by Matt Turner
“Nice catch,” Lamech said drily. “You’ve impressed me, whore.”
Lao dropped Vera to the ground and rubbed his arm with a wince. “Shit, that hurt,” he moaned.
“Vera! NOW!” Amaury cried out.
Vera could barely see, let alone think, but she was aware of a great commotion around her—she saw a glimpse of Simon’s blade screeching along the ground as he charged forward, heard Lamech shout a command, and a wave of bullets tearing through the air above her. Lao stumbled forward, his arms outstretched to meet Simon’s assault. Vera blindly reached out for him as a great wave of nausea overcame her body. She gagged up a mouthful of bile, felt her mind brush up against someone else’s, and then there was a squeal of pain and a shower of blood rained down on her.
“Got…you,” Simon panted. “Whore.”
Lao let out a weak gurgle and slumped down to his knees. Vera let out a cry of disgust at the great cleft that Simon’s blade had left in the handsome man’s body—from left shoulder to right hip, only a few tendons and scraps of rib kept half his torso from simply sliding away. As if to add insult to injury, even the upper half of Lao’s head, from his eyes to his scalp, had been completely torn away by Amaury’s bullets.
Simon raised his blade again and slashed Lao in the opposite direction, from his right shoulder to his left hip. For just a second, the X carved into his body spewed out a fountain of blood. Lao opened his mouth as if to say something in astonishment, but his words were forever lost as his four pieces toppled to the ground and fell apart.
Amaury emptied a few rounds into the pile of meat, just to be sure. “Bastard,” he spat. “That’s for Manto, you fucking bastard.”
“Damnit, Lao,” Lamech groaned. With uncanny speed, he kicked Vera aside and wrenched Lao’s ruined skull out of the body pile. He quickly retreated a few meters back, taking no notice of the knowing look that Vera exchanged with Amaury and Simon. “I see you’ve gotten smart enough to not strike me,” he mocked. “Still…I need my meat-shield, whore,” he shouted at the skull in his hands. “Get back here.”
“CHRIST,” the bloody skull screamed. A spine ruptured from its base, spreading outward into arms, legs, and a rib cage, even as muscle and organs bloomed like weeds across the rapidly forming body. A layer of fat and skin came last, and within less than ten seconds, Lao once again stood before them, naked as the day he was born and completely healed. “It hurts worse every fucking time.” He groaned. “Lamech, you got an extra robe or something?”
“I hate fucking healers,” Simon cursed. The thought seemed to remind him of something, and he quickly turned to hurl a large chunk of rubble at a distant hill of collapsed rubble. Somewhere far away, ELIE let out a scream as his projectile shattered its skull once again.
“I’m getting damn tired of these Horsemen,” Lamech grumbled. “Let’s just finish this already.” He raised both his hands above his head as twin orbs of swirling power came into being over his palms. “Feel my pain seventy-seven times over, little fools.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Vera,” Simon muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Otherwise it’s my ass.”
“I think it’ll work.” Vera shrugged.
“Wait—think?”
Lamech crashed both of his hands together in an explosion of raw energy. For a moment, it grew outward, billowing around him with a reddish aura that resembled the color of freshly spilled blood—and then it abruptly vanished.
“Good-bye!” Lamech crowed in triumph.
Lao raised a hand to his forehead. “I don’t feel—” His eyes widened in sudden terror. “Oh shit.”
It wasn’t too hard to figure out your little gift, Vera thought. She had only brushed up against Lao for a fraction of a second, but it had been long enough to comb through his mind for information about him and his partner. The last person who harmed Lamech, no matter how minute, receives the same pain back, seventy-seven times over. In all the commotion, it had been easy to make Lao reach out and gently scratch Lamech’s hand with the very edge of his fingernail—a hint of a scratch easy to miss even if you knew it was coming. She was just glad that Simon and Amaury had picked up on her plan; it could have gone very poorly otherwise.
“Make it stop, you idiot!” Lao screeched in panic.
