“Go to the entrance and make sure it’s clear.”
Abby looked at her friend with wide, shaking eyes. “How did you do that?”
“It’s a long story,” Sindy said.
“Why is he doing what you say?”
Sindy grinned. There was a certain light in her eyes that made Abby squirm. “Because I am a Daughter of Arkham.”
Now was not the time to get into it. Until Mr. Harris showed up—if he showed up—Eleazar was their only ally. The fact that his loyalty was somehow compelled rather than freely given could be addressed later, assuming there was a later.
“It’s clear,” Eleazar whispered.
Abby and Sindy made it up to the entrance and peered out. The forest was dark and quiet. They couldn’t see the church, only a few diffuse lights between the trunks that hinted where the church might be. Abby felt the presence as she had felt the last time she was here, the sense that the forest did not want her here. The Woodsman, Nate had called it. She wondered if the others felt it, or if it was some fell spirit they had conjured to protect them.
“Come on,” Abby whispered.
The three of them went up the winding path through the trees. Eleazar took the lead. Abby felt eyes on her from above. She wanted to ascribe some kind of human feeling to that gaze, even something like amusement or anger, but she could not. It was only an immediate, menacing hunger.
They emerged from the thicket. The church was just ahead. Flickering light spilled from its windows and the cracks in its walls. The light made the big oak look like it was on fire. There were no more Crows outside. Abby imagined they would be inside with their mistresses, ready to fight if it was necessary. She thought the best way in might be the gap that the oak tree had torn in the wall. She hoped it was big enough to admit her.
And then what? She had no plan. No way of taking on the Daughters. Maybe they should just wait for Mr. Harris and his friends…
“What now?” Sindy asked, giving voice to Abby’s doubts.
“Let’s see where Bryce and Nate are first, then we can figure it out.”
“They’re up on the altar,” Eleazar said. “Chained to the floor.”
Abby blinked at the Crow.
“Uh… thanks, Laze. Grant. Laze Grant… Eleazar.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am.”
Abby shook her head and led the way up the hill. The forest was silent. She hoped to hear the clamor of Mr. Harris and his “apostate” croatan coming through the woods, but there was nothing, “not even the savage song of the forest.
Abby approached the crack in the church. The candlelight dyed everything gold. It would have been warm if not for the terrifying cold within. She approached the crack, ready to look inside to see what she could see when she heard a surprised gasp and then a gurgle.
She turned to see Eleazar Grant bleeding from the mouth, the scarlet point of a knife protruding from his ribs. Bertram stood behind him. He held his hand over Eleazar’s mouth as he gave the knife a final twist, then he yanked it out, letting Eleazar collapse to the ground in a heap.
“Good, the guests of honor have arrived.”
Hester Thorndike stood off to the side, flanked by more Crows, her hand on Sindy’s shoulder. Sindy’s face was drained of color, her blue eyes wide. She shook with horror.
“Bring them inside.”
84
The Mother of
All Daughters
‘bertram clapped a strong hand on Abby’s shoulder and forced her into a chair. There was a short table set up on the altar, and below, a longer table that looked like something out of Game of Thrones. Sindy was two chairs away. She sat in petrified silence, unshed tears wobbling in her eyes. Constance was next to Abby. She stared ahead, offering no support. Faith Endicott was doing the same for Sindy. In front of them, Bryce and Nate were chained, stripped, and covered in bloody runes.
“Mom!” Abby whispered. “You can’t let them do this. Please.”
“I’m sorry, Abby. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Nothing you can do?”
“When this is all over, you’ll be one of us. Then I promise, everything will be better.”
“Nothing you can do?!”
Constance refused to answer. Servants spread through the room, carrying trays of wine glasses. Each of the Daughters claimed a glass of the red cordial and drank deeply, their faces melting in ecstasy.
Hester hobbled up onto the dais and took her place at the center of the table. She didn’t sit. Abby had never had particularly warm feelings toward her grandmother, but they were still family. She’d assumed their blood bond would be enough to keep her from the worst of Hester’s wrath.
Clearly, that was not the case.
Hester Thorndike controlled the room as surely as if she had all the Daughters in chains. Everyone gazed at Hester with the same adoring, respectful eyes—the people she knew in school, her mother’s contemporaries, the dowagers of Arkham… All of them.
“Tradition,” Hester began, strong and clear, “is the backbone of our society. The power of tradition gives us the bonds of family that make us strong. It is that strength that has allowed us to last these many centuries.”
Hester swept a look around the room before she settled on Abby. “My own granddaughter Abigail has already shown her lack of respect for tradition, for propriety, and for her own body by allowing herself to become ruined.”
A disappointed murmur rippled through the assemblage.
“She must be brought into the fold. It is only through the power of our society that we can help her become the woman she should be. We must do this tonight, before the child is born.”
Everyone, save Abby and Sindy, nodded in agreement. Abelard brought a tray bearing a single wine glass to Abby. She pushed back in the seat, but Bertram held her fast. He lifted one of the glasses and gripped her hair, locking her head in place. “Drink.”
