Lilith Saintcrow
Usually I stayed away from Pammy’s work tent.
There’s nothing good about me being near tarot cards, or crystal balls, or any of that junk. That’s why Pammy took the Madama Illyria spot, intoning portentous “fortunes” to idiots and draining each one a little, a very little. Not enough to notice, and if they did, well, lots of people had headaches and lethargy after a carnival.
Me, I was a Continuing Attraction. The Animal Girl. The shifting was easy—sometimes scales, sometimes fur, always teeth. So easy, in fact, that it was my incognito form—what you’d call human—that took effort now.
Which explains why I was wandering around during setup, in the gloaming, hat pulled low and shoulders slumped, sweating and suppressing the tickle of tonight’s form all over me like a wire brush just slightly scraping, when I heard that word raising little devils along the dusty alleys between the tents.
Midiaaaaaan, it breathed.
Pammy was running her mouth again. Was she drunk? Baphomet be praised, but each time she got incandescent she started babbling about … home.
Or what used to be home.
I cut into the alley between RVs and trailers for the punkers, thin metal coated with a layer of dust that would hide any sparkle. Summer in the asshole below the Bible Belt, with a nice long drought to make you choke on all the yellow dust, billing ourselves as a family-friendly show. Even Pammy had to pray loudly to Jesus before gazing into her crystal ball. The smart ones, maybe, could hear the sarcasm in her earnestness, but if they were that smart, they kept their mouths shut.
Especially if they noticed how thin Pammy was, and how hungry-looking, and how her teeth were just a little too sharp. She didn’t have to take a mouthful, neither of us had to, but there wasn’t much around to keep us from doing it.
Except each other.
Midiaaaaaaaan. Again, skipping through the lanes, snapping the tent ropes taut, rocking the trailers just enough to make them creak. I shivered, scales rippling up my skin but retreating when I took a deep breath.
They itched, especially around my ribs. Which stuck out more than they should. Meatskin stretched too tightly over bone, and sometimes the shadows underneath looked like claws rippling under silk, just on the edge of puncturing. Sometimes I made a supermarket run and came back with a bag of raw meat, and that held us for a while.
I hadn’t done that for a couple of weeks.
The sign wasn’t out front, so she wasn’t with a client. I pushed the flap open, blinking against a sudden gust of grit-laden wind, and ducked in.
Sudden, balmy dimness. Even twilight hurts our eyes sometimes. She had incense burning, a sharp exotic bite that immediately made me want to sneeze. My nose wrinkled, whiskers trying to prickle out on my cheeks, and I saw her at the table with a sharp-faced man.
He wore a linen suit and a fedora, as if he were on an old black and white rerun. Nose like a knife blade, and cheekbones under stretched-tight parchment skin. He reeked of nervousness, and a thread of that other scent, like music in the dark.
Nightbreed.
He sat in the old wooden client chair, the angle of its back just a fraction too acute, forcing whoever was in it to lean forward a little. Which he did, elbows on the table, a cigarillo fuming in one limp, wax-white hand. It smelled sweetish, and nasty. He looked vaguely familiar, but only vaguely.
Pammy, her dark hair a rat’s nest and her eyes—just a little too big, just a little too dark—heavily outlined with kohl. I don’t know who made the rule that all fortune-tellers have to dress in Romany drag, but on the circuit it’s necessary. So it was the peasant shirt and the long flowing skirts, the beads and bangles and glimmers of mellow gold, and the peacock-eye shawl she kept wrapped as high as she could.
Things went easier when she acted like she wanted to cover up the scars. And the stumps on her back.
“Cal.” Pammy grinned, and the glamour slipped for a moment. With it on, she was just a frail, older lady with white, sharp teeth.
Without it, her essential difference shone out, and the teeth, while just as sharp, were nicotine-yellow.
“What are you doing?” I tied the tent flaps, my fingers glimmering as luminescent scales crawled over them.
“Come meet him.” She drummed her claws on the tabletop, and the crystal ball wobbled uneasily under the hank of spangled velvet she used to keep its eye closed. “Our savior.”
“We had one, remember?” I stalked over the threadbare rugs piled on the tent’s faintly mildewed floor. “Didn’t work out too well.”
“Calpurnia.” The man’s head turned, a fluid, predatory movement. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Can’t say the same.” I halted just short of the table and slumped there, hands stuffed deep in my pockets. “What do you want?”
“We’re gathering again.” He didn’t look quite at me or Pammy, just at some vague point to my left. “A new city. A new flame.”
