Chapter Eighteen

Ayaan fired a bolt of dark energy into the legs of an oncoming ghoul and the meat slid right off her bones. The sinew and cartilage beneath darkened and cracked and she fell face forward across the packed dirt of the barnyard. The wizard just laughed.

“There’s more where she came from and look, even now she does my will.” It was true. The now legless ghoul kept coming for Ayaan, her skinned hands digging into the soil with slow but total determination.

Ayaan spun around and blew the head off a tall ghoul that had been creeping up behind her. Flesh peeled off his skull in dry strips and fell away, his black tongue flopping to the ground in one piece. He went down for good—but while she had watched him die others had flanked her as she had known they would.

Skinless hands closed around Ayaan’s flesh, pinching her mercilessly. The eyeless dead wrapped their arms around her and lifted her off her feet. She kicked and struggled and threw her center of gravity around but every time she slipped out of their dry grey arms another would come up to grasp at her hair or her wrists. She managed to get one quick shot off that seared a ghoul to death where he stood—the naked muscles of his chest and neck withering visibly, the individual strands of fibrous tissue splitting and peeling and blowing away like dandelion fluff—but it wasn’t enough.

Without a word, without a command they carried her inside the farmhouse. The front door lead through a simply decorated parlor and into the back of the house, to an enormous kitchen. A wood-burning stove blazed merrily in one corner while a barn door up on trestles filled the center of the room. Dark blood stained the wood in several places.

A painted wooden door in one corner of the room stood ajar. Something bright glinted behind it. As the corpses carried Ayaan inside she caught a glimpse of blonde hair, and then the door closed silently. Ayaan had no time to wonder about that—she was too busy fighting her captors.

The skinless corpses threw her down onto the table hard enough to make her head reel. While she pulled her consciousness back together the wizard came in and secured her spread-eagled with stout iron chains. He’d clearly done this before. His wooden arm was no use for the job but he worked the manacles quite adeptly with his callused hand.

“My name,” he told her, perhaps as a courtesy, “is Urie Polder and I eat the dead for the magic they got. Don’t you get me wrong, gal. I didn’t come to this lookin’ for a taste of gray meat.” The ghouls moved to the corners of the room while he busied himself with pots and pans and especially knives. “It was a kinda court of last resorts arrangement, you unnerstand. The larder,” he said, stabbing a butcher’s knife into the wood of the table until it vibrated in place, “was bare. Now that’s an old, old story and I don’t need to be re-tellin’ it. I weren’t the first time I or mine went hungry, but God help me, I hope it to be the last.” He brought a cleaver down to stick in the wood as well. “It was only when I et her heart that I felt it. That was when I felt the holy power for the first time, and I knew what God had given to me, this puissance, this strength.”

“Whose heart?” Ayaan demanded, curious despite her situation.

“I’m a rebuilder,” Polder told her, ignoring her question. “Some folks come on through here and see all the skulls and like and say I’m some nature of demon, but it ain’t true.” He gestured with a knife-sharpening steel. “This is where it begins once and over again, it’s the Garden, right? Only this time, the Fall come first, and now we’re goin’ back to the good place. It’s Eden in reverse.”

He looked up at the ceiling and brought his hands together in prayer. The stick-fingers of his artificial arm wove around the living fingers of his right hand. “Our Father,” he began, “who art in Heaven, ahallowed be—”

A horrible murderous scream interrupted him. He stopped in mid-prayer and looked down at her, though it was clear to Ayaan that the noise had come from outside.

“Hell’s hinges, it'll be afternoon afore I get somethin’ to eat.” He waved at them with his wooden arm and his skinless ghouls filed out of the room to the barnyard. “So you’re not alone, well, I shoulda guessed so much.” It took Ayaan a moment to realize she was being addressed. “Evil comes calling in threes, don’t it just. The furry fellow, you, and who else? Who else is out there knockin’ at my gate?”

Another scream came. Another—they made Ayaan grit her teeth. One long, extended howl that seemed t come from everywhere at once. Then one of the skinless ghouls came smashing up against the windows outside. His denuded face flattened against the glass and then he slid off, leaving a thin scum of milky pus against the pane.

“What’s... what’s that blurrin’ out there, it moves so fast like a car used to,” Polder said, staring out the window. “And there, a green fellow, now what could that be?”

“That's death,” Ayaan said, “for you, anyway.” She lay back on the table and closed her eyes.

The wizard grabbed her leg and shook it painfully. “Now you start talkin’, gal, as I will have none of that. Who is that, and what does he want? His boys are awful fast.” He grabbed up an iron poker and laid it across the crook of his human arm. “Don’t you go astray now, you mind?” he told her. His smile told her he had meant it as a joke. Throwing open the kitchen door he strode out into the barnyard to do battle with the green phantom.

