by J L Aarne
Then he saw them. The black-eyed children. They were pale, their eyes twice as large as they should have been in their young faces and so black that even the lightning didn’t reflect inside them. They came walking up out of the ocean in groups of three and four with their hands linked, their clothes clinging to them, their hair hanging like seaweed and their tiny baby teeth bared in gruesome smiles. Fake smiles, smiles of creatures that did not smile when you were not looking at them. They were insurance salesman smiles, car dealer smiles, smiles worn by actors on TV trying to sell people antidepressants. They were all children, not even one of them looked older than fifteen, but their empty eyes were ageless.
“Silas, do you—?”
Wyatt looked around for him but didn’t see him. The children were out of the water and coming up the beach toward him, more and more of them rising out of the ocean behind them. He could see the tops of their heads break the surface.
Overhead, black birds began to circle. Only a few at first but growing in numbers until there was a cyclone of them. One of them dropped from the sky and plummeted toward him, sharp beak open like the jaws of gardening sheers and talons like needles reaching for his face. Wyatt backed quickly away and raised his sword. He swung, but he missed it and the bird missed him, but he felt the breath of its feathers on his face.
“Silas!”
Another bird darted down. Distracted by it, he didn’t see the child separate itself from the pack and run toward him. He caught the bird a glancing swipe with the sword that made it screech but didn’t injure it badly. As he brought the sword back around, the child, a girl with hair like a mermaid, grabbed it. She looked about ten years old, but she was strong enough that she closed her little hand around the blade of the sword and it was caught. He backed away from her, yanking at the sword to free it, but it wouldn’t come free. Blood seeped through the gaps between her fingers and streamed down her arm to drip on the sand, but she held on and she smiled and her eyes like doors into the abyss called to him.
Wyatt drew the gun from his waistband, fumbled lefthanded with it for the safety, raised it and pointed it at the black-eyed girl. Wyatt’s finger tightened on the trigger, but he hesitated and backed away from the girl without pulling it. It looked like a child. Its face was pale as a clamshell and its eyes were two black holes, its fingers impossibly long, its strength inhuman, but it was a child.
She is not a child, that’s camouflage, whispered a voice in his head. It was a voice he knew, a voice that had spoken reason to him over the years when all he could think or feel was panic. It had always sounded like his father before. Hearing it in his mind was like a slap.
“Wyatt, shoot it! Fucking shoot it!”
Silas came around the big body of the whale and killed a boy with a swing of his sword. Wyatt pulled the trigger almost reflexively. At such close range, the bullet punched a hole in the girl’s forehead and threw her backward so hard that she threw up a shower of sand when she hit the ground. She still had her grip on the blade of the rapier and it was ripped out of his hand. Wyatt took a few steps toward her intending to take it back, but more children had been making their way out of the water behind her unnoticed as he fought the girl and they were closing in.
Keenly aware that he only had eight bullets left and there were at least fifty black-eyed kids making their way toward him from the water, Wyatt quickly backed away, turned and ran up the beach. Amarok leapt onto the back of a boy that started to chase after him. There were birds already on his back, wings flapping, tearing at the wolf, but Amarok noticed them no more than if they had been fleas. Silas was in the middle of it all, surrounded, but the children weren’t attacking him, they were trying to fight past him. They were coming for Wyatt.
The shrieking birds overhead dropped from the sky one after another to attack them and Amarok and Silas both had left trails of feathered corpses in the sand. Wyatt looked back and Silas swept two of them aside with his sword. They fell twitching on the ground, their beaks still gnashing and claws grasping at the sand.
Wyatt stopped and turned back when he saw a girl with dark skin and curls jump on Amarok like an angry cat. Wyatt shot her, and the wolf disappeared in a wave of little bodies, rejoining the fray.
“Silas, what do I do?!” Wyatt shouted.
“Shoot them!” Silas called back, panting.
There were bodies on the ground around him, children and twitching little bird bodies, more children climbing out of the waves unseen behind him to take their place and birds falling from the sky to attack his face. There were too many. If there had ever been a time for Silas to tell Wyatt how to stop it, to give up the secret to becoming the lock, it was now.