“Keep your voice down.” A shudder passed through me, and Pammy hissed out a rasping, rumbling obscenity. Two nervous steps away, sidling, before I could force the claws to retract. My hands tingled. “Are you from … him?”
“Cabal? No.” He said it so casually, I sidestepped a little more, ending up almost behind Pammy. “He is no true prophet.”
“I saw—” Pammy began, and I shushed her. She subsided, but only grudgingly. If she started telling that story again—the fire, the fleeing, the gunfire, the dying—she’d be off the whole night.
“Who are you?” I kept my hands in my pockets, aching and trembling with the claw-tingle.
He grinned, a death’s-head wrinkling itself up with sheer good humor. “I come from Seraphine.”
Another cold, dark thrill all through bone and breath.
Her. Of course she’s survived.
I stalked to the curtain, pushed it aside, and dragged the other chair across the rugs, clumsy with the shift fighting me. He expected to see something other than normal, and fighting the current of that expectation was hard swimming.
Pammy whisked the crystal ball into her lap with a sigh. I spun the chair, settled down spraddle-legged, and rested my chin on the high back. “Talk.”
* * *
That night, in the trailer, she exhaled a long satisfied sound, creaking and cracking as she stretched swollen joints and unfurled the wispy, scorched stubs protruding from her bare back. Thick, pearlescent salve gathered between my fingers, I worked it into leathery skin.
“I don’t like it.” Very quietly.
“You never liked anything to do with her.” Pammy cackled, but softly. “That pretty face of hers.”
Irritation rasped a flush of scales down my arms, but my hands stayed soft. Extra fingers sprouted, a sweet piercing sensation, the shifting reflecting exactly what would feel best. Still, fingertip-claws prickled, and I knew she felt it.
She sighed again, her hair writhing against itself with dry whispering sounds. The take had been good for her tonight. For me too—they paid at the door to see the Animal Girl, and it was easy to be what they expected. Some of their darker imaginings felt … familiar. While they were dazed by the pheromones my glands pumped out, Jimmy the hawker took up a collection for the poor Animal Girl.
Some crowds were better than others.
Still, there was the dissatisfaction. After dark, within Midian’s circuit, any of the gawkers would have been meat. Chase them outside, and you could eat your fill. Some, like Peloquin, stretched the law to its breaking point, feeding darker hungers.
Some didn’t.
Pammy scratched under her left breast, scraping with flat spatulate nails. “You’re quiet.”
What she meant was that I hadn’t said anything about staying or going, one way or the other.
“We shouldn’t have come down on this part of the circuit.” I touched one of the ruined stumps; it quivered. Once, she had been able to spread a blanket of black feathers over both of us. Now, I kept rubbing the salve in, and the fading luminescence of Baphomet’s blessing in its oiliness was the same as our starving by inches.
She had screamed when the fire took her, and I remembered very little afterward. They expected monsters, those who broke our home, and so the shifting made me …
No, not the shifting. I did it. Later, when I dragged her from the cemetery, stone angels garish-painted with orange and yellow, the screams of the armed men as some of us fought back echoed along with hers. Leave me, she had wailed. Leave me to diiiiiiiie!
“The take is good.” She moved, restlessly, and I knew she understood what I meant.
“We’re always five minutes away from another burning, down here.” And no Berserkers to set free to save us.
“Even praying to Jay-sus before every show.” Her derisive snort steamed the windows. Under her skirt, her feathered haunches would be twitching, her horn-tough feet with their rings and claws working. Shoes for her were always expensive, and her claws sliced them if she got agitated. “Stupid.”
We must remember, Lylesburg always said. We were gentle, once.
So gentle that most of the tribe hadn’t even fought back when the militia came. Their guns, and the stink of their fear. It took him releasing the old ones, the mad ones, for some of us to survive, to flee.
“We could find Cabal.” I worked along the burn scars, pressing in where she liked it. “We’re still of the Moon.”
“Will he take us in?” High and breathless, childlike. She shivered, and I remembered her spread ink-black and paper-sharp against a full moon, rising over Midian on a flurry of straining wingbeats. She was so light; it was how I had brought us both out of the fire. The shifting on me denied injury, because I didn’t expect to burn.
“You, he will.”
“And you?”
“I don’t know.” I had broken their fragile bodies, and snarled as the blood spattered. I had always been more of Peloquin’s persuasion than Lylesburg’s. But maybe that was only because of the orphanage and the chains.
