What was taking Reed so long?
I leaned into my walkie. “Reed?” I asked, breaking protocol. “You coming or what? Copy.”
Waiting for his answer was like counting the heartbeats between thunder and lightning. One… two… three… four…
“Hey, lucky charm,” he voice broke through with static. “Had to find an elevator. There in a jiff. Copy.”
My breath blew out in a tight woosh. Backup was on the way.
“Ma’am?” I called out again. There was scuffling, but no voice. My boot crunched down on a piece of broken glass. I turned my flashlight to the floor, skirting past cigarette butts and one of those press-on nails you could buy for kids at the pharmacy. Scanning the rest of the path, it looked clear.
A high, preening moan came from my left. I trained my flashlight on the sound, a broken LED monitor that had probably advertised perfumes and men’s watches in snappy little ten second videos. Now it was dark save a web of flickering nodes that glowed green and white near the base.
Bare, caramel toes came into view and overrode the growing sense of fear in my chest from feeling my way around the station in the dark. They were painted red, ankles swollen with the telltale signs of late pregnancy. The woman’s foot was dirty, covered in black asphalt stains, cuts, and who knew what else.
Her leg shook. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Her toes, her ankle, didn’t move as if she’d tensed or shifted. I took a step closer, heart in my throat. My flashlight beam hit a dark shimmer on the ground. A stream of dark garnet oozed between the old red bricks. My heart flew into my throat.
“EMTs are here!” I called, breaking into a run. “Ma’am, can you hear me? I need you to–”
I turned the corner. My flashlight found a moving shadow, its bony back curled over the woman’s belly. It crooned, mimicking the sounds of the woman in labor with delight. The mother-never-to-be stared at me blankly, legs spread open. The thing perched between her thighs had its hands deep in her swollen stomach, its mouth full of ground organ and bone. It was scooping,scoopinglike a mole digging a tunnel—
The monster hissed at my light and snarled at me. It squinted and strained against the harsh beam, deep sea eyes swimming like raisins that had rotted in dishwater. It bared a mouthful of sharp teeth set in many rows all the way to the curve of its throat, smelling the air with flat, slitted nostrils. As I watched, hair grew from its head like black worms, spiraling down its sticky shoulders. It grew into frizzy, sweaty curls, the same as those matted to the dead woman’s cheeks.
I gasped and shuddered, icy shock slamming into my spine. I stumbled backward, dropping my flashlight and bag, tripping over them as my limbs flailed in terror.
The flashlight beam rolled away and the monster’s eyes flew open, pinpointing me in a moment. I scrabbled for it on the floor as I fell, and the atrocity jumped, pushing it out of my reach. The light flared wildly across the bricks as it grabbed my head by the temples, its claws piercing through the skin and scraping at my skull.
I screamed. And then remembered nothing at all.
07
I lay in the mud, in my own rot and blood.
And I stared.
At the flat-bladed, dark green grass and the dried shoots of flowering bushes that died more each day as the cold of winter descended. At the curvature of the rocky terrain, rising around me like a bowl. At the black scar of a void the anchor had left behind without my spirit to hold it aloft.
And the sky.
The sky with clouds that hung so near I could taste them. Misty pops of cold that peppered my parched lips…
Thirst and agony fought a vicious battle in my throat. I swallowed hard, savoring that single drop of freedom again even as it caused an inferno within.
“Itzalways the quiet ones,izz’nit?”
They had been silent in their approach, but even if they'd worn bangles around their ankles like the old days, I wouldn't have heard them. Gamil crouched naked beside me, taking in the sky with their elbows propped on their knees like they were seeing it for the first time in eight hundred years too.
“Of course you would be the first to break free,” they continued conversationally, abandoning the speech of my lady for a more familiar tongue. It was a relief to understand without the strain. I was no longer upholding a corner of the world’s veil, so I would learn my lady’s tongue much more quickly, but my mind was still muddled, numbed by deprivation and pain. “Calculating, patient. If only your fellow ghasts were so resilient.”
I might have mistaken the comment as a barb if I had the energy. I needed the rest, however. To focus on spreading my lady’s drop of blood through my flesh. As small as a pearl, but that gift was the greatest I’d ever been given.
“Your children are coming,” I reminded them quietly. “Leave me to my peace, fallen one.”
Gamil smiled. “They were planning to replace you soon.”
I trained my left peripupil on them as they looked up at the sky. Their countenance was difficult to look at, always changing in minute ways, never the same. Changeability was the abandoned god’s nature. It manifested in the morphing of their smile from thin to full, bowed to flat. From the snub of their nose to a button to a point to an arch. Never directly when one looked at them, but always in the periphery, searching for the visage that made one’s breath short and their scent sweeten.
I found them difficult to look at because they had learned my preferred visage long ago. A white mane as fine as spider silk. Red eyes the same as mine. A sophomoric crease of the brow and a long, elegant neck.
