Chapter 20 #3
“I have had some promising results with blood tests, though of course, none of them would be foolish enough to allow themselves to be tested willingly.” He gestured with the gun, which was now pointing more toward Saul than to me.
“I am somewhat hampered by having only one specimen. Still, I am confident that we can find a way.”
I lowered my hands, waiting to see if Halder would protest. He didn’t. “If Phelps had just explained things to me, instead of shouting about devils…”
Halder sighed. “Phelps was a useful tool that outlived his usefulness, I am afraid. He never understood the importance of what we were doing.”
I nodded. “It is important, isn’t it?”
“You fickle little bitch,” growled Saul, and made an abortive lunge in my direction.
I dodged out of the way easily, ducking toward Halder, and heard the gun go off. A bullet whined past me and something stung my shoulder. Oh God, have I been shot? I staggered forward with a cry, tripped, and sprawled full-length on the ground.
For one crucial second, Halder took his eyes off Saul to look at me.
Saul moved in a blur. He grabbed the hand with the gun, yanked it upward.
Halder pulled the trigger, but the shot went into the air.
Saul dropped his head and Halder began to swing the lantern toward the other man’s face, then slowed.
The lantern’s handle fell from his fingers and oil splashed over the dry pine straw, lighting immediately.
More hit my skirts, which were fortunately too wet to go up.
I yelped and rolled, scrambling to my feet with speed, if not grace, and began slapping at my skirts.
When I finally looked over, neither Saul nor Halder were moving, and I realized belatedly that Saul’s teeth were sunk to the gums into Halder’s wrist.
“Oh,” said Halder, his voice remarkably calm. “It would appear that your saliva possesses anesthetic qualities.”
Saul opened his mouth. I caught a flash of sharp teeth vanishing. “Yes,” he said, clamping a hand on the back of the doctor’s neck. “Useful for a parasite, don’t you think? Miss Wilson, get his gun, please.”
“Let me put this fire out first,” I said, stomping out the last flames on the pine straw.
“Time is something of a factor, Miss Wilson.”
“So is not burning alive,” I snapped, but hurried to take the gun from Halder’s fingers. He tried to hold on to it, but his fingers were rapidly going limp. A moment later he crashed down to his knees. Saul moved his grip to the fringe of hair at the back of the doctor’s head and held him up.
“Miss Wilson,” Halder said, still very calm, “you can still help me. You have the gun.”
I took a deep breath. “Why the botflies, Doctor? Why did you do that?”
“For science.” His words were beginning to slur a little.
“And did you tell other scientists what you were doing? Invite them to read your notes and see your experimental setup?”
“Of course not.”
I shook my head. “Then it wasn’t science, Dr. Halder. It was just you torturing some poor bastard in a hole in the ground.” I stepped back, lowered the gun, and nodded to Saul.
“Hmm,” said Saul thoughtfully. “Now what shall I do with you? I have so many ideas…”
Halder said nothing. I don’t know if Saul’s saliva had paralyzed him completely, or if he simply didn’t have anything to say.
“I could put you down in that hole, Halder. Down with those wolf worms you fed on my flesh. I could even find some screwworms, I expect. You made cuts on my thighs so that the screwworms would burrow in exactly where you wanted. Do you remember?” He shook Halder, just a little. “Answer me. You’re not that numb.”
“I remember,” said Halder. His pupils were huge behind the lenses of his spectacles, as if he’d been eating opium. Phelps had said that his pig let the blood thief bite off its face, and now I understood why. Like the cockroach paralyzed by the wasp, Halder had no more will of his own.
“Even if I can’t find some screwworms, the flies will have you soon enough,” Saul said. “These move fast. One was eating through Phelps’s skull, did you know that?”
“Really?” Halder took a deep breath and seemed to rally a little. “Did it take control of his motor functions, then? I theorized…” His mouth slackened, and his theory was lost. His very last theory.
Saul ignored him. “Well, Miss Wilson? What should I do?”
My mouth was dry. The long shadows had fallen over Saul’s cheekbones and down onto Halder’s slack face. Neither of them looked human, or holy.
If I were a good person, perhaps I would have argued for Halder’s life.
I probably wasn’t a good person, so I decided to be an honest one.
“Saul,” I said, “if you want to kill him, do it. I’m too tired to sit in moral judgment right now.
I won’t stop you. I don’t think I can stop you. I just want this to be over.”
Saul huffed something that might, under better circumstances, have been a laugh. “For me—for what Louisa went through—I should probably make you die slow. But we’re all very tired.”
He moved again, very fast, and Halder fell over on his side with a red ruin where his throat had been.
I looked away as soon as I realized what I was seeing.
My shoulder still hurt. I looked down and saw a splinter of wood sticking out of it.
The bullet must have knocked a sliver loose from the wall and hit me.
I pulled it out and it hurt and it was very important to focus on the pain, because the alternative was to focus on the sound bubbling out of Halder’s lungs.
And then Halder’s gurgling breath stopped, and there was only silence, broken, very faintly, by a whippoorwill.
“It’s over,” I said, in a high voice. “It’s finally over.”
Saul said nothing. He said it for long enough that I turned and met those pale, pale eyes. The whippoorwill called again.
It occurred to me, like a splash of cold water, that I was the only person left who knew what Saul was, or even that he was still alive. The only one who knew that he’d killed both Phelps and Halder. The last loose end.
It would be incredibly easy for him to tidy me away. No one would think it odd that I had been killed alongside the other two, and no one would suspect a man who had been dead for a year.
He took a step forward, and I took a shuffling step back.
“Miss Wilson,” he said, and I wondered what he read in my face, and whether it would make him more or less likely to leave me alive.
I was sure that Saul was grateful for my part in his rescue, but was he grateful enough?
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m all right. I’m fine. So are you. We can just go home.”
The whippoorwill called for a third time.
His eyes narrowed.
And then I heard the familiar sound of a shotgun being cocked and Mrs. Kent said, “Turn around slowly—” and we turned and Saul said, “Rose?” and Mrs. Kent said, “Saul!?” and I thought, Surely he won’t kill me in front of her?
but then Saul was rushing toward me and I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the blow coming.
At least I died in the woods.
A long, long moment crept by, and Mrs. Kent said, “Dear god, what’s happened to you?” and it occurred to me that I wasn’t dead. I opened my eyes and saw that the world was at an unexpected angle, and then I realized that my knees had given out, but that Saul Gregor was holding me upright.
Jackson was carrying the lantern. He reached out and took the gun away from me before I could drop it. Of course he has the lantern and Rose would be the one with the shotgun. It only makes sense.
“Halder’s dead,” Saul said. “Phelps too.”
I looked up into Mrs. Kent’s face.
“Well,” said my friend Rose, swinging the shotgun away, “about damn time.”