“Will Seraphine? A new Midian, he said.”
“Maybe she has Baphomet. Or pieces of…” Perhaps Cabal was even dead, and Baphomet’s remains in Seraphine’s slender white hands.
The nameless man had those hands.
“I won’t go into any Midian without you.” Flat and toneless. Muscle flickered in her back, the stumps twitching.
My throat filled with something scorch-hot. “Pammy—”
“I won’t.” She shook her head, and her rasping hair flickered into life for a moment, fat snakes writhing. “You saved me.”
Do you remember what flying was like? I couldn’t ask her that, so I simply worked more salve into the scars.
“Cal?”
“Mmmh.” I added up our savings, balanced the likely state of the truck engine against them, and decided. “We should leave here anyway. We’ve stayed too long. Even Jimmy’s getting nervous.” Maybe he even regrets hiring us.
“He can’t complain about the take.” Pammy yawned, luxuriously. Now that I’d decided, she would settle into resting quiescence.
“Still.” I capped the salve jar. There wasn’t much left. “At least the Breed smelled right.” Even though he insisted he had no name. Who does that?
“It could all be fake.” She shivered, skin rippling as once again the burned stumps tried to flex further.
I shut my eyes for a moment, wishing I could be the one asking for reassurance. “If it is, we’ll find something else.”
* * *
Our truck engine roused in gray predawn hush, creeping past the sleepers on either side. A carnival obeys its own schedule; on nontraveling days you have an hour or two before the sun rises to vanish.
If you have to.
I drove, because Pammy’s feet … well, the pedals were a bit small for her. Also, I’m less sensitive to that great glare the meatskins call day.
She was silent next to me, propped against the towels and blankets I carefully arranged around her each time. Dust rose in silvery plumes until we turned onto blacktop, still warm from yesterday. No air-conditioning, but both our windows down just enough to provide a breeze. Wet heat, the type that slicks the skin and makes the tongue thick, not the dry oven-bake of the desert. Pammy descended into her dozing, twitching sleep—she was more comfortable hanging in a hammock, still a poor substitute for her old perch.
I drove, and remembered.
Tunnels below the cemetery, a honeycomb of delving in crumbling stone. Lylesburg said the will of Baphomet kept the tunnels from collapsing, but where was the spirit when the invaders came? And he—Cabal, once Boone, the most hated syllable among the tribes of the Moon.
Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. Boone was dead. Cabal was different, they said, for all that he was in the same body. Cabal had the bones of Baphomet and was looking for a new home for the survivors of the shipwreck his former self had brought upon us.
First the tribes were orphaned when the meatskins turned against us, long in the ago. Each new generation of us was cast out from their daylight world, in one way or another. For Pammy, it was when the feathers came.
For me, it was at birth. Then there was the orphanage and the chain, the dank basement so I wouldn’t be seen by the parents coming to choose their children. For a long time I wished I were one of the chosen, wished I could be taken to a daylight home.
Until Seraphine told me about Midian.
A child with long inky hair and glass-fragile bones, she was thought attractive by the meatskins but too likely to require medical care for adoption. When she eventually had to use the long metal canes to walk, so tiptap carefully, the taunts and teasing sprouted like mushrooms. Her face turned round and doughy, her hands turned into limp wax-white gloves, and her dark eyes began to burn.
Midian, she whispered to me in the dark of the basement. There, I’ll be a princess. I’ll walk.
I was useful, so she would guide us. I never knew how she’d learned of sanctuary’s existence, or of its location, but she did. We survived the trip and were taken in, and it was a shock to find that the shift made me more valuable to them than her fragility.
Baphomet did not mend her bones, either.
As soon as the sun rose, a white glare in the east, I slid dark sunglasses on. Pammy’s snoring deepened, and by the time we crossed the state line I was already contemplating how Seraphine was likely to greet us both.
* * *
Long ribbons of highway, gas stations where we paid cash, bought junk masquerading as meatskin food, and hunched our shoulders against stares. At least with the carnival we were part of a herd expected to be strange. There was some comfort in hiding among a mass, even of them.
After the first day we traveled at night. The days we spent in the trailer, Pammy in her hammock and me in my narrow bunk; I would wake at dusk to her chirping as she fried eggs and ate them six at a time.
I never openly mentioned the irony of her gobbling so many.
No raw meat, none of the energy-charge from a crowd of gawkers. We were both hungry, in that way meatskins never know. At least in Midian Baphomet fed us. Though Peloquin and his ilk wanted more. Hot blood and struggling prey, forgetting what we had once been.
