by Brian Hodge
Maybe she could start with why he still couldn’t move.
There was light, too—how else could he have recognized that cherished face while she still stood so many paces away?—and this was something new, different, welcome after his life’s longest night. The light crept in from without, a pink-orange glow emanating through the remaining glass petals of a rose window hanging high above his head, and —
And…
And only ruined churches had smashed rose windows, didn’t they?
She approached as though she feared him, as if every step was taken on nails, then sank to the floor beside him and cupped his cheek in her hand. Tears, too—just no end to these wondrous surprises—and, after another moment during which she took him in up close and unblinking, Manon tipped her head high and out ripped a sob she couldn’t hold back, and to hear it was as painful as anything the last hours had dealt him.
The gag…it was gone from his mouth. He hadn’t realized until now.
“That bad, huh?” he said.
* * *
With days to prepare herself for whatever was coming—she’d had less faith than hope that Andrei would end up besting his vindex—Manon thought she would be ready for anything. Throughout lifetimes she’d seen a textbook’s worth of terrible wounds already, forced to deal many with her own hands, while many more had been inflicted upon people she’d come to care for.
But she’d been wrong, when under almost any other circumstances it would have been a delight to discover that she could still be surprised. There was no way she could have prepared herself for this.
At her knees, he shivered with shock and cold, his breathing shallow and as rapid as a bird’s heart, and when he tried to speak, his chattering teeth bit the words to slivers. She swiped away the worst of her tears and stripped off her jacket, draping it over him like a small blanket, liner first, in hopes that he might feel whatever it held of her body warmth, to give him some small comfort.
Pinned to the floor at four points, he looked nowhere else but her face, his eyes glassy with trauma, and accusatory in their questions, damning in their love. She honestly thought that he didn’t fully realize what had been done to him.
“Keep looking at me, Andrei,” she managed to say. “Don’t look away from me. Not for a second. Don’t look down.”
“…kay…”
“The shots he gave you…it was the most I could get him to agree to,” she said, and wondered if Andrei could understand her any better than she could him. “But still, it…it wasn’t enough, was it?”
He said something else that she couldn’t understand; had to ask him to repeat it, and once he had, she wanted to die like she hadn’t in decades.
“Don’t you thank me, goddamn it,” she told him. “Don’t you dream of thanking me.”
“But…you’re here.”
“Yes,” she said, and thought her jacket might have been helping a little, for all the greater good that did.
With nowhere to look but her face, he must have begun to see everything she could no longer hide. “Why…are you here?”
She took his hand, on the far end of so much ruin. “Can you feel that?”
With a tiny jittering twitch of his head, he told her no, so she reached for his alabaster cheek again.
“I told you what I am,” she began. “You know what it takes for me to live.”
This time, a tiny jittering nod.
“You asked me yesterday about suicide, what happens if we try to defy the hunger, whatever it happens to be for each of us. I didn’t lie. Everything I told you was the truth. The agony, the madness, how it’s worse then than if we’d remained in control of ourselves…this was all true. I just couldn’t tell the rest of it.”
His gaze began to slip lower, the defeat of a man who knows he’s been lied to, and she patted his cheek to bring them eye-to-eye again.
“I’ve done it. I’ve been through it. I didn’t just die the one time…there was a second. Almost sixty years ago, in Italy, after the war. I had one of us lock me in a cell, far enough below ground that nobody above could hear anything, no matter how loud someone might scream. It is possible for one of us to starve to death. It took over a year, but I proved it.
“But even that wasn’t the end. He remade me…all over again…out of what I’d withered into.”
And how, how, how could Andrei have been through what he had, and still manage to condemn her with a look of pity?
“The first time, before I knew better, I’d thought it was punishment. This time I knew it was, for trying to escape,” she said. “In one respect I was still the same, still made to feed as before…but now, not just any heart would satisfy the hunger when it came. After more than five hundred years, His cruelty had only now reached its peak. This time He remade me to feed on the hearts of the dead who’d been reclaimed.”
“You mean…like me,” Andrei said in a voice more than halfway there already.
