The aardmen stared at me uneasily, tails switching.
“Free me!”
Trey crouched, growling, then dropped his hold and loped across the room to the sanctuary. Fury stared after him. “Please,” I whispered.
He let go of me. I stood shivering, rubbing my arms. Before me flames darted across the floor, licking at pools of melted tallow and dried grass and ruined cloth. I walked slowly from the alcove to where Justice lay upon the steps. In the shadows the silent lazars watched.
“Justice.”
I knelt beside him, brushing back his long hair to see a tiny mark upon his neck, like an insect’s bite. A drop of blood no larger than a bee’s eye pearled there. I touched it. brought it to my lips not caring if it were poison. Then I bent to kiss him, pulling oh so gently at his jaw still warm in my fingers. My tongue slipped between his teeth, his mouth unyielding now for the first time, the only time, as I kissed him, my Justice, kissed him and found nothing, nothing at alclass="underline" only my own tears falling upon his lips and throat and he was not there, he was gone, gone past all redeeming. Justice Saint-Alaban whom I had loved was dead. The Gaping One had claimed him.
I drew back, stunned. Dark bruises had begun to erupt on his skin, the beautiful pale skin that had not been a vanity to him. And at the thought of that, of his beauty ravished in death, horror and grief overwhelmed me so that I knotted his hair about my fingers and began to sob Fury crept to the altar to slink warily between the flames, The lazars slipped from the shadows and approached me, murmuring.
I wept then, who had never wept before; while behind me in the crypt I could hear the hiss of the bonfire where they would lay him—my friend and companion, who had led me from HEL and lived only long enough to teach me the beginning of love.
And now I would never know what it was to be human; now all there had been of love in me would burn upon a madman’s pyre. My brain seethed as though it might explode, as inside me I heard the weeping of all the ones I had taken, all those who had gone to feed the Gaping One: Emma and Aidan, Morgan Yates, Melisande, all the others for whom it had been too much, this life, this waking horror that was the world; their voices rising to a shriek, until I shook and my hands dropped from him.
And I screamed, striking at a lazar who had reached to touch Justice’s hair. She fell back, her head striking a marble pillar. She slipped to the floor, a seam of blood like a crack upon her pale face.
“Don’t touch him! Don’t try to hold me!” I shouted. “None of you can hold me!” Another child slipped and fell in his haste to run from me. I lunged to grab him, held him above me, and hurled him across the chapel. He screamed, and the voices of the other lazars echoed his end.
“The Gaping One, the Gaping One!” they cried. “He wakes, he wakes—‘”
I stood, panting as they cringed in the shadows of the Chapel, weeping and coughing from the bitter smoke. Then someone else limped from the altar, the reflection of firelight scorching his tattered crimson jacket until he seemed another flame approaching me.
“No!” he shouted, kicking a knot of crouching children so they scattered like a nest of voles before a stoat. “That is not the Gaping One!”
He staggered toward me: the Consolation of the Dead, the mad Aviator, Margalis Tast’annin. The torn jacket flapped like some withered basilisk clinging to his shoulders. From its tattered sleeves hung myriad tiny bones that clattered as he moved.
I stood frozen, staring; and finally I knew why they feared him: because now I too was afraid.
“Go back,” I hissed. “I will destroy you—” I bared my teeth and swiped at the air in front of his face.
“You are not the Gaping One,” he said. He jabbed at me, knocking me to the floor, then grabbed my shoulders. I could smell the plague on him, the fetor of rotting flesh. I fought him with all my strength, twisting, snapping at the air until my teeth felt his skin split beneath them. He swore, kicked me as his blood ran into my mouth and I choked, trying to find the strand there that would unleash the horror upon Tast’annin and disable him. I tried to escape, but succeeded in getting my head free so that I could shut my eyes and try to call it forth, the One who lived inside me, the Boy who lived on blood…
There was nothing there.
Not a thought, not a darkness, not even the black wraith of a nightmare to feed it. Instead I gagged, my mouth filling with hot blood. As when I had tried to tap Justice when he died: He was gone, truly gone. I was helpless before the power of those who worshiped the Gaping One.
I was bound again, my legs left free so that I could walk. Trey and Fury watched me as the lazars dragged Justice’s body away, the children looking at me fearfully as the Aviator shouted at them to hurry. Then I was alone with him in the Crypt Church, with only the aardmen guarding me.
“Wendy Wanders. Subject 117.”
He licked his cracked lips and reached for a taper burning upon the altar. Dried blood caked one side of his face, so that it appeared he wore a grisly half-mask. He raised the candle, held it close enough to my cheek that it burned me and I turned away. “Emma’s prize subject. You led us quite a chase, Wendy; and for what? It doesn’t even work anymore, does it? You couldn’t save your friend, you couldn’t fight me. What good are you now, Wendy?”
I spat at him. He laughed, drew the candle to my temple until I heard the hiss of hair burning and smelled where he scorched me. Beside me Fury growled. “The scars are gone, you can’t even tell anymore, can you? I would have given anything to see how you did it; but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now, will we?”
He stepped back, kicking at something: a heap of bones, the twisted remains of a white robe. A skull clattered across the floor and came to rest beneath a smoking brazier. He stared after it for a long moment, then turned to me.
“I asked them to show it to me once. Aidan Harrow told me. He told me everything. I was his confidant, his only real friend at the Academy—
“‘Show me,’ I begged him; ‘let me see what it is.’ I wasn’t afraid of it, you see, as he was and Emma was. I knew even then that this was something that shouldn’t be kept a secret.
“But he was a coward, Aidan, and we all know what happened to him.” He laughed, flicked melting wax so that it spattered my arm. “Emma was no coward but she was a fool, to think she could hide this—”
“She didn’t know what she was doing!” I tried to pull away from the aardmen, but they only held me tighter. “The implants were part of her research—”
“She knew exactly what she was doing.” His voice was very soft. He took my chin in his hands and turned it so that I faced the brazier and blinked in its fiery light. “Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders.” He traced a jagged cut upon my cheek, and I winced as he prodded where I had been burned at Saint-Alaban. “She knew there had been a boy, your twin brother; I read it in your file. She hoped to awaken this— thing —she wanted to see it again…”
I closed my eyes, trying to recall Him, the face peering from spring leaves and the color of His eyes. But it was Justice’s face I saw, pale beneath the film of blood, his eyes dead and gray. They were both gone: gone as though it really had been a dream. Justice dead. The other had forsaken me as He had Aidan and then Emma; and they had killed themselves to find Him again. That beautiful face, those eyes…
When I looked up the eyes boring into mine were pale blue and threaded with blood.
“Why?” I asked. I struggled to shake myself free of the aardmen. Tast’annin glanced at them, nodded. They stepped back to crouch in the shadows. “Why would you care after all this time, about—about Emma, and me, about all of this?”
His gaze drifted upward, seeking something in the smoke-blackened figures that watched us from the vaulted ceiling. “I told you, I was Aidan’s friend,” he said at last. “I wasn’t—happy—about his relationship with his sister. And I was curious.