Did it matter? Forget or remember, we were hungry now.
It was dead midnight on the seventh day when I found the exit—well, “exit” was too kind a word. A two-lane highway, rolling through forsaken mountains, pines and firs pressing close on either side, and the turnoff looked just like a long scar of gravel for a desperate trucker to use. At its end, however, there was a sharp right-hand turn onto a rutted dirt track.
We jounced along this for a few minutes, the trailer rattling behind us, the headlights a white smear as more dust rose. This wasn’t the yellow sandy cake the carnival had been swimming in, but a floury glittering screen.
He coalesced out of the dark and the headlights, between one moment and the next. The linen suit was exactly the color of the dust, his hands loose wriggling worms, but the hat was gone, revealing indeterminate, closely cropped hair. His eyes were holes of darkness, and beside me, Pammy let out a soft sigh.
“At least we’re on the right track,” I muttered, and she elbowed me.
He turned on his heel and set off up the dirt track. We inched along, his speed matching the truck’s idle creeping, his back bisected by one large crease in the linen, a knifecrack of shadow. Up in zigzags, and up, and up. Each turn was hairpin, and soon the trees choked close, their branch-fingers brushing the trailer’s side, a lover’s caress.
It took a long while, maybe an hour, for the vegetation to draw away. We crept out into a wide half circle of more gravel and flour-dust, and on the other side was a large sloped barnlike shape. The moon had gone down, so all we saw was weatherbeaten wooden planks, a few boarded holes for windows, and the front door, its double leaves flung wide.
Behind it, the mountain rose, a dark bulk against a star-riven sky. The moon had gone down, and our doors slammed loudly in the hush.
There comes a time past midnight when even wild animals are silent.
Pammy’s foot-claws scraped gravel as she scratched, luxuriously. Weeds had once forced their way up through the plain of crunched rock, but they were yellowed, blasted where they stood. I took my hat off, shaking out long, fine changecolor hair. Part black, part orange, part other colors, it was the one thing that never shifted.
I unwrapped my scarf, my sweat-damp neck breathing freely and flushing with little pinfeathers. You’d think scales would help me stay cool, but they don’t. They just get itchy.
I slid out of my jacket, tossed it in through the open window. My tank top was ancient and yellowed, but it didn’t matter. Prickling ran across my bare arms, the changes moving across them before settling on smooth honeybrown skin, even though I never tanned. Pinfeathers moved uneasily over my cheeks and throat, rising on little bumps. After so long walking around muffled except in the hot close confines of a tent or the trailer, the nakedness of exposure, however welcome, was still … disturbing.
There was a pale glimmer in the dark between the doors. The nameless man glided silently up rickety stairs you could pose an extended family on for an interminable photo on a sun-gilded afternoon.
I glanced at Pammy, who stared, rapt, at that shimmer in the door’s cave.
The smear of paleness resolved into a too-tall, stick-thin womanshape. She stepped out, onto the porch, and starshine was lost in the inkwell of her hair.
Seraphine … walked.
“Welcome to New Midian,” she crooned, and beside me, Pammy began to weep.
* * *
Stupid, and careless. I was stupid to not ask more questions. Pammy was stupid to believe so wholeheartedly.
I halted at the foot of the stairs. “Sera.”
“Cal.” A slight tilt of her head. She probably thought it looked regal, but really it just reminded me of the round-faced child she’d been, pasty and burning with sullen, slinking rage. “He found you.”
The nameless man passed her without a word, vanishing into the dark maw of the house. It was a house, a large one. Who would build it up here?
Who cared?
“Thought he was looking for any of the tribes.” We locked gazes, again, Seraphine’s dark and mine … whatever it was. The shift responded, pinfeathers and scales retreating, meatskin form settling on me with the weight of her will.
Did she expect me to look like one of them, or was it just that we’d been children together? Her with her glass bones and me with scales and hair and claws coming in unpredictable waves.
“He was. But I’ve spoken of you often.” Her smile wasn’t pleasant, but I suppose mine wasn’t either.
Pammy scraped tears away with the flat of her hand. “Is this the entrance? To New Midian? Is it really true?”
“It is.” Seraphine’s smile was supposed to be gentle, maybe. It showed her teeth far too much for my comfort. “Come on in, Pammy.”
