by Brian Hodge
So who could’ve guessed it was what Patrick had been waiting for?
It abruptly felt as if he gathered deep down in her belly, as full as any pregnancy come to term, straining to be expelled in blood and pain and…
And then he was gone, just…
Gone.
Ethan reeled from between her legs, falling backward onto his ass as his face was overtaken by surprise, by a toxic disgust—but anything was better than its indifferent devotion to duty. He sat in the muck that their thrashings had dug, then reached for the sickle. As the blade lifted, dripping purest morning rain, his face had never looked so much like the Ethan of old as it did now—so stricken and so torn.
She lunged to stop him, felt herself caught from behind.
The first cut was slow, methodical, disciplined. He stood even as entrails burst out across his lap, then raised the sickle again and again, chopping it down and down as if chasing a nimble mouse, until he and the frantic blade achieved a blur of terrible speed and fouled the rain with blood.
She reached for him and screamed with all the voice their rope had left behind, knowing it was Maia’s hands that held her even before she saw the face pressed over her shoulder. Pandora struggled until she conceded the futility of it, toppling onto her side with Maia’s arms wrapped around her from behind in a perfect imitation of someone who actually cared.
Someone, something, like this—would she laugh at you if you told her she’d done to you the worst thing anyone ever had, or ever could?
Or would she wither you with her aloof wisdom and tell you to live with the consequences you’d brought upon yourself?
Whichever it might prove to be, Pandora didn’t want to hear it. So she held her bitten tongue as Maia held onto her long after the frenzy of blade and blood was over, clinging to her like a long-lost daughter as the dawn gathered strength. One of them was trembling, but she didn’t know who. She contemplated the enveloping arms that she’d dreamt of for years, so sinuous and strong, marveling now at how powerful they must be to bear so much hollow desolation.
If I tried to leave them, Pandora thought, I think she would kill me…
So she lay within them as long as it took to survive, until once more she heard feet crossing the sodden turf. Villagers, she reasoned, welcoming the easing of Maia’s arms almost as much as she had the cutting of the rope. Two figures emerged from the mists—not villagers after all.
She’d never seen them, not even in her most hopeful dream…but now that she had, she would know them anywhere:
Lilah, the eater of flesh.
Salíce, the eater of seed.
Even knowing now what they truly were, and not what she had hoped, how could she feel anything but diminished by knowing she was something else?
They said nothing to her, or maybe it was nothing she wanted to hear, staring down at her in her wounds and squalor as if she were a creature both lesser and greater than they could ever be again.
“You should’ve been content with the Patrick you imagined,” Maia said, lips soft and breath warm upon her ear. “Then you never would’ve had to know what he’s become.”
Maia rose and joined her Sisters. They gathered up the raw litter of remains, as it must have been done once before, long ago, and cast them into the mausoleum at the heart of the yew. Then, with a reproachful look at Maia, her Sisters took her with them into the mist from which they’d emerged, and if she spared a pitying glance behind, it went unseen. Pandora no longer wanted to see their backs.
They were not born, she knew. They were made, remade, from the insignificant lives with which they’d started. Knowing this had felt like such a whisper of possibility.
As late as a few hours ago, she wanted nothing more than to be one of them. But now it was not enough. Now she wanted to be better than them, and worse, more beautiful and terrible in every way, if that was what it took to matter.
She lifted her gaze again, higher than Ethan had ever stood, and held nothing back—not rage, not sorrow, not bitterness or spite or disappointment. She unleashed them all on whatever might be listening.
And the rain fell, as always.
“I never slipped and fell from grace,” she said, in a whisper now, then pounded her fist in the draining slick of Ethan’s blood. “I jumped.”
But the god she cursed was silent, as if having decreed long ago that the flesh she knew, and its slow wilting decay, would be damnation enough.
Cemetery Dance Publications
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
With Acknowledgements to Sun Tzu
If I Should Wake Before I Die
The Passion of the Beast
De Fortuna
The Firebrand Symphony
Brushed In Blackest Silence
Pull
An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Flesh
And They Will Come in the Hour of Our Greatest Need
Re Your Application of 55
Where the Black Stars Fall
When the Silence Gets Too Loud
Guardian
Hate The Sinner, Love The Sin
A Good Dead Man is Hard to Find
Our Turn Too Will One Day Come
When the Bough Doesn't Break
Cemetery Dance Publications
DH Digital Editions
