Rose had never felt so exposed in her life. She and Priya walked hand in hand where the woods would allow it. The bitch with the gun followed right behind them, but they held hands as if this were an ordinary hike, the two of them exploring the wilderness. They had kayaked on the river but had never climbed any of the mountains together, never even gone fishing. Their dad had taken Rose and Maeve fishing many times, and she wondered why she had never taken Priya.
Agatha bumped her gun against the small of Rose’s back, and she let out a kind of peep, a sound she’d never made in her life. Her face flushed with shame. Had she ever hated anyone as much as she did this tiny woman with her big goddamned gun? She didn’t think so. Even the man who had driven his car through the crowd at the parade had been sick and fleeing something or someone. And she couldn’t hate Maeve, even though her heart wanted to. Maeve would be suffering even more than Rose. After what she’d done, Maeve would be in agony.
But this fucking bitch? Rose burned with hatred for her.
“Talk to me, Rose,” Agatha said. “Where are we headed?”
“Where you wanted to go. There are dozens of ways to get down into the gorge, but only a few of them are both quick and safe.”
Agatha said nothing, just kept them moving with the specter of that gun.
“Can I ask you a question?” Priya said quietly.
Agatha’s footfalls were quiet, but now they grew quieter, as if she had fallen back to make sure she could shoot them both. “Go on.”
“How much do you get paid to kill someone?”
Rose stiffened. Her mouth went dry, but she kept walking. She squeezed Priya’s hand in warning, but the question was already out.
Agatha laughed softly. “Well, Rose, looks like your girlfriend is more interesting than I thought. But what makes you think I kill people for money, honey? All sorts of people will want what Maeve has. Maybe I work for my government—”
“I don’t think so,” Priya interrupted. “You’re a private contractor. That’s why you’re here alone. I don’t know if someone paid you to be here or if you’re looking at it as, like, an investment or something. But you work alone. And I was just wondering what it cost to hire you to kill someone.”
Rose felt the chill of the rain that soaked her clothes, felt the way they clung to her, but now she felt the dampness of the air as well, and it seemed ready to suffocate her. This wasn’t Priya, so what did Priya have in mind?
Agatha fell back another step or two. She laughed softly, muttered some profanity under her breath. “Let me get this straight—I have a gun pointed at you. In this moment, you have zero idea whether I intend to let you live through the day, and you’re looking to hire me to murder someone else?”
Rose glanced over her shoulder. Agatha’s amusement seemed genuine.
“Not necessarily to hire you,” Priya replied, growing sheepish. “I’m just, y’know, looking for an estimate.”
That did it. Agatha burst out laughing, stopped in her tracks. She kept her gun aimed at them, but the barrel wavered.
Priya plowed into Rose, letting go of her hand and practically sweeping her off to the left. Rose stumbled, but Priya kept her from falling, kept her moving. Panic alarms shrieked inside her, and she expected bullets to punch through the vulnerable softness of her back. Expected them, but didn’t wait for them. Her body understood what it took her mind deadly seconds to process, that they were running, trying to escape, that they were about to die.
Gunshots popped and echoed through the forest. Rose felt the shots in her chest, each one slamming into her with sound alone, like standing too close when the fireworks went off. She heard shrapnel blown out of trees, heard bullets hit the dirt. It took only seconds.
As she lunged behind a huge oak, Rose realized Priya had let go of her hand.
She spun in time to see Priya cock her arm back like a pitcher on the mound and let fly with a jagged black rock the size of a baseball. Agatha leveled her pistol and fired. The bullet punched through Priya’s right shoulder, spun her around, droplets of blood spraying the leaves around her.
Too late.
The rock Priya had thrown struck the left side of Agatha’s face. Her head whipped to one side as she staggered backward, caught her boot on a root, tried to break her fall with her gun hand, and cried out in pain as something gave way in hand, or wrist, or fingers.
“Fucking run!” Priya said, clutching at her bloody shoulder as she crashed toward Rose, smashing branches out of her way.
Rose was already running.
Though she tried to fight it, she succumbed to the temptation to look back. She saw Agatha on her knees, cradling her right hand against her body. Blood smeared on the woman’s cheek and stained the beautiful silver of her hair. The tiny killer looked fragile and pitiable, until the moment she turned her head and her gaze tracked them. Even from here, she looked disoriented, unfocused, but Rose felt seen.
Agatha might be down and bleeding, but still Rose felt hunted.
Maeve drifts in and out of the world. Outwardly, she struggles to draw breath, her throat so raw it seems lined with shards of glass, but another part of her feels exultant, ready to open her mouth and scream with pleasure. In that interior place, a shard of Maeve opens its eyes to find herself in a church of rough-hewn stone, torches blazing in sconces on the walls. She glides as if in the midst of a dance, inhaling the oily smoke from those torches and the sweat-stink of worshippers. Her hands dart out, caressing those who chant their prayers, and one by one she silences them.
