Mr. Connor ran through the hall, with Harold close behind him; I sprinted to catch up, but they were too fast. We rounded a corner into the main hallway to find a group of three men in bulletproof vests—useless against the furious force of nature that had assailed them on the lawn—struggling to bar the shattered glass entrance with couches. Mr. Connor crouched low, but Harold roared and barreled forward in a rage.
“Stop!” I shouted, but he either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. The agents turned around just as Harold reached them, but they were holding a couch and couldn’t defend themselves. Harold dropped one with a punch to the face, kicked another solidly in the stomach, and turned to grapple with the third.
“Rain!” I shouted; I turned to look for her, and she was close behind. “I told you not to hurt them!”
“I’m not,” she said, and took cover in a doorway. “He’s been controlled so long he just … It’s instinct. He’s not under my control right now, but he’s not under his own, either. All he can do is defend me.”
“Make him stop!”
“He’s dead already,” said Rain, and I turned back to see that it was true—the agents had recovered, dropping the couch in a broken heap and raising their weapons. Harold sunk his teeth into the shoulder of the man he was fighting, and when that man fell to the ground with a scream the other two men shot Harold a dozen times or more.
“No!” I shouted. “We have to stop!”
The agents turned toward us, and I saw Agent Harris standing in the middle of the group. They raised their guns, and Harris called out: “Nobody move!”
“I need a muse,” Mr. Connor hissed, and raised up to run. I grabbed him, but he slapped at me with his hand—not slapped, but slashed, for his fingers had all elongated into eight-inch razors of yellowed bone. They raked my arm, as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpels, and I fell backward as my skin opened up in four long lines. The cuts were deep, but so sharp I couldn’t even feel them. Mr. Connor launched himself at the agents, and they fired back in an overwhelming volley; I dropped to the floor, covering my head with my hands and praying that none of the bullets flew wide enough to hurt me. The sound of the gunfire was deafening, drowning out even the screams. I think I screamed when something grabbed my legs, but it was lost in the noise, and no one could hear anything. I kept my hands tight over my head and felt myself get yanked helplessly back into the darkness.
More hands grabbed me, pulling me farther; I slapped at them, but there were too many. When the shooting stopped I looked up, expecting the tooth-filled maw of a ravenous Withered, but I saw only Jasmyn, wide-eyed and panting, trying to sit me up against a wall. Rain was next to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked, but my ears were still ringing too loudly to hear my own voice, let alone her answer.
“They will never listen to us,” said Rain, though it wasn’t her voice but her mind, speaking directly to mine. Her thoughts entered mine like dragons in a medieval village, ancient and overwhelming, bringing destruction even where it wasn’t intended; I felt memories and emotions and even reason corroding at her mental touch, toppled as casually as a wooden hut caught by the flip of a great, forked tail.
“Let go of my mind,” I shouted.
“Your hearing will return in a moment,” said Ren, for now there was no other name for her but the primeval one—the mother of darkness. Her words rang through my mind like wailing spirits. “We need to get out of here.”
“They’ll only keep chasing us,” I thought back. I felt like I was kneeling before an angry god. “We have to talk to them. Harris is there—let me reason with him.”
“After all of this?” Her mental sneer scraped across my consciousness.
“They’ll pin the mutilations on Mr. Connor,” I thought, “and the Dark Lady stuff on Dana—they’ll conflate that name with the drownings, just like I did. But they don’t know about you. I’ll save them later if I can, if I can find a way to reason with Harris, but we can save you now. Don’t do anything suspicious or dangerous or supernatural and we can still get out of this.”
“Jasmyn can,” thought Ren. “And you. But not until after they cuff us and search us for weapons. At that point, there are certain things I can’t hide. I’m too obviously Withered.”
“So what will you do?” I asked.
Ren didn’t answer, and I heard a distant shout. My hearing was coming back.
“I don’t know,” she thought at last. “I could fight back, and I could win.”
“But you haven’t yet,” I said. That meant more than I dared to hope.
“No I haven’t,” she said at last.