A jagged slash tore from his hand through his forearm, deepening as it went. By the time it was at his shoulder, Vera could see the white of his bones peeking out, and still the furrow tore through his body, faster and faster. Like a child whittling with a knife, it traveled up his neck, going so deep that they could see the ruins of Dis on the other side of his body, then went up to his scalp. For an instant, it paused, and then it shot down his body in a whirlwind, going in a spiral pattern that destroyed every trace of his face, his torso, his arms, his legs, and then his feet. By the time Lamech’s vengeance was done, nothing remained of Lao but a few drops of smoking blood on the ground.
“What in the Master’s name—” Lamech exclaimed.
“You peeled him like a potato,” Vera said. “Even he’ll take awhile to come back from that, I bet.”
“But you won’t.” Amaury grinned a hideous smile that exposed every tooth in his mouth. “Still have that little scratch I gave you, I see. Vera, does he need his hands to perform the ritual?”
She nodded. “I think so.”
“I can fix that,” Amaury whispered.
Lamech sighed and rubbed his forehead in exasperation. “That’s what you get when you send a whore to do a man’s job,” he grumbled as he knelt and wrenched the flaming sword out of the ground. “Must I do every goddamn thing myself?”
Amaury reached into the folds of his cloak and tossed Vera an extra machine-pistol. “The bastard can’t heal, so hit him hard,” he ordered. “Don’t let up, and we’ll have him.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Lamech sarcastically said.
“Not when I cut those pretty little ears off,” Amaury snarled. “I go left, Vera go right, Father up the middle.” He did not wait for the two others to nod their assent; he began to rush forward, already reloading his guns. “Go!”
The three of them charged at their quarry, eager for the kill.
11
The most miserable day of Salome’s afterlife—she had lost her city, her lover, her coworkers, her devil, and her face, all in the space of less than two hours—only seemed to be getting even worse. The strange woman straddling her seemed to be on the verge of crushing her windpipe with the sheer power of her hands, and her mouth, full of razor-sharp teeth, was heading for Salome’s throat in a way that she did not like one bit.
Any fucking second now, John, she thought as her vision began to grow dim. The stranger’s mouth opened even wider, and Salome realized that the woman was about to tear out her throat with her bare teeth. Somehow the only thing that she could think of was what she’d do for a dose of Zaqqum right now.
“Uh, ladies?” John politely coughed. The strange woman jerked her head around to glare at him with her cold brown eyes. “Am I interrupting?”
“Fnnnngh,” Salome managed to gurgle out, just as the woman ripped herself up out of the pus and dove for John. Both of her hands shot out, claw-like, ready to rip and tear, and Salome was brutally certain that John was about to be made into a eunuch.
“No thank you.” He shook his head, and a dozen vines shot out of his fingertips. They lashed around the stranger as swiftly as whips, pinning her limbs together. Her charge suddenly became an awkward stumble, and she toppled into the pus at his feet with a muffled curse.
“You all right?” John pulled Salome up to her feet. “You, ah—” He awkwardly made a bandaging motion around his face.
Salome nodded in recognition and readjusted her bandages, taking a moment to examine his pupils as she did so. To her surprise, they weren’t even slightly contracted. His Zaqqum must’ve worn off. Then why is he still here?
“Fugh.” She groaned. It felt as though the stranger’s hands were still tightly
wrapped around her throat. “Fughing duhmas.”
“What was that?”
“I said fucking dumbass,” she croaked. “Not you, me,” she hastily added when she saw the expression on his face. Why is every man I meet always a bastard or a puppy?
“Who’s your friend?” John nodded at the stranger. She was still facedown and still thrashing in a pool of Legion’s excrement.
Some dead bitch. “Let’s find out.” Salome kicked her foot underneath the woman’s chin and lifted her face out of the pus. She nearly had several toes bitten off for her trouble.
“Kingdom bastards!” the woman spat out furiously. “I’ll kill you both! I’ll hunt you across all Hell if I have to! I’ll eat your fucking necks!”
“Charming woman.” John sighed. “She reminds me of Vera.”
“Vera?” The woman suddenly went still. “Vera Figner? You know her?”