Infects them.
Their lives are delicious.
Maeve follows a serpentine path among them, slithering contagion. She takes a withered old man by the hands and kisses him on the corner of his mouth, the adoring gesture of a favored granddaughter. She holds his wrinkled cheeks between her hands and watches the glint in his rheumy eyes go dark, watches the plague blossoms rise and burst on the sagging flesh of his throat and forehead, watches the bags beneath his eyes turn black and begin to blister with rot.
People scream in the church. Someone grabs a torch from the wall and brandishes it in her direction. She reaches out, and the haggard old woman thrusts the burning torch at her face. Maeve stops it with an open hand, grasps the oily flames, greasy smoke pluming up from her palm and fingers as they are engulfed in fire. The old woman shrieks at her, eyes wide with ferocity born of terror, yanks the torch from her grip, and thrusts it like a swordsman, right into Maeve’s face.
Her hair ignites.
As flames engulf her head, she grabs hold of the fierce old hag’s face, and the woman sags to her knees, topples to the stone floor, and cracks her skull open.…
In the real world, Maeve wept. Tears slid down her face.
Feverish, she staggered from tree to tree. The wind whipped against her, rain trickling down her back, mixed with sweat from her effort and her disease. Her left hand reached out again, searching for the next tree, but this time it found nothing to grasp. She lost her balance, stumbled forward.
Panic snapped her awake, reality burning almost as much as that dream-fire.
The gorge, she thought, and for an instant she imagined herself flying over the edge. Falling, falling, falling. She imagined impact.
But impact came too soon. Maeve sprawled on her side in the tall grass of a clearing. Rain pelted her, falling harder than ever. She had lost track of her direction, lost track of the gorge, yet it seemed of little importance now. Lying in the wet grass, she realized she must be closer to death than to salvation. Whatever she had hoped to do—hide, think, devise some escape or cure—the time for those hopes had passed.
I’m going to die.
The realization was not unpleasant. It settled into her, wrapped itself around her, and she embraced the idea. She’d killed the BMW driver, though she supposed she ought to be forgiven for that one. And her mother and Logan … the guilt clawed at her, but she knew no god would hold her responsible. But what about now? She felt the thing inside her, that hunger, the sickness, and the voice still whispered there. If she lived, she would surrender eventually, and someone would kill her.
This could only end one way.
Better to die now than to suffer or to kill again.
Maeve pushed herself up to a sitting position and drew her knees up toward her chest. She wrapped her arms behind her head, coughing, trying to get one unfettered breath of mountain air, the smell of rain. Maybe she should just wait there to die?
She smiled bitterly. It had been a foolish thought. Maybe? Where else could she go?
“Mama,” she rasped and began to cough.
A finger of jagged lightning stabbed the gray sky, silent, and habit made her count the seconds until thunder boomed, echoing off the mountain, the sound rolling into the distance. Four seconds. The storm had grown worse.
She glanced up to search the sky for more lightning. As she did, she caught sight of a squat building across the clearing, caught in the shadows cast by trees and storm. Warm yellow light glowed in the two small windows in front. Barely more than a cabin with a wide front porch, it had several picnic tables arrayed in front, and paths worn down to the dirt led from several directions right to the front steps.
Ranger station, she thought, just before she spotted the sign. Even in the storm, the yellow painted words were visible.
Maeve struggled to her feet. She pushed her hands through her soaking hair and squeezed some of the rain out, pushed the whole mess behind her head, away from her face. Somehow, though she felt like never moving again, she straightened up to her full height. She would turn herself over to them. Whoever might be chasing her, they would either kill her or cage her or study what had happened to her, maybe all three in some particular order, but it didn’t matter anymore. She just wanted this to end, and if the ending meant death, at least it would be faster than dying up here, sprawled on the ground in the rain.
She took one step toward the ranger station.
The front door opened.
The ranger didn’t step out, but he held the door with one hand and craned his neck, peering through the rain at her.
“Hey,” he called, “you okay? I spotted you from the window and I thought … You alone? Are you lost?”
Maeve gazed at the silhouetted figure in his pine-green uniform. She saw the other one behind him, a second ranger, an older man who grabbed him by the shoulder. The rain drowned out their conversation, but she watched the pantomime through the rain as the older man gestured toward her, face etched with concern, and the younger one, who had come to the door, looked hesitant.
The younger ranger took a step out onto the porch, the wind sweeping around him, plastering him with rain. “You the one they’re looking for?”
Even from forty feet away, even in the storm, she could see the change in him. A young guy like him, maybe Maeve’s age, did not take a job like this without thinking himself some kind of noble figure. When he had opened the door, he had looked the part, kind and caring. Now suspicion and fear clouded his features, and the fear reminded Maeve of this morning.
