Chapter 22
Elias sat on the chest of a big fireman as if the dying man were a park bench.
He held the giant’s arm in his lap, slurping blood from the wrist. The fireman had tried to fight back, but when Elias slammed him to the road and pounded on his chest, shattering his rib cage, all the fight had left him.
Now he just twitched, mouth opening and closing like a fish dangling on the end of a line.
Blood bubbled from his lips, and that made Elias smile, because it was a look they shared, mouths and chins smeared scarlet.
The smile vanished in seconds. Each swallow of the fireman’s blood flowed through his body, a salve for his pain, but it faded instantly.
Sating the hunger made him tremble with vitality, and it seemed to heal his wounds, but with limits.
The hole in the back of his head had closed, just a soft spot of rubbery flesh, the skull not yet hardened, like a newborn’s fontanel.
The same was true of the socket where his left eye had been.
Ridged, pliable flesh had grown there, closing the wound, but the eye was gone.
Elias had murdered the cop who’d shot him, but he wished he could bring the son of a bitch back to life and have a do-over. He wanted to make him suffer for the lost eye, but it was too late.
Worse than the eye was the underlying pain.
It had been there from the moment he’d come back from oblivion in the baggage car.
He’d been overwhelmed by the noise and scents and the way he could feel the darkness outside, even though he’d been inside the train.
He’d wanted to hurt Violet, to break Malcolm, even as some little flicker within him shimmered with regret, and hoped to save them.
There’d been violence, and then the screaming of the train’s wheels breaking free of their tracks.
All of that had distracted him from the gnawing pain.
His new skin hurt. His tendons felt like sharp splintered things shunted into his flesh.
His bones ached so deeply that his gnarled fingers itched to dig down to the marrow and tear it out.
The pain pressed down on him, and he kept sucking at the fireman’s wrist in an attempt to keep it at bay.
But the blood had stopped flowing and had to be drawn out.
He could taste the temperature difference now. The man was dying. Or, maybe—
“Dead.”
Elias looked up to find Root looming over him. The rain had washed it clean, and its skin glistened blue-white in the dark.
When it spoke, its voice seemed to come from deep inside.
“It is finished here. We have only hours until sunrise.”
Elias took its hand, studied the length of its fingers, the bony thinness, the sharpness of its claws. He saw that his own hands looked different—not like Root’s, not yet, but thinner, longer, sharper at the tips. The skin had sloughed away, leaving hard, raw flesh.
Root caressed Elias’s head and gazed at him, a parent to a newborn. “We must stop the witch.”
“My mother,” Elias said.
“No longer.”
Elias rose, the dead fireman’s arm dropping to the pavement. The sound of the rain striking the corpse seemed strangely loud and somehow beautiful, like birdsong at dawn. But even that small pleasure was obscured by the grinding pain inside him.
“It hurts,” he said.
Root held both of his hands, teeth bared. Elias thought of sacraments, of benediction.
“The witch did this to us, long ago. We buried ourselves deep, wretched in agony, minds collapsing. Her death provided some relief, but we are so much more than this. If we end this pain, we will be the gods of blood and darkness once more.”
Elias understood. “If we stop her going home…”
“Yes. She was a fool to ever leave the place where she cursed us. But her foolishness is our gift, our chance to be gods once more.”
The pain racked him, but Elias nodded. The memories of life were dull, but still remained. His mother had loved him only when it served her. With hunger and pain ruling his thoughts now, he would finally return that love just as she had given it to him. Her existence no longer served him.
Malcolm. Violet.
They’d betrayed him. Elias had always been the one who did the betraying, and it infuriated him that the tables had been turned.
He still felt a bit of fraternal love for Malcolm, and he still remembered how he’d felt on the night when he’d seduced Violet, but these memories were no more than the phantom pain of a severed limb.
They were the memories of sights he’d seen with the eye that had been blown out of his skull.
“Let’s go,” Elias said.
Root grinned, teeth long and sharp and black. Elias ran his tongue over his own teeth, disappointed to find that, though now deadly sharp, they were not yet as bestial as Root’s.
They walked side by side in the direction Malcolm and Violet had driven off in the police car.
There’d been a third person, a man on a motorcycle, but in the chaos, Elias hadn’t gotten a look at him.
Now he surveyed the carnage of the train wreck.
Out in the dark and the rain, two of Root’s kin moved among the passengers, killing any they found still alive.
Some survivors had likely made it to the distant trees or to the other side of the derailed train, but aside from those few lucky ones, the rest were prey.
Until Root spoke.
“Come!” it shouted to its kin.
One of them snarled at it. “We have starved in the silence of our skulls for centuries! You cannot expect—”
“You will return to that silence if the witch is not stopped!”
The things paused, exchanged a glance, and then strode quickly toward Root and Elias.
Several people were still moving amid the scattered bodies.
A head poked up from inside a derailed sleeper car and then quickly vanished again.
Root and its kin did not understand this modern world—did not know of such things as newspapers and the CBS Television News.
Survivors would tell stories of this night, not only in the morning but for the rest of their lives.
Elias nearly warned them, but then he realized that it didn’t really matter.
The public wasn’t likely to believe stories like this without evidence they could see with their own eyes.
Even if people did believe it, what did it matter?
If they couldn’t stop Malcolm and Violet, Root’s people would have to go back underground, Elias with them.
But if they prevented Maggie’s corpse from receiving the burial she’d demanded, no police force would be able to hunt and kill the things they would become.
Firefighters and medics lay dead in the street, near the vehicles they’d driven to get there.
While Elias had been drunk on blood and pain, draining the big fireman, Root and another creature had killed them all.
One of them, skin bruise-purple shot through with thick white veins, crouched on the roof of the fire truck.
Benjy and the tall Irishman stood waiting.
“Get in. You’ll drive,” Root said, and the Irishman obeyed.
Another puppet. What must it be like to take a man’s will that way? Elias felt the wrongness of it but also the desire for that power, that control. To mesmerize someone, to master them … the allure was almost as strong in him as the ravening hunger.
He could do that to Malcolm. Better yet, to Violet. Humiliate them as they’d humiliated him. It was a shame his mother had died, because now that he’d begun thinking of repaying pain with pain, he’d dearly have loved to see her again.
“You,” Root said, pointing at one of the two creatures who’d been murdering passengers. “Go ahead, quick as you can. Find the witch’s remains. You can sever the head, but don’t burn it until we get there. I want to see it happen, to know for myself.”
“You will feel it when she burns. We all will.”
Root stiffened. “Wait until I am with you.”
The other creature sniffed and turned away.
It leaped atop the fire truck and unfurled thin, membranous wings the rest of them did not seem to have.
It hurled itself into the air, wings opening with a sound like a sail unfurling, and vanished into the storm.
Root climbed on top of the fire truck while Alfie slipped behind the wheel, the little boy in the middle, and Elias took the passenger seat.
One of the remaining vultures crept into the back of the truck and the other jumped onto the roof beside Root.
Alfie drove as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened.
He began to sing “The Wild Rover” with joy and vigor, his eyes alight with adventure.
Elias wondered how much of the man remained inside his mind.
Was Root controlling what Alfie Hannigan saw and felt, so he didn’t really know what transpired around him, or was Alfie truly a puppet, with Root pulling the strings but the man’s mind still there, aware of the horrors unfolding?
“Faster,” Root said. “I want an end to this.”
Caught between the last vestiges of the man he’d been and the monster he’d become, Elias couldn’t agree more.