“Like you,” she whispered. “Still God’s monster. But now it was even worse. Now I was forced to depend like a scavenger on His newer ones…on our replacements…the devoted ones who blend so much better into what the world became.”
Somewhere close by, in the shadowed halls branching off this dead sanctuary, Bruce waited for her, each of them a parasite to the other now. Benevolence was not within his range, but they’d bartered anyway, for as much as he would concede, to be paid with the only thing of value she could offer him: knowledge of where his future might lead.
For what he had done here, she hoped it would be a particularly terrible one.
Manon took stock of the damage.
“You understand, Andrei, don’t you? I came for you. Only you. What beats inside you. My mistake was that I came much too soon.”
The awful damage.
“And you were wrong. I was never so much more than you.”
Though his eyes still held her, he couldn’t last much longer. The chills were getting worse again, and maybe that was merciful, if they brought numbness.
Bruce had opened him down the full length of each thigh and upper arm, incising through a layer at a time until he could remove the greater part of each femur and humerus. He’d then fashioned these into great ivory spikes, sharpening the thinner ends and hammering them down through the splayed meat of each deboned limb, into the spongy wood of the floor.
And he’d done it all with such precision that he had missed every major artery and vein. Andrei leaked, lingering, but was still far from bled clean.
She skimmed her fingertips over his eyelids, had him close them before she leaned in and wrapped both hands around the battered knob of bone jutting from his biceps. Still wet and slick, it slipped her grip but she seized it again, fighting until she tugged it free of the floor like a peg pulled from the Earth, and fresh blood welled from the gaping wound.
Horrible, hateful thing, she set it aside. Wiped her hands and opened his eyes for him again.
“I want you to do something,” she said, reaching behind her and, from an old, secret sheath strapped to her back, slid free a rugged blade that looked better suited to freebooters, mercenaries, and tavern brawls.
She held it up for him to see.
“This was mine. I don’t need to tell you how I used it, but I haven’t used this one for a long time. Now it’s yours.”
She placed it in his hand, nerveless and unresponsive and cold, so she wrapped his fingers around the handle and lifted it just high enough so he could see that he held it firm. Then she folded his arm toward his chest so that fist and knife alike would rest defiant upon his breastbone.
“It’s yours forever. Do you understand? So believe in it.” Telling herself that she would not choke on her tears again. “Believe in what you can do with it when you get to where you’re going. Or believe in wherever else it might take you. Believe in whatever you have left. Do you understand?”
He tipped his chin down and blinked with heavy-lidded eyes, then murmured some brief phrase that she
couldn’t make out, only that he may have said something about “a minion”…whatever this meant to him.
She lay down next to him then, heedless of the mess, reaching her hand to his cheek for the duration. It wouldn’t take long now, it couldn’t, yet still Manon hoped for a little more time to feel the fading warmth of his skin and listen to the sound of his breath, resigned to wish and wait for as long as he might linger.
XVII
U never told me how u died, someone had once reminded him, and he had gone through the story she’d wanted to hear, a tale of stupidity and ice, of waterlogged lungs and Yuletide miracles.
She could’ve meant so much more.
So remind me again, Kimmy, wherever you are, and maybe I’ll see you soon and you can ask me to whatever’s left of my face.
You never told me how you died.
Fighting, I hope.
Yeah…fighting. That should work just fine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Hodge accepted his destiny as a writer early, when as a preschooler he used to scribble on scraps of wood and affix them to unsuspecting trees. Eventually he learned the alphabet, which proved to be an enormous help.
He is now the award-winning author of eleven novels spanning horror, crime, and historical. He’s also written over 110 shorter works, and five full-length collections. His first collection, The Convulsion Factory, was ranked by critic Stanley Wiater among the 113 best books of modern horror.
Recent or forthcoming titles include No Law Left Unbroken, a collection of crime fiction; The Weight of the Dead and Whom the Gods Would Destroy, both standalone novellas; a newly revised hardcover edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his latest novel, Leaves of Sherwood.
He lives in Colorado, where a constant supply of mountain air and brewpubs keeps more of everything in the works. He also dirties his hands with music, sound design, and photography; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are of no use at all against the squirrels.
Connect through his web site (www.brianhodge.net) or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter).
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