“Thin, Russian, bad temper? Yes, we’re friends.” John nodded. “Don’t tell me—you’re not that woman Signy who was with her and Tituba in the factories?”
“So she did make it out,” the woman muttered to herself. “Should’ve known. Vera’s a survivor.”
“You two know each other?” Salome raised an eyebrow.
“We have a few mutual friends,” John said, although he ever-so-slightly hesitated just before the final word. “Vera—one of the other Horsemen—worked with Signy in one of the Kingdom’s factories, I think.”
“Right before we blew it the hell up.” Signy laughed. “Gave Pliers and that bitch-doctor Cenodoxa the fucking of their lives, too.”
Something about that story did ring true—didn’t Giles mention that he had captured two workers from C District who were somehow connected to that rebellion the Horsemen had started? Most of Salome’s memories were just Zaqqum-hazed blurs, but she did seem to recall seeing this Signy woman being thrown into a cell by Legion. If she had been able to keep up with one of the Horsemen and later escape from her prison during Legion’s attack on Dis…
Salome gazed down at Signy with a new appreciation. Maybe she could be useful. “Tell me, Signy.” She smiled. “How would you like a job?”
“Why don’t you use one of the tree-man’s branches and shove it up your ass,” Signy said cheerfully. “And for God’s sake, put on some more bandages. Your face is leaking.”
It took every ounce of willpower to not claw out both of the bitch’s eyes right then and there. Leverage. I need leverage on this fucking witch. “You must have heard me talking to Imperator Sisera,” she coolly asked. “A Kingdom bastard. Tall, ugly face, still has a stake buried in his skull from the bitch who murdered him.”
“Sounds like my kind of woman,” Signy sneered.
“He’s the head of the Praetorian Guard and has the entire Eighteenth Legion with him. Only problem is, the Eighteenth Legion is mine.”
“The Master is coming,” John said quietly. “The Prophet is right. We’ll need all the legions we can get our hands on.”
Signy’s eyes glittered. “Is that right?”
“I’m going to rebuild the Kingdom,” Salome hissed. “But in my image—”
“Pretty fucking ugly one, then.” Signy chuckled, and this time John had to whip out one of his vines to intercept Salome’s knife before it buried itself in the bound woman’s scalp.
“One more smartass comment, and I’m going to skin you,” Salome said in a low voice.
Signy grinned, exposing her sharpened teeth. A few droplets of blood ran down from where she had bit into Salome’s palm, staining her canines a bright red. “You’re lucky I like you, Prophet.”
What can I give her? And with that, an epiphany struck Salome. “You fought with Vera Figner,” she remembered. “And you lost.” She crouched down so that she was eye-to-eye with Signy and gently ran the side of her knife down Signy’s cheek, as soft as a lover’s caress.
“Last time that fucking happens,” Signy growled, but she did not retreat from the blade.
A thin line of blood followed the edge of her knife as she traced it down Signy’s cheek to the top of her throat. The other woman’s attention was rapt; Salome could hear her ragged breathing increase in intensity. Not interested in my tits, eh? Liar.
“Serve me, and I’ll see that you’ll never lose again. I’ll give you the greatest weapon in all Hell.”
“I only need a my teeth and a bow, Prophet.”
Salome grinned. “What about the most powerful demon the Kingdom has? What about Abaddon?”
Signy’s cold eyes gleamed with interest. “What exactly was this job of yours, Prophet?”
12
Jagged flecks of sand and dust tore at Seth’s skin with the speed of a whirlwind, tearing away strips of fabric from his white robes and leaving dozens of lacerations across his body. He winced in pain as the whirlwind about him quickly turned a dark red from the blood that the wind ripped out of his body. “Don’t do this, please!” he vainly shouted into the storm. “Father, let me help you!”
“I am beyond help,” Adam’s defeated voice miserably echoed. “All is dust. All is lost. My fault. My fault.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Seth barely made out a dark form coalescing from the cloud of dust. He dove for it and felt his shoulder connect with something solid. It was no use; as quickly as Adam’s body had appeared, it vanished back again into the cloud.
