ROXBURGH STOOD OVER the swallow’s twisted corpse. It lay beside a crude fire in a little circle of pale feathers, flies swirling above. Lifting the body on the point of his knife, he watched blood well from its solitary wound and spill over his tattooed hands.
Pellet gun, he thought. Bloody kids.
He breathed deeply, blinking through the pain in his leg. Lundy trembled at his feet, teeth bared, growling so deeply, he heard it through the soles of his boots.
“It’s all right, lass,” he said, still out of breath. “It’s all right.”
He switched his pipe across his mouth, then moved it back again. The doll’s footsteps had vanished. But it was nearby—the trees were empty of birdsong.
It had bitten him—there was a dark, sticky hole in his calf muscle. It had borne down on him with impossible speed, leaping at him with its little mouth. And when Biscay had thrown herself in front of Roxburgh, the dead-smelling thing had bitten her neck.
He blinked, tried to focus, clutched the dog’s limp body to his chest as the flies climbed over him.
“These is my woods,” he said aloud, spitting out a shred of tobacco and swiping as the flies covered Biscay’s wounds in buzzing slabs, then swarmed over his face, landing in his eyes and mouth.
Roxburgh stumbled, and might have fallen but for a distant cry that came through the silence like a javelin.
He ran again, Biscay swinging loosely in his hands, Lundy tight to his heels. He heard the voice again, and scrambled on through a muddy gorge, snapping two shells into the barrels of his gun.
He raised the weapon, ready for the old offerings, for the puppet and the doll: but found instead a boy—a huge, red-faced, Mohawked boy, his face shiny with tears—swinging a pellet gun like a bat, and screaming.