground, pinning her arms to her sides.
Now they could see it clearly. The girl’s face was a horrific mirage of shifting parts.
Adeline couldn’t guess how young or old she was.
Just that in between repulsiveness, there were slices where the girl was absolutely, terrifyingly beautiful—a goddess with a bloody mouth there for a heartbeat, before something in her face shifted again and she was back to being a nightmare.
Her eyes were mismatched, one amber and the other pitch-black, then one sky blue and the other deep hazel, lashes curling and shrinking and then extending into spidery threads laid across the tops of her cheeks.
Whatever different formula of the pills this was, it had brought out another side of the magic.
It was no longer merely erupting in the bones.
“Shit,” Christina whispered, coming up behind them. She rocked slightly. “That was how Lina looked when we found her. She—half her face was all wrong.”