“John!” I heard the voice, cutting through the ringing that still filled my physical ears. Ren pulled her thoughts away from mine, leaving me alone again in my own head, and the world seemed to snap back into focus. “John!” the voice shouted again. I took a deep breath, feeling a thousand pounds lighter than a moment ago. “John Cleaver, are you there?”
It was Harris’s voice. I nodded, taking another breath, and then shouted back. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here. Are you okay?”
“Are you on their side?” he demanded.
I looked around and saw that Ren, Jasmyn, and I were holed up in the chapel, hiding behind a low wooden pew; the wide double door was riddled with bullets, and one side of it was hanging from a single hinge. Agent Harris’s voice floated in from the hallway, probably still crouching in the shelter of their makeshift barricade.
“I’m trying to stop this fight,” I said.
“Then you’re on their side,” he said. “They’re the enemy, John, they need to be killed. There’s no room for treaties here.”
“Then the circle will never end,” I said. “One side has to give.”
“It’s not going to be us,” shouted Harris.
“That’s okay,” I said, “the other side already did. Now all you’ve got to do is stop shooting.”
Harris’s voice rose a few tones in disbelieving anger. “Are you kidding me? That thing you were with has already killed one of my men and dragged another off to who knows where—and that’s not even counting what Hurricane Katrina is doing to the rest of the team outside.”
“She’s trying to save us,” I said. “It’s complicated, but her heart’s in right place.”
“I can’t wait to find out where Agent Gray’s heart’s going to be when that skinny guy gets through with him,” snarled Harris. “Do you think he’ll balance it on top of the guy’s head, or maybe carve it open like a turnip rose first? Make a nice centerpiece or something.”
“I tried to stop him!” I shouted. “And maybe all we can do is kill him, and if that’s how it has to be then—”
“Maybe?” cried Harris. “John! He’s killed three agents so far, and who knows how many more that we don’t know about. He’s been going for ten thousand years.”
I closed my eyes. “People change.”
“That’d be great if they did,” said Harris, “but when? I have a responsibility to keep people safe, and I can’t do that by letting a dangerous murderer go free. The circle can’t end on him, John. That should be as clear to you as to anybody. And that thing outside can’t end it, either, no matter how much you talk about her trying to do the right thing, because anyone who thinks that killing a dozen faithful law-enforcement officers counts as doing the right thing does not get to make any more of those decisions. They can’t. And that third one…” he said, and I shook my head: he knew there was a third Withered. Ren shifted behind me, and I turned just in time to see her creep backward into the shadows. I clenched my jaw, trying to think of a way out of this. Everything was falling apart.
Harris continued his tirade: “… the third Withered, the mind controller, she tried to kill me once already. She tried to use me to kill my partner. She tried to kill you, John! For crying out loud, what does it take to piss you off anymore? Can’t you see that these things are evil? That they need to be destroyed? I know you’re trying to turn over a new leaf and be all good and righteous and I respect that; I applaud it. I think it’s exactly the direction your life needs to go. But self-defense is a thing. You can’t stalk someone and murder them for no reason, but when you see someone else doing it, it is your right—it is your responsibility—to step in and stop them. As an officer of the law or a citizen of it. And if that means killing the aggressor you do it, and that is right and legal and moral. The Withered are threatening the world and everybody in it merely by their existence; they kill and hurt and torture as a matter of course. It’s as natural to them as breathing, and people like that cannot be allowed to live.”
He stopped talking, though his words seemed to hang in the air like ghosts. I looked at Jasmyn, and she looked back. Terrified but determined. Ren was gone.
I looked back at the broken doorway. “Does that mean you would have killed me?”
He waited several seconds before answering: “That’s different, John.”
“No it’s not.”
“You’re a human being!”
“So are they.”
“They’re killers!”
“So am I.”
“You’re a sociopath, John. You don’t feel the difference between right and wrong, but you know it. You make choices to follow it, no matter how bad things get. They don’t do that.”
I smiled. “Then why aren’t you being mind controlled right now?”
Agent Harris said nothing for a while. I crawled closer to Jasmyn, and she grabbed my hand and held it fiercely.
