“It was only dumb luck it didn’t get her instead of the little girl it did get. It dragged her down and tore her open while she was still screaming and my mom saw her guts coming out. The little girl’s name was Sharon. My mother remembers that because she was wearing a nametag. It said, Hello, my name is Sharon. If I’m alone, please help me find an adult.”
Azrael put down his knife and fork and tore the leg off the hawk with his hands.
“All the other kids ran, but my mom grabbed an axe—don’t ask me what an axe was doing lying around, because I don’t know—and hit him in the back. She severed his spine and no, he didn’t die, but he couldn’t get up either. He lay there and writhed instead, snapping his teeth while Mom tried to drag him off of Sharon. And when she finally rolled him over, Sharon got up. The rest of her guts fell out, but she still got up. Mom had to cut her head off to stop her. Would you like to know how my mother lost her coat?”
“Not especially.”
“She took it off because she couldn’t get the blood out. That’s how young she was—she left behind her only coat just because it got bloody. She’d have slapped me if I’d done that, six years old or not. There’s no excuse for that kind of stupid in this world.”
Azrael ate. His musicians finished their song and began another.
“She got another coat the next night, in some empty house down the street. She ate out of their cupboards and slept in their attics She learned all the ways to get around your benign Eaters and you’re right,” she said, nodding. “They’re not too bright. She lived right there in that town by the sea until summer, all by herself. Five years old, maybe six or seven. She never saw another living person after that first night, so she moved on when the weather warmed up. She scavenged when she could and then she learned how to make weapons and hunt. She learned how to find places to sleep between the towns and how to make them if there weren’t any to find. She learned how to sell her body for a bottle of water. She lived eleven years in the open country before Norwood took her in. Eleven years, alone.”
“A resourceful woman,” he said. “I suppose my hungering dead must have ultimately run her down.”
“No. She was killed for her boots. I was working in the orchards when she went out hunting. I didn’t see it happen, so do you know how I know?”
He tossed the bird’s bones onto the platter and helped himself to a peach.
“When she came back, she was barefoot,” said Lan. The effort of keeping her voice low and even caused it to tremble. She made herself take a few breaths before continuing. The air ached in her lungs, caught like hooks in her throat. “There were leaves and dirt in her hair, all matted in with blood. They’d stabbed her over and over before they cut her throat. Her clothes were…torn…too bad to be worth stealing, but they took her boots and left her there to get up again. They left her there so she had to come back, barefoot in the fucking mud. And she didn’t even know it. She didn’t even know she’d lost her boots.”
“My condolences.” Azrael carved out a slice of peach, but he didn’t eat it. He set it on his plate and carved another. “Yet I would observe here that my Eaters, as you call them, have no use for shoes. I may have robbed your mother of her childhood, however obliquely.” Another slice, uneaten, joined the first. “I may have robbed her of her home and family. I shall even grant that I robbed her of hope and innocence and happiness, as if such are qualities of a world that has never known me.” He carved a third and fourth wedge out of the peach, then put the whole thing down and pushed the plate aside. “But not even by the acts of my hungering dead have I robbed her of life.”
“You ruined her life. You ruined her death.” Tears broke her voice even though they didn’t fall from her eyes. She tried to breathe herself quiet and couldn’t, tried to blink her vision clear and couldn’t do that either. “I couldn’t even bury her. She doesn’t have a grave. They burned her with all the rest of them and I have nothing left. My last memory of my mother is the stink of her smoke.”
“I’ve smelled that smoke,” he remarked, now reaching for his cup. “It is a terrible smell and it does linger.”
“Stop trying to one-up me.”
“I’m not. I’m sympathizing.”
“You…” She fought with it, but the tight heat choking the breath from her body coiled and coiled and suddenly erupted. “You don’t get to sympathize, you son of a bitch! You’re the reason she had to burn! Because she was out there! Because she was dead and walking around and trying to get at us! She was my mother and you turned her into an Eater that someone had to chop up and burn!”
“Someone.” Light reflected in the eye he turned on her, making it glow gold in the shadow of his mask. “But not you.”
She should have known he would ask, but she didn’t. She should have refused to answer, but she didn’t do that either. “I tried,” she said. Two words and they still cracked.
“But…?”
“She was my mother.”
His eyes sparked in the sockets of his mask. “Not anymore.”
“Yes, damn it! Always! That’s what you don’t get! They’re all someone’s mother or brother or friend! They’re all someone that someone else wants to grieve for and can’t! If you were really capable of any kind of feeling—”
He slammed his cup down hard enough to dent it.
“—you’d know that when someone you love dies, you’d do anything, anything, to see them again.” Tears shook free of her voice and trickled down her cheek as she glared at him. “And when we see them, they’re trying to eat us. And that’s your fault. That’s entirely…your…fault.”
The music played. Otherwise, there was silence. At last, Azrael picked up his cup, put it down again without drinking and snapped, “How is it that you have so much more venom for me, a hundred miles from your mother, than for her murderers? Where is your sense of justice?”
“Stopping them only stops them. Stopping you stops all of it.”
“Ah. Well.” He gestured toward his chest. “Stop me, then.”
“I’m trying.”
“By making me angry?” he demanded incredulously.
“By making you feel.”
“Feel what? Pity? For whom? You admit that even though the living rarely venture beyond their town’s walls and so have nothing to do with me, still they revile me for my cruelty! My tyranny!”
“You are cruel!” Lan shouted. “You are a tyrant!”
“How dare you!”
“People starve in Norwood while you waste tables full of food every night on people who don’t even need to eat! You don’t think that’s cruel? You sent an army of Revenants to raze Norwood just because you like peaches and when I begged you for their lives, you threw me in chains for the night! But you don’t call yourself a tyrant? You killed a man for being in the same room when I fell down and called it mercy because you didn’t impale him first! Well, my goodness, you’re just an angel of compassion, aren’t you?!”
“Point,” said Azrael tightly, thrusting up one black-clawed thumb. “My Revenants are under strict orders never to kill unless attacked and they are incapable of disobedience. They razed nothing of Norwood—not a hovel, not a field, not a fence. They were met with resistance and they quelled it. That is all. Point.” His index finger stabbed out. “You did not beg. You said, exactly, ‘Stop. You can’t kill them,’ followed in due course by, ‘Murderer.’ I have no doubt your memory casts you in the part of the noble victim, but you have begged for nothing in my court. You have made demands. Point.” He raised another finger. “I did not kill a man. I let the dead die. And is that not after all why you came seeking me?” Without warning, his hand became a fist and crashed down on the table, upending his cup and collapsing the decorative tower of fruits between them. “If I want her dead, I’ll kill her myself!” he roared. “Get back to your posts or I’ll pin you there and let you rot!”