"She was afraid," Matt said.
"I'm afraid every day of my life," Mouse said. "I'm afraid of what I did, and I'm afraid I'm going to do worse. I opened that book at it changed me and I changed everything. But I would never do what that whore did. And now they're all killing each other and they won't stop until there's another lawgiver."
"I wasn't sent here to be your lawgiver," Matt said. "I think we were both tricked, and I know who did it."
"I saw you in my head before you came," Mouse said. "Knew your face and your name. I paid the price of blood to bring you here. Only those lives were too small to bring the one we really needed."
The lives were too small, Matt thought. All those bones hidden in Joan's woodpile. Sacrifices to summon her replacement?
"I need more blood," Mouse said. "The right kind of blood."
Mouse disappeared from his view. After a moment, he heard the thud of a body falling on the floor. The girl.
"Don't do this," Matt called.
"I can't do anything else."
Matt strained his neck to look around and saw Mouse bent over double, dragging the unconscious girl across the floor. Amazing how much strength there was in that little body.
"Thought I could do it the easy way, using animal blood, not having to hurt anyone," Mouse said. "But look what they sent me in return."
"Maybe they sent you what you needed," Matt said.
"You already said you're not the lawgiver," Mouse said. "No one's going to listen to you."
She dragged the unconscious girl to a spot on the floor where she had marked out a pentagram in chalk and aligned her limbs with the star's points.
"When you needed a lawgiver to stop the killing, they sent you Joan," Matt said. "When you needed to stop the pain she was causing, they sent me. Maybe that wasn't a mistake."
"I saw what happened at the Grange," Mouse said.
She picked up a knife from the table where the book lay and ran it across her thumb. Blood sprung up in its wake.
Matt pulled against the ropes, but they wouldn't budge. "I didn't kill those people at the Grange," he said. "You did."
She whirled around, raising the knife. She looked like she wanted to plunge it into his heart.
"You could have stopped it before it started," she said. "You refused." She thrust the knife at his throat. He felt its point pierce his flesh.
"How long ago did you summon Joan?" he said. "Years? Decades?"
"Don't know how long," she said. "Time went all funny here. But it seems like forever. Not going to make the same mistake with you."
The knife pressed deeper into his throat. "All that time, and what did you do?" he said, fighting the urge to panic, to try to thrash himself free and force the blade in deeper. "You didn't even try to change anything. You let Joan keep you from killing each other, and that was all. Did you ever give one second's thought to making peace between the families?"
"We had peace until you came along."
"You had a cease-fire. You couldn't kill each other, but you never stopped the hating. Why was that, Mouse? Do you even know how this feud began? Do you have any idea why you're killing each other?"
"Doesn't matter why it started. It just is."
"It doesn't have to be," Matt said. "If you don't want it."
Matt could feel the knife blade tremble under his skin. And then it slid out, a drop of blood falling on his shoulder as it went.
She was staring down at him, but he didn't think she was seeing anything in the room. "What are you?" she said finally.
"I'm not the lawgiver," he said. "And I'm not a hero riding in to save the villagers from the monster that's been terrorizing them. I'm just a stranger passing through."
"Then why should I listen to you?" The knife was getting closer to his throat again.
"You shouldn't." Matt fought to keep his throat calm and under control. "Not to me, not to Joan, not to that book. Because none of us can stop this for good. There's only one person who can. And that's you."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Matt had never been to war. By the time he was old enough to enlist, the age of the existential battles that had consumed entire generations of Americans seemed to have been over forever, and by the time the country was actually attacked for the first time in his life, he was too enmeshed in his parents' slow slouch toward eternity to think about anything bigger.
So he'd never seen what the Earth looks like the day after a battle has ended. Not until the red sun rose over Heaven.
The fight had started in the Grange, now nothing but a wisp of smoke rising out of the trees, but had spilled out into the town. Main Street was dyed crimson; potholes turned into drinking fountains for the crows, which lapped at the thickening pools of blood. There were mangled pieces of bodies scattered along the roadway, the town's gene pools strong enough that even in death Matt could identify a Gilhoolie nose or a richly furred Vetch forearm.
Maybe we're too late to make peace, Matt thought as he walked toward the general store, the white flag of pillow case on his axe handle held high. Maybe they've all found the only peace they'll ever know. The peace of the grave. Except that if that was true there would be no graves, just food for crows.
One of those crows cawed and beat its wings. Matt turned to the sound and saw a body hanging from the eaves of Mabel's Eat Fresh Diner Cafe. The birds had taken the sign literally and plucked away at the corpse's eyeballs and tongue. But they had been especially drawn to the bloody hole where its genitals had once been. They'd pecked and bitten at the raw flesh until they'd broken through to the rich, sweet innards. Now a long rope of intestine hung down between the body's legs like a parody of the penis it had once possessed.
Matt could hear Mouse's sharp gasp, could practically feel her muscles tightening even though she walked two feet away from him.
"They didn't have to do that to Cal," she said in a voice choked with anger. "They didn't have to do that."
"No one had to do any of this," Matt said. "What do you think your people have done to theirs?"
There was a long silence before she uttered one short syllable: "Worse."
They walked in silence, Matt holding the flag of truce, Mouse gripping the rope that trailed behind her and wound around the neck of the Vetch girl, the one who had been Cal's only lover.
This had been Mouse's sole demand when she acceded to Matt's plan. He'd wanted to leave the girl behind in Joan's house, let her sleep off the horror she'd lived through and wake up on her own if she decided the rest of her life was worth living.
Mouse insisted they bring the girl along. If things went the way Matt hoped, she'd be a sign of the Gilhoolie's good will. If not, she was a hostage.
It had taken a long time to wake the girl up, and by the time her eyes finally opened the sky above the mountains was beginning to turn the cool gray that comes just before dawn. Even after she'd shrugged on the robe and sandals they found for her, though, it seemed that the girl never woke up completely. Her limbs moved and she could follow their instructions, but her eyes were blank and hollow, and she never said a word.
The walk into town was a voyage through hell. The farms they passed had been attacked and the animals slaughtered, their corpses left to rot where they lay, the structures torched or simply torn apart. And everything had been looted. The road was littered with shattered glass and torn clothing. Jars of preserves that had been carefully laid away for years lay smashed on the ground, their contents slathered over books and photographs and anything they could be used to destroy.
There hadn't been bodies though. Not yet, anyway. This must have been a raiding sortie, not a battle. This was one side destroying the other's supply lines so there could be no retreat.