Abby tried to tear free but Abelard grabbed her face, grinding her cheeks into her teeth as he forced her jaw open. Bertram poured the wine into her mouth. Most of it spilled down her chest but Abby couldn’t help swallowing some of the sickly sweet liquor. The faint, iron-laced taste of blood lingered on her tongue as she choked up what she could.
“Bastards. You bastards!”
Abelard and Bertram were impervious to her rage. They turned to face their mistress.
Hester clenched her raised hands in triumph. “Let us call upon our lady, the Mother of All Daughters, wise Yidhra, to bless and accept her newest daughter to her bosom. Join me, in calling our mother into our Abigail.”
Abby’s eyes widened. Into?
Hester began to speak, and the congregation joined in. To her horror, Abby saw Constance was echoing the words, though her voice was small and broken. She whipped her head around, trying to get up. Bertram clapped his paw on her shoulder.
Hester spoke, though it was not English. It was not any language Abby could recognize. Just hearing the words dropping from her grandmother’s lips turned her stomach. The syllables scraped over the back of her neck and burrowed into her mind. She felt them, twitching and writhing and crawling inside her. They reached her belly.
And stabbed.
She screamed as the white-hot anguish of the words speared through her. This was no sudden flare; it did not disappear in a comforting fading ache. As each fresh sound joined the first, it expanded a phantom wound that blacked her vision and flooded her mind. She felt her body split open inch by burning inch. Even her scream, slicing the night, was only the dimmest reflection of it.
She could not see, but she could feel, and in feeling there was something approaching sight. She could not describe it; the agony had pushed her past any human reckoning of time and space. She was in the church, and yet the church was gone. There were only the voices, but they were not attached to anything substantial. She was within that great tear she had perceived before, and she was not alone.
No, it was the tear itself. It was a void. She felt the crushing emptiness of
nothing all around, the sense of being an infinitesimal, lost mote of dust surrounded by a vast black. It was not empty, not in the sense she understood. It was a reflection of reality, empty of what she understood as matter, but full of something else. Something wrong.
It moved. She had the sense of layers sliding past other layers, with the occasional glimmer of something that was almost scales. Her mind cried out; even through the pain, it could not perceive what was all around, not without breaking. The human mind was not built for understanding the divine.
That’s what this was.
Or, it was as close as she could come to such an understanding. She could not be certain, even as she was looking through an agony so terrible it threatened to snuff out her nerves entirely.
She had the sense of a great uncoiling as the ragged edges of the tear resolved. It was not precisely a void, and not precisely a being. It was both, and neither.
And it could see Abby.
Her panicked mind gave it the form of a snake, though that was only the most convenient of descriptors. It was a serpentine mass whose scales glittered with stars and whose eyes were the ravenous pits of black holes.
The words—the unholy, inhuman syllables—formed a trail for the vast snake. Abby was amongst it, yet somehow it also had to hunt her along this pathway of blasphemy. She wanted to recoil, but she found she could not move. There was something in the wine beside just blood and alcohol… it weakened her, made her receptive to the hypnotic sway of the snake. All of the Daughters looked on the snake with rapturous devotion.
The words writhed ahead, igniting her agony wherever they went. Where the serpent followed, the pain was doused in a pleasant, soporific sensation. She felt like floating; she felt like sleeping.
No.
Abby roused herself from the seduction of possession. The serpent was already preparing to coil itself within her, worming into the cracks made by Hester’s words. If it got inside, there would be nothing left of her.
She screamed in frustration, as the power of Yidhra tried to open her like a seam. A thunderbolt of pain exploded across her abdomen and her scream cascaded into shrill agony. And then, a moment later, there was an echoing scream resounding inside her and demanded release.
It was time.
Her daughter was being born.
This power of birth, of creation, was the strongest force any human could harness. Abby felt the temptation to throw it as a wall against the great serpent, this Mother of All Daughters, to fight her strength for strength. It was futile. The strongest power of a human was still human. This was a god.
And then… a hand grasped hers. Strength flowed into her body and cleared the drug-like haze from her eyes, pulling her back into the real world. Abby’s head listed to the side. She could barely move her head under her own power, but she saw enough to recognize burnished auburn hair and shimmering green eyes.
“Mom?”
Constance planted her other hand against the arm of her chair, straining against the crushing force that filled the church. She forced herself to her feet. She reached up to the omnipresent metallic pin on her lapel and clutched at it with a trembling hand.
“Get—away —from my—DAUGHTER!”
She wrenched the pin from her breast and hurled it against the void. The ancient serpent howled its displeasure and turned its gaze to her mother. It rippled with might, but Constance had placed herself in front of Abby. Her mother’s shriek tore through the air and Abby’s very soul as the snake drove its essence into Constance.
Abby and her unborn daughter echoed the scream as another contraction built; a precursor to an eruption that would tear Abby in half. The snake’s power hammered at the fragile wall of Constance’s psyche. The congregation hadn’t yet realized what was happening and Hester was unable to see beyond the ancient words tumbling from her mouth. Mr. Harris had not arrived in time and her mother had reached beyond her years of conditioning to buy her these few seconds.