A bird caught the back of Wyatt’s hair in its claws, screamed and pulled and he swatted it away. The bird left a cut behind on his arm and a shallow gash along his neck. It wasn’t much blood and he hardly felt it, but the birds gave a triumphant cry. Thousands of wicked little blackbirds screaming their triumph at the sky. The sound of it made ice form in his belly.
“Goddamn it, Silas, what do I do?!”
Silas cut through the children between them and made his way up the beach to where Wyatt stood with his back to the rocks. “You make sure I don’t fail,” Silas said, panting. “They think it’s you.”
He threw down his sword and drew a slim, wickedly sharp knife from his belt.
“Of course, they think it’s me! It is me!”
Wyatt shot two of the black-eyed children who got past Amarok then picked up Silas’s sword and tried to shove it into his hands. “What are you doing? Take it!”
Silas shook his head and backed away from him. He began to roll up the sleeves of his shirt as he skirted around the rocks back toward the water, keeping his back to them so he could watch the black-eyed children and the birds.
As Silas backed toward the ocean, the water did a strange thing; where the waves licked against the shore, it began to break. It no longer looked like waves slapping the sand, but like tiny fingers reaching for it. The fingers began to twist, and Wyatt saw that they weren’t fingers at all; they were snakes. Gleaming grey and black snakes coming up out of the salty, wet sand. There were so many that the sand rose over them and they began to boil up out of the water like nightcrawlers after a heavy rain.
“Silas!” Wyatt offered the sword to him again, but Silas was out of reach.
“They think it’s you because he thinks it’s you,” Silas said. He sounded calm in a way that Wyatt didn’t like at all. He had felt that kind of calm himself right before he did something either stupid or dangerous.
“What the hell are you talking about?!”
Wyatt jumped over a small cluster of sharp rocks and followed him. Out the corner of his eye he saw the children trying to get past the monstrous black wolf, but Amarok was roughly the size of a small pony and he looked like he was having fun. Every few seconds, he paused in the fight to snatch a bird out of the air. He crunched the birds between his jaws like sunflowers seeds and swallowed them whole. When a couple of the children got past the wolf, Wyatt shot them, and he didn’t feel guilty about it. He had managed to stop seeing them as children or even as people. Their masks had slipped. They still looked like children, but only vaguely the way a shadow held the shape of a child without being a child.
He had three bullets left and Silas’s sword was much too heavy for him. Neither weapon would do much, if anything, against sea snakes and birds, but the black-eyed children were still climbing out of the sea and fighting their way up the beach. If Silas didn’t pick the sword back up, they were going to die.
“Silas, what are you doing?!”
“He was braver than me, did I tell you that?” Silas called. He had stopped on a little sandbar with water lapping at the toes of his boots. His arms were bare, the sleeves of his shirt pushed up past his elbows, and the knife he held was sharp as a sickle.
“Who was?” Wyatt called back. The wind had picked up and tried to carry his question away, but Silas h
eard him.
“John,” Silas said.
The fingers of a white, childlike hand reached out of the water and clasped the toe of Silas’s left boot. He paid no attention to it.
“He was good the way people aren’t and never have been, and I could have done it, but I let him do it and never said anything,” Silas said. Wyatt had almost reached him, so he didn’t have to shout anymore.
Wyatt still held Silas’s sword in one hand, though it was so heavy he had dragged it down the beach and over the rocks. He held it up and tried to give it to Silas, but Silas held his hands up and shook his head, not taking it.
“See, I’ve been Richard Warwick for so long that no one knows who Richard Warwick was anymore or what was in his blood,” Silas said over the wind. “Even the serpent’s forgotten. They all think it has to be you.”
“Silas, stop it,” Wyatt said. He heard the reasoning tone of his own voice and hated it. He had been on the receiving end of that voice before and it was always patronizing. There was no helping it though, Silas was about to do something awful. “Silas, pick up the sword. Help me. I can’t do this with three fucking bullets and a giant dog. Not by myself. Don’t leave me here like this, please. Come on, put the knife away and pick up the sword. It’s too goddamn heavy for me.”