“Is she here?” asked Harris.
“She is,” I said. “I don’t know where, but she’s definitely close enough to hurt you if she wanted to. But she’s not.”
“Then she’s planning something,” said Harris. “This whole building is a trap.”
“Occam’s razor,” I said. “Why use an elaborate trap when she could just make you all shoot yourselves in a couple of seconds?”
He paused again, then shouted back: “Are you armed?”
“No.”
“Then why are we shouting?”
“Because you don’t believe me,” I said.
A moment later Harris peeked his head around the edge of the blasted door. I stood up and pulled Jasmyn with me. Harris stepped inside and pointed his gun at us.
“Jasmyn Shahi?”
“I’m not armed either,” she said, and I saw that she kept her cool well enough not to raise her arms at the sight of his gun. “And I’m not a Withered or whatever the hell.”
“Hell is close enough,” said Harris. Now that he was close I could see a bad cut on the side of his head, and a patch of purple skin and dried blood around it. “I’m going to pat you both down just to be sure.”
“Oh, my word,” I said.
“I’m not an idiot, John.”
“I just gave you a whole speech about breaking the cycle of violence,” I said, though I let go of Jasmyn’s hand and spread my arms and legs wide. “I’m not hiding a shower curtain in my back pocket, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He patted my legs and chest with a sneer. “I bet you’ve been saving that one all friggin’ night, haven’t you?”
“The woman we’re looking for is named Ren,” I said.
“The demon queen?” He satisfied himself that I was not armed and moved on to Jasmyn. She didn’t look remotely comfortable letting a man touch her, but she bit her tongue and stared at the wall. I let Harris finish before I started talking again; Jasmyn jogged several steps away the instant she was allowed to.
“Ren doesn’t want to hurt anyone,” I said. “But there’s only three of them left and they feel kind of backed against a wall. Understandably, I think.”
Harris looked up as we heard more shouts and shooting in the distance. “I think our feelings are pretty damn understandable as well.”
“Everyone’s feeling are,” I said. “That’s what makes this so hard.”
“I don’t hear any more shooting,” said Jasmyn. “Or screaming.”
I nodded. “You think Dana’s gone?”
“Is that the hurricane girl?” asked Harris.
“Yeah.”
“She’s gone,” he said, “or she’s come inside.”
“Then we need to find Mr. Connor,” said Jasmyn. “We might still be able to save the agent he took.”
Harris sucked in a breath, considering his options and obviously hating them all. “Yeah,” he said at last, “you’re probably right.”
“You’re way too optimistic,” I said, “but you’re right anyway.” I started walking toward the door. “Mr. Connor’s building another muse; he needs them for anything deeper than computational thought.”
“What about Ren?” asked Harris. “I don’t want to leave a demon queen unaccounted for.”
“If she was attacking us we’d know,” I said, and I caught just the hint of an involuntary shudder that ran through Harris’s head and shoulders as I said it. He’d felt that same horrible thing I had. But Ren still wasn’t attacking.
We went into the hall, and Jasmyn picked up the rifle from the fallen FBI agent. Harris raised his eyebrow. “You know how to use that?”
“This is small-town America,” said Jasmyn. “Half the dates I’ve been on have been to a gun range.”
“Fair enough,” said Harris.
“Did you see which way he went?” I asked.
“This hallway,” said Harris, pointing toward the embalming room. We followed the hall cautiously, listening for sounds, but heard nothing. I checked in the embalming room; there were wet footprints on the tile, but no people or bodies.
“What else is down this hallway?” asked Harris.
“The crematorium,” said Jasmyn.
“Awesome,” Harris said, and shuddered again.
We crept softly down the hall, poking our heads into each room as we passed it—the restroom, the coatroom, a custodial closet—but Mr. Connor wasn’t in any of them. I looked for wet footprints in the carpet but couldn’t see any. No shouts or cries rang out in the distance; no bodies lay bleeding or soaking on the floor. We were alone in the house of the dead. With three Withered demons.
