Rose seemed to notice me. Without moving her gun from Mara, she took in the wings. Her forehead creased with the frown that followed.
She turned her attention back to Mara as Mara continued her speech.
“…When the flesh is gone, the feeling of being trapped and immobile will persist. The panic, the despair… but I won’t give you that, Rose Thorburn,” Mara said. “You alone, I’ll give over to Death. Worse things wait for you than confinement in a slowly rotting corpse.”
“You’re talking, but all I’m hearing are threats,” Rose said. “Threats are meaningless unto themselves.”
Hoo boy. I was pretty sure she was channeling some Conquest as she said that. Dipping into the old reserve of power to find poise and natural arrogance. Banishing the fear.
Not that it was necessarily a bad move. Challenging Mara had to count for something. Take away from her sway over the local spirits.
“Threats are largely meaningless until they’re carried out or someone responds to them,” Mara said. “The question is how you respond to them. If you were smart, you would ask for mercy.”
“You wouldn’t give it,” Rose said.
“But you’d ask, all the same,” Mara said. “What else is there, for you?”
“Uh,” Ellie spoke up, from the midst of the Knights. “I’m not smart at all, and I’m asking. Can she even do that?”
Peter had talked about people’s patterns. I’d seen Ellie’s. Grovel, be the omega to the enemy’s alpha, be the coward. Break the pattern, and she lashed out. Taking a beating from Eva, only to turn around and poison Andy.
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that Ellie had a gun, all things considered.
“What I’ve learned,” a heavyset Knight beside Ellie said. “Is if you have to ask, they probably can do it.”
Ellie gripped her gun tighter. “Great.”
“Assume they’re more dangerous than you’ve heard,” I could hear him saying. “That assumption has kept an awful lot of us alive for a few years now. If it means we don’t pick certain fights, all the better.”
“Oh?” Mara asked. “What a shame you picked this one.”
Several of the veteran practitioners and Others in the group tensed, myself included. A few people with guns focused on their aim.
But they weren’t ready for a word.
“Die,” Mara said.
The heavyset man reacted to the word like he’d been slapped. A step backward, gun pulled back and pointed away, as if he were afraid he’d reflexively pull the trigger.
He dropped to his knees. I could, now that his face was no longer in such utter shadow, make him out as one of the individuals that had been in the room when I’d first met the Knights. Was he the one with the artificial leg?
Teddy?
The import of the word had become clear. Shots rang off. Mara dropped, and she did it fast enough that I suspected the first bullet and most of the others had flown over her.
Birds were scared into the air by the ringing shots. The noise of the gunfire was so raucous, so powerful, that snow and ice fell from branches. Had we been on a mountainside, it might have stirred the snow and brought on an avalanche.
I chased Mara, careful not to put myself between the people with guns and her.
More darkness, more shadow. Mara was running, one eye on the gunmen, and she was moving faster than I did. As light as I was, my feet still stabbed through the snow, five steps in six sinking me to mid-calf or knee level. Mara’s footsteps didn’t. She moved easily over the crust of snow, and when her feet did punch through it, she found something solid beneath.
Peter backed away, hands on Roxanne’s shoulders, drawing out of Mara’s way.
Mara was creating too much distance, and the light was swiftly dwindling.
“Evan!” I called out.
Evan took flight.
I, too, spread my wings, walking forward to try and find a point where I wouldn’t be fighting the grasp of the snow as I tried to ascend.
Green Eyes was about as fast as Mara, crawling forward, weight distributed evenly on snow, fingers hooking at the crust of ice on top.
She moved to intercept, as I took to the air, kicking free of the snow. The light was going quickly now, and I did what I could to memorize the most open areas. The space of the clearing, the branches I couldn’t afford to run into.
“Don’t let her touch you!” Rose called out.
Green Eyes hesitated, stopping at a ridge.
“She only needs to touch you to kill you!” Rose elaborated.
“Take the harder path! The obvious path is a trap, here!” another voice said. It might have been the male Behaim. He was grunting as the birds assaulted him. “Paths will turn you around and send you back into her clutches!”
“She didn’t touch Teddy!” another voice shouted. “And he’s having a heart attack!”
“Slowing him down, but we’re not equipped for this,” the female Behaim called out.
“I don’t know!” Rose said, raising her voice as the bird cries intensified. She grunted as one bird attacked her. “But she’s not doing it again, she might need something more concrete to off the rest of us, some possession of ours, some point of reference! Touch is the most obvious. Each kill should be easier than the last! Don’t-”
I didn’t hear the words that followed, as the birds started hissing, croaking, and calling, drowning us out.
As I found the footing to kick myself free of the snow around me, flapping my wings, the last of the light and voices were drowned out.
Even my ability to sense fear was gone, as the birds and their frenzy made for a thick soup of negative emotions. It was bad enough that I couldn’t tell where the others were, scared as they were.
Her territory, her battlefield, her darkness.
The birds were hers, but there was no bloodthirst to them. I’d been attacked earlier, but I’d crossed some barrier. Roxanne and Peter had been attacked, but they’d been lighting the matches, and maybe it had something to do with them working against the Crone.
When I’d flown over, testing the limits, part of the reason had been to gauge her. To see how she protected herself. I’d hoped for clear sailing, but hadn’t been surprised to find a defensive measure. It was the nature of that measure that had been so useful to know. Not a barrier, or a natural wall, not even a hiding place, exactly. More passive than that. Reactive.
Mara was a survivor, more than a fighter. She had sway over life and death, as evidenced by her attempt to give me a heart that she could stab, and her ability to kill with a touch or a word, but her actions, her approach, had largely been to deter.
Increasing the response of the birds, so they got more intense the closer we got? The traps? All of it had been to keep us at arm’s length, allowing her to dispatch us as she saw fit.
Now we were at arm’s length. She was moving, I was blind and giving chase, and the others were trying to organize. Was this where she worked to dispatch us?
If Rose was right, Mara would try to achieve a sequence. Kill someone who was close to death already with a word. Use a touch to kill a second person. By the rule of three, would she be able to kill someone who wasn’t close to death with a mere word? Rose?
In her darkness, the shadows of the birds adding to the darkness of night, she could be going after anyone, and they wouldn’t know until she had her hands on them.