His companion struggled to stand, fighting to hold his skin in place where it had parted. He slipped on wet ink and his own blood, and fell hard.
The ink man reached out with one foot, and placed it on the lost soul’s chest.
The spiraling script didn’t only cover the surface, but ran through the man’s veins, spreading out from the largest to the surface of the skin.
Blood, bone, muscle, and skin all separated, cut to pieces by the script.
The gore itself ran red-black, colored with ink, and the blood spread out in turn, forcefully enough that a chunk of skull was sent spinning off to one side. The blood penned out a story in red around the corpse.
The ink man smiled.
I touched the spot where my shoulder had connected with him. The wood had been gouged, and splinters stood away from the wound. The gouges had been inked black.
“It’s a shame you’re the asshole kind of monster,” I said, “Because I really miss my old tattoos.”
He spread his arms. Ink dripped from the fingertips, knuckles and elbows.
When he spoke, it was through a mouthful of ink. Spatters flew from his lips, and the words were muddled. “Got to earn a place.”
“I don’t think the Abyss is going to kick you out. You fit here.”
“Fit, yes,” he said. “But my aspirations are higher.”
“Higher? You want out?”
He only smiled.
I was aware that the others were continuing to leave me behind. The butcher behind me was a problem I had to keep in mind. I needed to resolve this, fast.
The tolling of the bell was growing quieter. Slowly but surely.
I frowned, backing toward the others.
The ink man apparently took that for weakness, opting to charge me.
My wing stayed up, raised like a shield, blocking much of my body, defensive.
If he cut the membrane of the wing, I might lose the ability to glide, my flying-without-really-flying.
He might have realized that. Being the sadist he was, he might have wanted it. To take something from me. The bogeyman, reducing things to their composite elements. Recycling the world.
It was greed of a sort. Greed I took advantage of.
I pulled the wing back and away, twisting my body as I drew and thrust with the Hyena in one movement. A weapon he’d been prevented from seeing with the wing where it was.
He ran straight into it. Changing course for him was as difficult as it had been for me to rush to Nick’s aid. His ‘blood’ splattered, a large amount of ink, and it landed on my arm and hand. It didn’t spread or soak in as ink should, but took form, carving out nonsense words.
Still impaled, he reached for my face.
I hauled the blade of the Hyena up and toward his heart and shoulder, dragging it through his flesh.
His hands dropped, and he collapsed.
I was quick to back away, as the script spiraled out like something alive, a hundred thin, razor-sharp limbs, ranging from curved to looped and to angular.
The script did its damage, tearing apart surroundings, taking bookshelf to pieces, and cutting floorboards in half. The blood script that marked where the lost soul had died was swallowed up and dropped down to a lower floor.
I turned and hurried to catch up with the others. I couldn’t see them, as they’d started to run up a staircase that spiraled up a great pillar of bookcases, as thick around as a house, and they’d already rounded a corner, but I could see the brief flashes that came with the gunfire. There were Others swarming them, now. Many could be just as bad as the one I’d just dispatched.
The tolling of the bell grew louder as I ran.
Not because I was drawing closer. The sound of the bell wasn’t quite following the group. I was heading toward the base of the staircase, and the others were ascending.
I slowed to a stop, waiting, looking up.
I waited.
I listened, as the sounds of the bell grew quieter still.
There was a scream, a man’s, and I tensed. Now that they were high enough to have few options, the pillar was getting in their way. Rearranging, or employing some trap.
I was getting a sense of how this place worked.
“Evan!” I roared the word.
The peal of the bell joined the echo of my cry.
They came out of the woodwork, some very literally. They stepped out of shadows and crawled through gaps between and inside bookshelves.
Lost souls, one or two bogeymen.
The lost souls were haggard, very much not in tune with the theme of the library. They reminded me of the homeless, but their skin and hair had suffered for going too long without light, their eyes were eerily large, as if they were trying to take in whatever light was available. Many were looking furtively about, as if studying their new surroundings.
I recognized the one bogeyman. The papercut girl from the library. She’d been the one that had been turned back on us by the witch hunters. Old fashioned clothes, old fashioned hair. Where she’d been prim and crisp before, each page of her body was bloodstained, she worked to breathe, and she bent over as if in pain.
Her book was gouged, and blood leaked from it, a slow, steady drip.
Her expression was one of hate.
The other was a brute of a man with a cracked old leather tome for a head, a great paper-cutting guillotine blade in one hand, wielded like a sword. He had hardcover books slipped into the breast pocket of his dress shirt and the pockets of his slacks, one smaller book tucked into a rolled up sleeve like someone might with a pack of cigarettes, and they fit easily. He had a belly, but not to the point of being morbidly obese. I could estimate him at six hundred pounds, easily, and it was more muscle and height than fat. A literary ogre.
I remained still, only periodically turning to check my back.
Evan appeared.
“Blake! Fly!” he cried out.
His voice was the trigger that set the Others to moving. Lost souls mobbed, and Bookbrain lurched into action. The papercut girl hung back.
I turned away from Bookbrain, ran toward the nearest bookcase, sheathing the Hyena and preparing my wings.
The shelves became footholds, I ran up the surface, and drew the wings down.
Evan reached me, and he buoyed me up, just out of reach of Bookbrain’s swinging paper cutter.
A flurry of papers rose past me. I felt the papers cut, and I recognized the papers for what they were. Superficial damage, but she preferred the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ approach.
They collected into the papercut girl’s form, about fifty feet above me. The girl perched on one railing at the spiral staircase that ran along the pillar, just a silhouette in darkness, but I could see the pale eyes staring down at me.
She leaped, and she didn’t fall so much as she floated. Papers in the wind. Unpredictable movements, her dress and blouse moving with a life of their own, all sharp angles, as if the were starched to a ridiculous degree. Now and again, she shifted the orientation of the pages, and every page that formed her body fluttered, as if she were a living flipbook.
I evaded her, turning a sharp right. She passed me.
A moment later, the pages all went horizontal to the ground, and an updraft caught her. The pages folded, turning a sharp angle, and she snapped over in my general direction, a paper airplane flight.
The papers formed a real, denser body as she flew straight for me. Injured book still in hand, she reached for Evan, missed, and wrapped her arms around my wing, crushing it against her body. Her consolation prize.
Whatever I was, I still needed physics to fly, and a folded wing with a fifty-pound weight attached to it was the bad sort of physics.