The look on her mother’s face as she’d died.
“No,” she whispered.
Maeve started to turn back the way she’d come, but her body seized as if she had been on a leash all along and now her owner had tugged it tight, calling her to heel. A cough erupted from her chest. Black spittle and bloody foam sprayed from her mouth, flecking the tall grass, and in the midst of wheezing, trying to catch her breath, a surge of black hostility flooded her mind. The anger burned her. Its venom tasted bitter in her mouth, and she sneered as she turned toward the ranger station.
The sneer vanished. Her face went slack, then pitiful and pleading, but none of those expressions belonged to her.
“Please,” she called. “Help me.”
No, she thought. But the voice that had come from her lips did not belong to Maeve, and for that moment—just those few seconds—she could not form her own words. The gift of speech had been stolen from her.
She wept, and the tears—at least—were her own.
The hunger came on her even more suddenly than the anger. It had been inside her all along, gnawing, yearning, but now it ripped into her with such power that she clutched at her gut and cried out.
“Son of a bitch,” the young ranger said, striding across the porch and starting down the steps.
“Frankie, wait,” the older one warned.
Frankie glanced over his shoulder. “Call it in, Abe. We can’t just leave her.”
In the doorway, his silhouette darker, taller, wider than Frankie’s, Abe just stood there and watched, worry carved into his features. Frankie strode toward Maeve, and though she did not lick her lips, the temptation existed. The satisfaction and anticipation of watching him approach made her flex her fingers.
No. I don’t want to, she thought.
The voice inside her disagreed. It wanted Frankie in a way that Maeve had never wanted anyone for anything, and that want radiated through her. She can see it in that moment, striding up to the porch and taking Frankie into her arms, caressing his exposed skin while black boils erupt and the cough chokes him, and she tastes his life on her tongue and in the folds of her brain, the tingle of it from toes to fingertips.
“You okay?” he asked again, approaching through the rain.
In her mind, she saw the sorrow and confusion in her mother’s dying eyes, and that seared into her brain, a clarifying image. Maeve snarled as she ripped herself out of its control and turned away. She started to walk, forcing herself, and wondered if she could manage to run.
Distracted by pain and mesmerized by hunger, she barely heard the engine over the rain. Only when the rangers both turned to the right, no longer focused on her, did Maeve notice the droning buzz that grew louder with each tick of her life’s clock.
The buzz belonged to the engine of a dirt bike.
She didn’t have to wonder if this might be the one she’d heard earlier, the twin of the bike ridden by the man who had impaled himself on a fallen tree. The rider saw her and changed course, rear tire slewing through mud. He bent his head low over the handlebars, rain sheeting across him, and he drove straight for her.
Her hands reach toward the rider as he approaches. The buzz of his engine continues, as if originating within the confines of her skull, yet the vision before her shimmers like heat above a roadway and shifts, and she is elsewhere. The tall grass is gone, the mountain and the storm vanish. At her feet lies the twisted corpse of a man whose face is covered with a mask, whose exposed skin is dotted with pustules and bleeding from pores. Though it may only be a part of his costume, by his clothing she believes him some sort of nobility, perhaps even monarchy.
Screams fill the room. The shrieking sweeps over her like the weight of the air just before a storm thunders in. She looks up and sees them coming for her, terrifying phantasms, beaked monstrosities, cloaked shadows, and it’s a moment or two before she recognizes these as merely costumes, like the one worn by the dead prince arrayed on the black marble floor. This is no tomb, as she’d thought a moment ago, but some kind of masquerade ball. It’s a party.
The walls are black. The drapes tied back from the windows are the finest, most elegant black velvet. Only the windows vary in hue. Each glass pane is stained a bloody scarlet, lit from without by tripod candelabras whose flames cast a garish, flickering red light within.
The costumed celebrants rush toward her, their hands outstretched as if to punish her for some crime. She feels a smile stretch her lips, feels her face crack at the corners of her mouth as she reaches out her own hands to greet them. For the first time, she notices those hands, wrapped in rough, yellowed cloth, stained with blood and black effluent. She notices the fingers, bone-thin or perhaps merely bone. Skeletal.
The masquerade envelops her, tears at the fabric that shrouds her body.
As they claw her apart, they begin to cough. To choke. Purple bruises turn to erupting blisters on their skin. Black blood weeps from eyes and ears, and they begin to drop, one by one.
We all fall down, she thinks …
The buzz in her skull made her blink. She reeled and fell to her knees, the sickness overwhelming her at last. Maeve stared down at her hands. For a moment she saw the mummified skeletal fingers, but her vision cleared with another blink and they were only her hands after all. Maeve Sinclair, flesh and blood.
There were three spots on the back of her hand. Small blisters, sores that had appeared within the past hour. Maeve coughed, unable to rise from her knees, and she spat a wad of black phlegm from her throat.