Silas was shaking his head again and smiling before Wyatt finished speaking. The hand grasping his boot had reached up to grab onto his leg and a little boy about five years old grinned up at them from the water.
“Wyatt, they’re coming. Turn around,” Silas said, looking past his shoulder.
“No,” Wyatt said. It made his skin crawl to know how close the other children were, and he imagined their too-long fingers reaching for him, but he refused to turn and look. “What are you going to do?”
“What I have to,” Silas said.
He sliced his left arm with the knife and the flesh broke open from elbow to wrist straight to the bone. Wyatt heard himself scream, but it sounded far away, merging with the screams of the birds overhead. The blood came immediately and rained down on the upturned face of the black-eyed boy, spread across the sand and turned the black water crimson.
Somewhere, there were hands on Wyatt’s neck and arms, little clammy fingers biting into his skin, pulling and grabbing and pinching. The birds dived from the sky toward him and he felt their tiny, sharp claws on his face. Somewhere a wolf howled, and it was like a demon screaming its way out of Hell. His fingers went slack, and both the gun and the heavy sword splashed into the water.
There was a roar in Wyatt’s head that he took for his own dismay at first. Only gradually did he realize that it was the serpent’s rage flooding his mind. The sound of it was like the bellowing scream of a dying wildcat and it grew louder until his head felt like it was going to split open. He fell to his knees, clutching his head like he could hold his skull together against such power by sheer will, but the pain became intense electric pulses of agony behind his eyes and in his brain. It was like his brain was being chewed on, ground up and spit out. His eyes burned so hot he had to close them. He expected to feel the little childlike fingers tear into him while he was down, the needle-sharp talons of the savage birds rip into his flesh, but they didn’t. When he dared to look for them, he saw them all laying on the ground all around him. Children curled up on their sides, birds scattered all around them on the beach and still raining down from the sky. The millions of water snakes that had come up from the sand flailed and thrashed in pain, then died and crumbled to dust and ashes, turning the beach black.
In the deaf, humming silence that followed the serpent’s roar, Silas was the only thing that dared to move. Shaking and with tremendous effort, Silas cut his other wrist the same as he had the first. It was a shallower cut because his tendons had been severed and he held the knife with that hand clumsily, but the cut was deep enough. Blood poured out of him, soaking his clothes, spreading across the sand to where Wyatt knelt among the rocks.
Under Wyatt’s knees, the ground began to shake. He fell onto all fours and held onto the slippery rocks as the world shook so violently that sand and little stones broke from the shore and fell into the water. Silas fell to his knees in the shallow water, his head bowed and his dark hair stringy and hanging in his face. He was still alive, but his breaths were deep and far between.
He was dying.
“Silas, why did you do that?” Wyatt asked. “Why? Killing yourself isn’t going to stop anything from—”
“I didn’t,” Silas said. His voice was rough and he struggled to speak. He picked his head up though and his eyes were blazing with triumph. “You were right. The price is life, not death for a lock. I am the lock. Just… wait. It… it’s happening.”
The black sky broke with a crash of thunder, the earth’s shaking slowed. The slimy black stones around Silas and Wyatt rattled, and when Wyatt looked up, something was happening. The clouds had parted and as they did, light creeped over Silas’s body. Where the light touched, he turned black. As Wyatt watched, he understood, and he got up and tried to go to him, but the gentle shaking of the ground knocked him back down.
Silas was turning to stone.
“Don’t worry, I’m not dying,” he said.
Wyatt heard him, but he wasn’t listening because it looked like Silas was dying and it felt like he was dying, and it was happening right in front of him. He had never felt more helpless.
“It’s okay,” Silas said. “My life is bound to his. I’ll make sure he can’t escape, and you’ll be fine.”
“Shut up,” Wyatt said. He was crying and his throat was tight with tears so the words came out sounding angry. “I’m sorry but shut up. You just… Why did you bring me here if it wasn’t going to be me?”
