Well, and there it was. His worst fears, confirmed. “The undead at the schoolhouse. They weren’t meant for her.”
“I knew there was something about you. The thing in the claim recognized you, but it’s…distracting, to have that much knowledge. It’s like a lumber room; thing wanted often buried—”
Jack moved. He hit the boy squarely, the knife sinking into the thin chest, and Robbie Browne laughed. Rolling, wet dirt flying and his exhausted body betraying him, the knife slapped out of his hand and the boy’s limbs closing around him like a vise. He struggled, and the prickles of grace burned unholy flesh. Robbie Browne hissed, his breath a sudden foulness…but even though Gabe’s spirit was willing, the flesh enclosing it had endured quite enough. Grace ebbed, and the struggle ended with a greenstick crack as bone in Jack Gabriel’s right arm gave way. He screamed, but the thing had its teeth in the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Tearing and ripping, a gout of hot blood down his shoulder, and his left hand was full of the gun he had loaded with charter-blessed ammunition.
Rolling again, the barrel jammed into the boy’s ribs. The thing inside Robbie’s flesh gapped and leered, and when the gun spoke, the white horse screamed to match Gabe’s cries and fled, trumpeting its fear as it tore through shadows and undead mud-substance alike. Another shot, and Gabe’s prayer rose like a charter-bell’s tolling, grace washing through him in a last hot flood of in extremis.
Catherine, he thought, deliriously, and Robbie Browne’s body sagged aside.
Jack curled himself into a ball, whisper-screaming as edges of broken humerus grated together. His lower arm had snapped in two places, too, and the pain ate him alive. Everything he had ever thought of eating rose in his throat, escaped in a series of retches.
Robbie’s body twitched. It hissed, a viper temporarily dazed. It wouldn’t be down for long.
I wish for her to be proud of me.
Me too, Gabe might have said, only he was busy trying to breathe. On his knees, left hand dropping the useless gun, and his fingers scrabbling through dirt for the knifehilt.
He found it, and the thing with Robbie Browne’s face glared up at him, its mouth working, black with Jack’s blood. “Do…it…” it hissed, and Jack didn’t hesitate. The broad blade bit deep, a tide of blackness gouting, and he hacked grimly at the thing’s neck until the head fell free, spurts of unholy ichor steaming in the chill night. The jessum trees rattled as they shook their fingers, just like slim graceful women letting their hair down, and the sound of the undead and the mud-creatures outside the consecrated ground falling to bits as the will that had impelled them decayed into dissolution was a whisper fit to haunt nightmares.
There was a brief starry period of blackness, and when Gabe regained consciousness he found himself lying under a cloudless sky, the stars a river and a graying of dawn in the east.
There was a wooden shape to one side, and two slumped corpses that were probably horses, drained to feed Robbie Barrowe’s unholy thirst. Jack didn’t care. He lay for a little while, until, blinking away dirt and crusted blood and nastier decaying fluid, he found the last gift Robert Barrowe-Browne would ever leave.
It was a second grave, dug just to the side of the freshly turned earth with the charterstone at its head. All Jack had to do was crawl, and pull some of the dirt over himself.
It should be enough. He prayed it would be enough.
His right arm hung useless, and the gun was left behind. He clutched the knife, its blade running with bubble-smoking black ichor, in his left fist as he crawled, scratching along the pan of the flats under Heaven’s uncaring vault. In the predawn hush, the scrape and rattle of his boots digging against damp earth were loud as trumpets. When he tumbled into the hole, the sides gave loosely, scattering over him.
It ain’t so hard, he told himself. All you have to do is put the knife in the right place.
He set the fine-honed edge against his own throat, and arranged his feet. His right arm throbbed and screamed, but he disregarded it. All it would take was a single lunge, jamming the hilt against the side of the grave, and he would bleed out.
But he had to do it before the sun rose.
Jack shut his eyes.
“Cath—” he whispered, and his legs spasmed, pushing him forward.
Chapter 36
Four months later
San Frances was a simmering bowl of smoke, dust, filth, mist, corruption, lewdness, and outright criminality.
It was, Cat reflected, merely Damnation writ large.
Her arms were too thin; she had not yet recovered from the agonizing thirst of the desert. She no longer felt the dreadful heat, and every drop of moisture they had been able to scavenge had gone to Li Ang and little Jonathan. One of the horses had died, so they traveled at night, Cat’s boots slipping and sliding as she heaved the wagon along like a mindless undead in a quarry. Next to her, the other horse had lost its fear of her predator’s scent, and had merely endured that terrible passage.
The thirst had consumed every excess scrap of flesh, leaving her slim and breastless as a boy. Still, she possessed enough inhuman strength to lift both heavy trunks, and settle them on the wagon. It was a far finer vehicle than the one that had carried them out of the desert; the bars of un-cursed gold from the claim had proven most useful. There were even solicitors who could be paid to transact business after dark, and Cat’s experience had built a fairly unassailable comfortable independence for a certain Li Ang Cheng Barrowe-Browne, as the widow of one Robert Barrowe-Browne.
How Robbie would laugh.
Not only that, but Catherine Elizabeth Barrowe-Browne and Robert Heath Edward Barrowe-Browne, both deceased, had named Jonathan Jin Barrowe-Browne their heir, and all papers were in order.
Mother would be horrified, and Father might be angry…but it was right, Cat thought, that it should be this way. At least the wealth would shield Li Ang and little Jonathan from some of the unpleasantness of life.
Her dress hung on a too-wasted form, scarecrow-thin as Robbie’s. Now that the thirst raged through her, she understood a little more of his bitter laughter. She refused to think on the slaking of said thirst, of the lowing of the cattle and the stink of the slaughteryards. Overcoming her disgust at such feedings would help her survive…but dear God, it did not completely erase the terrible burning. Another manner of blood was called for.
Human. It was a mercy her parents were dead.
She sighed as she surveyed her work and found it as proper as she could make it. “It’s safest this way, Li Ang.”
The Chinoise girl, heavily veiled and mutinously quiet, shook her head. There had been argument, and the throwing of a butcher knife…but really, it had taken only one instance of Cat standing over baby Jonathan’s new cradle, shaking and dry-weeping with the urge to sink her newfound, pointed and razor-sharp canines into the tiny, helpless pulse, for Li Ang to become convinced of the wisdom of Cat’s plan.
Little baby Jonathan, tucked safely in his mother’s arms with charter-charms on red paper attached to his swaddling, was fast asleep. Cat stepped back, not trusting herself, and bit her lower lip.
But gently. The teeth she now sported were provokingly sharp. “I shall miss you,” she said, softly. “The gold shall help, and do not let anyone take advantage of you. Especially solicitors. Jonathan is the heir to a fortune in Boston, and you shall be safe enough there. Though I advise you to go overseas.”