We approached the crematorium slowly, the last room at the end of the hall. The door hung open, and we could see now the faint hint of red and the subtle roar of flame. Someone had turned it on. I waved Harris and Jasmyn back a few steps, and peeked into the room as quietly as I could.
Blood covered the floor and walls, and a totem made of human flesh rose from the center of the floor.
Agent Gray’s body had been disassembled and the pieces had been carefully stacked and balanced in a grotesque new configuration. The torso, headless and limbless, sat at the base, with a careful arrangement of handless arms and footless legs forming an intricate web of arches and buttresses above it. Within this web was the head, too concealed to see clearly, and sprouting from it were hands and fingers and feet and toes, spraying out from the edges like leaves and spikes and horns. I couldn’t tell how they were attached. On one side of the room the oven burned fiercely, bathing the room in a hellish orange glow, and next to it, cross-legged on the ground, sat Mr. Connor, his fingers steepled solemnly in front of his face. Directly across from him, in the dancing light of the fire, the corpse-made monument cast a writhing, rippling shadow against the wall.
Mr. Connor watched that shadow and dreamed.
“Don’t come in unless you really want to see this,” I said, and then stepped further into the room. Agent Harris followed, his face grim and flat. A moment later, hesitant and wary, Jasmyn came in as well. She balked when she saw the display, but didn’t back out. Death was her life now, and corpses had become so clinical they couldn’t faze her. Even this one.
“What do you see?” asked Mr. Connor.
I looked at the body, at the muse he had so carefully constructed, and once again I had the unnerving thought that it meant something, that it was saying something in a language that my head or my heart or my soul could speak, even if I, myself, couldn’t remember a word of it. It was a hieroglyph, or a pictogram, or something even more primitive; it was a trail marker, flat stones stacked up to show where one hunter had passed before, so that another could follow behind. Slashes cut into a tree. I looked at my own arm, sliced with four neat lines by one killer, and raked with a chaos of scratches by another. Ancient carvings, to mark the path.
“It’s not true,” I said.
Mr. Connor stared at the shadows. “Nothing is.”
“It’s marking a path,” I said, “but the path isn’t true—it isn’t the right path just because it’s marked. We don’t have to follow it.”
Mr. Connor’s voice was low, like a drumbeat in the distance. “There’s only one path now. The only path we’ve ever had.” He rose to his feet, fluid and almost majestic in the firelight. “This is why I need the muse—to tell me what I see.”
“What do you see?” asked Jasmyn.
“Dancing shadows,” said Mr. Connor. “Real and unreal at once.”
“Like the Withered,” said Harris.
“Like everything,” said Mr. Connor, and then the bones slid out from his fingertips, as thin and precise as a sculptor’s tools. “I grew up in a cave, you know. Before the ritual, when I was still a child. It doesn’t mean anything, but this made me think of it.”
“We can get out of this,” I said, watching his claws warily, putting myself between him and the others. “We can make this right.”
“The only way out is down,” he said, and then he leapt toward me with a hiss. Harris and Jasmyn both fired their weapons, deafening me again, but the bullets simply punched through him and sparked against the cement wall behind, and Mr. Connor slashed at me with his blades. I tumbled backwards, falling to the ground, and Mr. Connor descended toward me with a soundless howl, but he never landed. A burst of wind filled the room, catching him up and surrounding him with a torrent of air and water. Dana had come. She held him in the air, invisible and intangible and impervious to his flailing claws, and then the water condensed out of the air and covered his head. He fought and slashed and kicked and screamed, but no sound came out; he clawed at his own throat, desperate for air, but the only thing constricting it was water, and all he did was slash his own face, his own skin, his own neck and throat and sinew. Water and blood leaked out only to flow back in, forced through him by the wind, and then his struggles grew weaker and his arms fell and then he stopped altogether. And then it wasn’t blood leaking from his wounds but soulstuff—ash and grease and tar, as black as the darkest shadow. He crumbled before our eyes, shriveling in on himself at the heart of the raging storm. And when the storm suddenly abated, it wasn’t a body that fell, but a slick, runny blob. It splashed against the floor, spattering us with sludge both warm and cold at once.
Mr. Connor was dead.