The black had reached Silas’s chest. Below the waist, he was a pillar of stone, unrecognizable as anything even resembling a man. Even the blood he had spilled into the water had turned to black stone and sank into the sand around him.
“Because I’m a coward. I’ve always run. I needed you… in case,” Silas said. His eyes were wet, and tears overflowed and ran down his cheeks.
The shaking finally stopped and Wyatt lurched to his feet and went to where Silas knelt in the water.
“I needed someone,” Silas said as the stone creeped up his neck. “A friend. I’m sorry, Wyatt. I should have done this… a long time ago.”
“It’s okay,” Wyatt said. He was crying too, and he wanted to hug Silas or pull him away from the water like that would save him from what was happening to him, but he didn’t dare touch him in case the stone tried to take him too. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yes, I did,” Silas said, his voice rough, gravely.
The stone took the rest of him then and his handsome face twisted and cracked and became dark, rough, pocketed stone, indistinguishable from the other rocks along the shore. Amarok howled, and Wyatt stared at the place where Silas’s eyes had been moments before, willing him to turn back. He didn’t. It was like trying to will any other old rock into being a man. After a while, Wyatt gave up, wiped the tears away and stood.
“Amarok, stop it,” he said. “He’s gone.”
The wolf padded over to him, sniffed his hands and licked his face. The birds had torn at it and it stung, but after a couple of swipes of Amarok’s tongue, the stinging went away. Wyatt didn’t know he was going to hug the creature until he was doing it. Amarok growled and shifted uneasily in his arms, but he allowed it and sat still while Wyatt cried into his star-studded fur.
He had been so wrong about everything. So certain that it was him. He was supposed to be the sacrifice, not because he wanted it that way, but because everyone said it would be him. Even the serpent had thought so. The serpent probably had a thousand descendants who dreamed what Wyatt had dreamed, but Silas hadn’t dreamed about it at all. They were enemies, he and the serpent, and the serpent had been quiet for him. Ignored him.
When had Silas known what he was going to do? He hadn
’t always known, Wyatt refused to believe that. Had he known before they got to the beach or had he only realized it once they were standing there and the children started coming out of the ocean?
He wanted so badly to be able to ask him.
“I hate him,” Wyatt muttered into Amarok’s thick neck.
Amarok nuzzled his hair and whined.
Chapter 22
The Midgard Serpent was gone. Wyatt had no more dreams about him and he didn’t hear him in his head or feel the slippery scales of his presence in his mind anymore. This should have been a relief, it should have brought him a measure of peace. It didn’t much. Instead, he remembered Silas and dreamed about him standing ankle-deep in seawater as he opened his veins. In his dreams, Silas didn’t often speak, he screamed as the stone crept up his body and it only stopped when the blackness overtook him and crawled into his open mouth and down his throat. Some nights the stone didn’t get him before the black-eyed children did. Some nights, Silas was too slow, and the birds pecked his eyes out and the children dragged him down into the waves. Though the worst dreams were the ones that felt the most like memories.
It’s going to be okay, Silas assured him in his dreams. You’re going to be fine.
Amarok kept Wyatt company, but he wasn’t a pet, he was a wild thing, and he came and went as he liked. When he was there, he slept on the floor because it was the only place there was room enough for him and he seemed to be mourning Silas too. Not as if he had died, as if he had left and there was no telling how long until he would come back. The wolf mourned like he was waiting. Like he intended to go on waiting however long it took.
A week after that day on the beach, Wyatt received an invitation in the mail to his sister’s wedding. Katerina Sinclair was getting married in three weeks to Brian Monroe. She hadn’t called to tell him or dropped in to see him, Wyatt had never met Brian, and he tried to be offended and hurt, but he wasn’t. He put the invitation aside and there was a letter from a lawyer in Seattle he had never heard of. He opened and read it and was told that Silas had made a will in the month before he disappeared, that Wyatt should contact the lawyer’s office at his earliest convenience. He put it aside with the wedding invitation, thinking he would call on Monday if he felt like it.