She looked at Nate and Bryce, helpless on the altar, awaiting their death. But there was no one in the world left to help them.
Not in this world.
Abby kept one hand locked into her mother’s. She placed the other on her belly, whispering to her unborn child; asking, pleading, for her to use whatever gifts she had imparted to Abby over the last nine months.
She felt a flutter of response and then a rush of sound that traveled through her body and into Constance. The surge of energy gave Constance new resolve in her battle with Yidhra; she dug in her heels and squeezed Abby’s hand in silent gratitude. Abby felt a flickering pulse from within her womb.
They were united. Three daughters, acting as one.
An unbreakable holy trinity.
Abby felt the contraction coming, and this time, she did not flee from it. Instead, she dove into the crushing wave of its approach. She let it submerge her, relishing the bright agony until she was floating within its embryonic depths. She forced her body to relax, breathing through the spasms. She surrendered to its pull, allowing it to draw her upward until she broke through its surface with a gasp.
Abby threw back her head as the pain shattered into a symphonic downpour of unspoken notes. She sobbed with joy as she bathed in the heart wrenching melody of her unborn daughter’s voice.
Her daughter had been speaking to her for months in words not meant for human ears. And just as Abby’s mind had rebelled at being forced to reconcile the layered worlds and creatures that existed beyond human sight with those terrible headaches, so too had her body fought against the discordance of this non-Euclidian language until it had battered her consciousness into comprehension.
And with that comprehension came bliss and freedom from pain.
She fashioned that comprehension into her lens—so easy now that she could see with all of her senses. She called out in a voice that reverberated through the church, down through the hills and onto the town green.
“Josiah Baxter. Luther Hobbes. Israel Thaw.”
The words left her lips like a testament.
“Come and claim your justice.”
Her words seized the corners of two worlds and forged them together by sheer force of will. The Daughters of Arkham were nearly laid flat by the concussion of Abby’s invocation.
Abby opened her pain-bright eyes to behold the church. The congregation was gazing at her in awe and terror. Hester could not halt the ritual lest the serpent tear free and turn on her, but she saw Abby. They could all see her.
Abby had been exalted by her daughter and had transcended the Daughters themselves.
She was iron and judgement.
She was Abigail Thorndike.
85
The Cavalry
‘mr. Harris had gathered a paltry force: Treach, the school janitor; Jenkins, the mechanic; Williams, who ran the local deli; and a few others. None of them really had the kind of power they would need to overcome the thralls and their masters inside the church. It was a risk to reveal themselves before all of their plans were in place, but for Abby’s sake and for her promise, they would try.
They ran overland. The forest or the denizen within—as though there was a distinction—didn’t want them there. One day, Mr. Harris would learn what devil’s deal the Daughters had struck to place such a sentry, but there was no time to worry about it now. Their attack would have to be swift and brutal. Their only goal was to keep Abigail Thorndike alive.
They had just come into sight of the church when a thrum of power tore the air, slamming into reality itself. It knocked the wind out of Mr. Harris and his men. When he recovered, he saw their masks had been stripped from their bodies. He didn’t know what sort of sorcery could do such a thing, but it was fitting that they would fight this battle as their true selves.
He charged, knowing they would follow. He threw the doors open and his men boiled into the church around him. Hester Thorndike, the leader of the Daughters, was on the dais.
Abby was seated, clutching her belly and her mo
ther’s hand. Harris saw lines of energy that he perceived as threads of ink in water, a sign that Yidhra was making her way into Constance Thorndike’s body. The woman was still fighting. He wondered how long she had left before the god consumed her entirely.
Bertram, the leader of the thralls, pointed at Mr. Harris.
“Kill them,” Bertram said.
The thralls charged out to meet the apostates on the stairs of the church. Mr. Harris struck two, temporarily incapacitating them. Bertram vaulted over their prone bodies and gripped Mr. Harris’ wrists with hands like liquid stone.
“You’re mine, apostate,” he said.
86
Brothers in Death
‘abby was still reeling. The phenomenal power she had unleashed had left a glowing residue behind in her soul. She could see her mother still struggling against Yidhra but she didn’t know what to do. She felt a momentary surge of hope when Mr. Harris and his apostates arrived but… there were so few of them.
With the thralls distracted, the dais was unguarded. Abby turned to shout to Sindy, but she saw the other girl was already moving. Sindy ran around the front of the table to crouch beside Bryce and Nate. Moments later, Ophelia Thomas and Charity Duckworth grabbed her from behind and dragged her away. Sindy kicked and bit and clawed at them, but other Daughters soon joined in to restrain her.
Bryce and Nate hauled at their chains. Abby could see the shackles bite into the flesh of their wrists. Other Daughters converged on them, beating them back into submission.
Abby was frozen. If she released her mother’s hand to help any of them, Constance would be lost to Yidhra forever. Mr. Harris’s apostates were outnumbered and being driven back. Her small flash of hope and victory was fading in the maelstrom of this chaos. Abby buried her face in her mother’s side, unable to watch any more of the suffering.
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