Before he’d taken three steps an accelerated ghoul leapt to his shoulders and slammed him to the ground. He cried out and tried to raise his wooden arm in self defense but the ghoul raised its doctored arms and jabbed his belly, chest and face over and over again, the sharpened bones moving so fast they shimmered in the air. Blood leaked out of the wizard in great gouts and his energy started to flicker.

“Da,” someone said from near Ayaan’s face. She turned to look and saw the interior door ajar again. A skinny little girl, maybe thirteen years old stood there, her face pocked with acne but her hair the color of corn floss. She looked up at Ayaan with very wide eyes. “My Da,” she said, as if that conveyed a full message on its own.

Maybe it did. Ayaan nodded solemnly. “I know. But we have to think now. We have to think about what we’re going to do. Are you alone?” That elicited an obedient nod. “It’s just you and your Da?” Another. Crap, Ayaan thought. This wasn’t going to end well. “Do you know how to undo these chains? This is very important.”

The girl looked out at her father’s corpse—the ghoul still stabbing away at what had become a skin full of blood and liquefied organs—and then stepped into the kitchen. She took an enormous iron key out from under the kitchen table and made short work of the manacles. Ayaan sat up on the barn door table. “What’s your name?” she asked. She had a duty to this girl.

“I am called Patience, if you please,” the girl said, and did a little curtsey. She smiled sweetly. She would have been trained to smile sweetly. Ayaan knew that training would only get her so far. The girl was going to collapse in tears very soon. She stepped down from the table and took Patience’s hand.

“Well, Patience, it’s very good to meet you. Now. Come with me.” She kicked the door closed so the girl wouldn’t have to look at her father’s body, or what was being done to it. Very little of Urie Polder’s face remained.

Ayaan lead the girl deeper into the house, into a room where the breaking dawn barely lit up an over-stuffed couch and a few simple end tables. There would be a root cellar, of course, and probably other places to hide. The hex signs outside would protect the house for a while—at least until the goat blood powering them dried up and flaked off.

Patience flopped down on an ottoman and studied the seam of her little black dress. She found a loose thread and started picking at it. Any second now, Ayaan thought. Any second and the girl would lose her calm.

But what could be done with her? If Ayaan hid the girl, well, then what? Ayaan couldn’t stay behind to protect her. She couldn’t send anyone else to pick her up and take her to a better place. There was probably plenty of preserved food in the house but it wouldn’t last forever. Eventually Patience would have to come out of the cellar and face the big bad world. She would have no chance out there, not without her father’s magic to protect her. Ayaan hadn’t seen any firearms in the house. Certainly not the kind of weapons the girl would need to survive on her own.

Ayaan could turn the girl over to the green phantom. She could be raised as one of the Tsarevich’s zealots, get a little education, be well fed and brainwashed and turned into one more slave of the dead. She could look forward to the day when she, too, would die and have her hands and lips surgically removed.

Wouldn’t it be better, Ayaan thought, to just put her down?

It could be done so simply, so painlessly. Ayaan could hold the girl against her breast and then just use her power, just a little, to end the girl’s life. Or even better, she could just... just...

Patience was the first living human Ayaan had been near since the Tsarevich remade her. The girl’s energy burned inside her hotter than the stove in the kitchen—Ayaan hadn’t really expected that, that it would be so warm or radiant. She felt quite cold, suddenly, quite chilled, and she longed to have a little of that heat inside her. No malice, no threat came attached to that desire. It was the simplest, most wholesome feeling in the world.

“Come here, Patience,” Ayaan said. “I want to hold you in my arms and make everything better.”

The girl slid off the ottoman and onto her feet. She looked down at the carpet but didn’t come any closer. Tears slicked down her cheeks.

“Come here,” Ayaan said. She took a step closer to the girl. “Come here.” She reached out one hand and touched Patience on the elbow. The little girl’s face came up, her eyes tightly shut as if she knew what came next, as if she was bracing for it.

Behind Ayaan a door opened and Erasmus stepped inside. Ayaan could feel his energy behind her, cold and unwanted. “Well, what do we have here?” he asked in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, and held out his arms. The girl ran to him and embraced him like she would a giant teddy bear, her arms tight around him, her sobs buried in his fur.

A tremor of revulsion went through Ayaan’s body. She had considered something so terrible it made her bones ache. She wouldn’t have done it. She told herself she never would.

“We all make mistakes,” Erasmus whispered, and she spun around to glare at him. “It can be so hard.”

Ayaan stormed past him and out to the barnyard. The green phantom stood there waiting for her, his ghouls standing as motionless as statues in a line behind him. No sign remained of the skinless horrors from the barn. The body of the dead wizard had been completely devoured. Only bloodstains remained in the barnyard.

“You did well,” the phantom told her. “I guess you get to live.”