“I had three sons,” Adam wept. “Cain, Abel, and you. I lost the first two. And now—” The winds roared even louder, and a rock the size of a fist whipped out of the darkness, nearly smashing into Seth’s face. “Now I lose the last.”
The rock was only the first one; all around Seth, the cloud of dust coalesced into hundreds of the projectiles that spun, faster and faster, around him. A cold sweat broke out over his body; he was about to get stoned by a hailstorm. “It doesn’t have to be like this!” Seth shouted. “Father, remember the Garden!”
An inhuman scream tore through the air around him as a hundred of the shards suddenly switched direction and shot at Seth. He ducked and weaved among them as fast as he could, nimbly jumping and leaping through the volley of projectiles, but not even he was able to avoid them all—their edges ripped great lacerations in his skin, tore away part of his ear, and came within a hairsbreadth of decapitating him.
“The Garden makes it WORSE!” Adam screeched. Scarcely a second after his first volley was finished, another storm of stones shot down from above Seth’s head, slamming into the ground with enough force to shake the earth. “It is GONE! NOTHING BUT ASH AND DUST! MY FAULT!”
Seth rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding a stone that would have obliterated his torso, and let out a groan of disappointment when he saw the row of spikes and stone blades thrown by the furious winds at him. He spun around, hoping to avoid the onslaught, and hissed as a spike crashed into his rib cage.
“MY FAULT! EVERYTHING!” Adam’s voice rang out. “SIN! DEATH! I MADE IT! ME! ME!”
“Father, please…” Seth begged. He tried to stand back up and fell downward as the spike embedded in his chest let out a violent stab of pain.
The winds swirled and raged in front of him, carrying with them a dark plume of dust and debris. A hideously familiar form emerged from the cloud: Seth’s father. The sight of what the First Man had become was disgusting to behold. His former frame, once sleek and taut with muscle, was nothing more than a withered shell broken by millennia of age and starvation. His dark skin had turned translucent from the absence of light, so much so that Seth could see the tendons and naked bones underneath. And Adam’s eyes… Seth had always remembered his father as a cheerful man, full of light and energy, but in the eyes of the hunchbacked thing that stood before him, he saw only the emptiness of sin.
“Now I take it back,” Adam whispered. “All of it.” He raised one of his hands, allowing another dozen spikes to crash down into Seth’s body, impaling him to the ground.
“Don’t do this,” Seth screamed. “Father, it’s me, I’m your son! Rememb
er me!”
“I do.” The hunchback sighed. “I remember everything. The snake, the Fall, your brother’s death…. My fault, all of it. But I can make this right, son. Forgive me.” The winds about the two of them slowly died away as Adam began to walk forward.
“I don’t know what Cain told you, but it’s wrong,” Seth pleaded. “Father—”
“This all began with me,” Adam whispered. Madness contorted his withered face as he drew closer to Seth. The long fingernails on his hands looked like claws as he reached for his son’s body. “My ribs, my children. I can fix this. The Master said so—I just have to take it all back—”
Seth let out a howl of pain as Adam stabbed his knife-like fingernails into his son’s abdomen. The filthy blades twisted and burrowed deep into the flesh as Adam probed deeper and deeper. The agony was horrible—Seth could feel his father’s fingers wrap around the edge of one of his ribs.
“Flesh of my flesh,” Adam raved. “My fault—take it all back—MY FAULT—EVERYTHING, I CAN FIX IT!”
His grip tightened on Seth’s rib as he slowly pulled back, prying the bone out of place. Pinned in place by the spikes, Seth could only let out a scream as his rib cage twisted and cracked.
“I have seen this, in my dreams, in the ice,” Adam lovingly whispered into Seth’s ear. He pulled his hand away from his son’s rib cage, more and more slowly, allowing Seth to jerk in pain with every crack and rupture of bone. “The angel…she came to me…she told me…what did she say?”
“Not too late.” Seth groaned. He could barely breathe; if felt as though both of his lungs had been punctured by the loose shards of bone snapping away. “Let me help you.”