She looked up and found herself in that clearing again. The tall grass, the muddy trails, the rain soaking her clothing. To her left stood the forest ranger station, to her right the dirt bike bore down on her. The rider squinted against the rain, teeth bared. His dark hair plastered his scalp, made him look almost like a corpse himself.
Maeve thought this must be real. She felt the rain, heard the dirt bike’s growl.
She licked her lips, the hunger so bad she would have screamed if the pain in her throat would have let her. Maeve opened her arms as if to embrace the rider. The dirt bike roared toward her, and the rider reached inside his jacket, drawing out a handgun. One hand guiding the bike, he began to take aim, the engine snarling as it began to slow.
Something flashed in her peripheral vision. Brown against the gray light.
The young ranger hurtled through the rain, planted himself in the dirt bike’s path. The rider swerved, one-handed. The front tire went sideways in the mud, the dirt bike slewed, and the rider flew into the air to hit the ground perhaps twenty feet from Maeve. He tucked his body in, protecting his head and his gun hand, skidded in the mud, and started to rise almost immediately. Mud smeared half his face, and his right eye seemed to open behind a wet, dark mask. He looked at her as he reached up to scrape that mud away. His gun dangled in his right hand, also smeared with mud.
Maeve shuddered with anticipation as she staggered toward him, arms outstretched. As he wiped the mud off, the young ranger slammed into him.
The two men went down together. The impact rolled them off the path and into the grass. The wind picked up, the rain slashed down at an angle. The thick humidity of the earlier storm had abated, and Maeve felt a chill now, as if the hot July summer had fled the mountain and surrendered entirely to this storm. She watched the rider and the ranger struggle, saw arms flail and punches land, and then the crack of a gunshot filled the air, momentarily blotting out the shush of the rain and wind.
The older ranger shouted as he came down out of the little cottage they used for their station. He clutched a radio in his right hand, barking into it, reporting on events as they unfolded. With his left hand, he wielded an aluminum baseball bat that certainly wasn’t standard issue for the job.
Grunting with effort, the dirt bike rider tossed aside the young ranger’s body. In that green uniform, the deep red flowing from his gunshot wound soaked in just a little darker than the rain, but Maeve could smell the copper tang of blood in the air.
The rider began to turn, gun still in his fist.
Maeve knelt beside him, gripped his arm before he could take aim. Her other hand cupped around the back of his neck, and she bent quickly to give him a soft peck on the forehead. She tasted the rain and his sweat. He struggled to turn the gun toward her, but a savage cough seized him. He wheezed, trying to catch his breath, and she slipped the gun from his hand and let it hang from her fingers as she rose and started along the path to the east.
A tremor swept through her, part pleasure and part pain. A sound escaped her throat, and she noticed immediately that the rawness, the ragged feeling of broken glass, had vanished. She felt as if she could scream now, as if she might sing. Warmth suffused her. The cold and pain, the sickness, had been leeched from inside her and into the man whose life she had just taken.
She dropped the gun into the tall grass and kept going, feeling strong. Alive.
“Stop!” the older ranger shouted from behind her. “Come back here, lady. You can’t just walk away from … Jesus Christ, what did you do to Frankie?”
Maeve hesitated. Rotated her head to look at him. He reminded her of Jeff Bridges, the actor who always looked like he’d just woken from a bender. As strong and healthy as she felt, her fingers still twitched. A little knot of hunger growled in her chest. A longing that had quickly grown familiar to her, as much a part of her as the beat of her own heart.
“Run,” she whispered, halfheartedly. Then she shouted it. “Run!”
She forced herself to turn away and take her own advice. Tall grass whipped at her. The soft, rain-soaked ground squelched underfoot as she ran for the trees.
The old ranger barked after her, screaming commands as if he thought she might actually obey them. A little voice deep in her brain told her she ought to do exactly that. She recognized it as the voice of the original Maeve, the one who had ceased to exist this morning. The other voice, the louder one, the darker one, demanded that she turn around, go back, and get the old ranger and eat his life. Consume him. Infect him.
But Maeve strode on. She forced herself to quicken her pace, running from the old ranger as much as she ran from the voices in her head.
Up ahead, the woods were dark. The trunks of trees looked almost like a shadow army, waiting in the rain.
Two of those dark forms shifted, and Maeve assumed she must be hallucinating again, until the first one stepped out of the trees and she saw the black, glistening armor, and knew that her troubles were not over. The soldiers had come for her.
Relief swept through her, despite the roar of that new voice. The one that yearned for life, lusted for death.
The two black-clad soldiers aimed their guns at her and began to shout her name, ordering her to raise her hands above her head. There was nowhere for Maeve to run.
A smile curved her lips, but it was not her own smile. That grin belonged to something else.