Pammy’s claw-feet scraped against the stairs. The blackened stubs on her back twitched, muscle flickering as she balanced. Up, and up again, and she passed by Seraphine without a look back. Which meant I had to follow, stepping on the groaning, worn-smooth wood. Holes in the porch roof let fitful starshine leak through, and the blackness through the door was a balm and a promise at once.
I stopped, shoulder-to-shoulder with Seraphine. She facing the world, me turned toward this New Midian. “Am I welcome?”
A slight, disdainful, chilling little laugh. “Very.” Seraphine moved slightly, and for a dizzying moment I was nine years old again, listening to that laugh. “Very welcome, Calpurnia.”
It smells wrong, I realized, just as a stunning blow smashed against my head. Seraphine laughed again.
“After all,” she continued, Pammy’s terrified scream echoing oddly behind the words, “I am very hungry.”
* * *
“Cal.” A sharp hissing whisper. Blood caking my face, everything hurt. “Wake up. Cal!”
I groaned.
A frantic jabbing at my ribs. My head rang. What the hell?
“Cal, wake the fuck up.” Pammy sobbed in a breath, and I jolted fully into myself. Blinking away crusted blood, I scrambled up to hands and knees, searching for a wall to put my back to.
I didn’t find one. I found iron bars as thick as my forearm, and a wretched stink, and sterile dirt that hadn’t seen light in a long, long time. And Pammy in the cage next to me, the faint gaseous light from above painting shadows on her face.
No, not shadows. Bruises, deep and fresh.
I coughed, rackingly. Spat to the side—the shift twinged and ached all the way through me. Now that I was conscious, the pain was roweled spurs all over. Scales flashed up, fur too, then retreated.
No wonder she’d wanted me pink-skinned and soft.
“What.” I coughed again, retching up something foul that might have been the last bit of meatskin food I ate, swallowed hard—never waste anything edible—and found out I could breathe. “The. What?”
“Broke her arm.” Pammy had found a stick somewhere and used it to poke me; it dropped on the floor between our cages. “At least, I think so. There was another Breed down here, they took him—”
“Who? Seraphine?” I winced, my head pounding. “Who else?” Who’s working with her?
“Those … the nameless. Cal, she ate them, she hollowed them out. She’s halfway to being Titan. They all look the same, and they took another Breed away. He was worked over pretty good too, and she’d been draining him for a while.” Pammy pointed off into the darkness. “He was over there.”
Four cages, familiar iron bars with dappled radiance dying slowly along their edges. Berserker cages, the smaller ones. Nothing Titan-sized, but then, she didn’t need those. How had Seraphine brought them here?
Probably only Baphomet knew, since it was his blessing in the iron, leaching away like the glow in the salve. Maybe Seraphine had been hunting for a while, since Midian fell, and the nameless shadows did all the heavy lifting. She would only need a few cages, because we were scattered to the four winds now.
I scrubbed at my face as Pammy babbled on, trying to think through the noise in my skull. Grabbed Pammy’s hand to reassure her, and she finally quieted. There were sounds overhead—wet creakings, slapping noises, muffled howls.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “Maldeane. He told me she got him the same way—a nameless came and found him. They bring her fresh Breed. He also said—”
“Shhhh.” I took stock. Tank top and jeans; my boots were gone. They’d probably searched me, and found the knife. Under the thin scrim of cellar dirt on the floor was rock. Our truck and trailer were probably pulled off into the woods—she’d probably go through it for supplies, too.
Resourceful Seraphine.
The cages weren’t whole. The doors had been wrenched open, broken when Midian fell. A heavy chain wrapped around the doorfront of each one, locked with a padlock the size of a Berserker’s fist. Snugged tight enough, it kept the thing closed, and Seraphine probably kept the keys on her.
“I’m so sorry,” Pammy whispered.
The noise overhead crested, and a choked cry spiraled up into nothingness. I’d never passed words with fish-gilled Maldeane; he’d been one of the solitaries, swimming the underground rivers.
Now I never would.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, and I patted her hand.
“Shhh. It’s all right.”
“I wish we’d never left the carnival.”
I don’t. I exhaled, sharply, and forced myself to think.
Because if I knew Seraphine, they would come for Pammy first.
* * *
It was silent overhead, the silence of digestion. The shift burned, or maybe it was the bars.
Didn’t matter. I tried again.
Pammy’s shallow, rapid breathing echoed. She huddled in a ball in the corner of her cage, and it was hard to think with her hyperventilating.
Forcing the shift this far was dangerous. There were some things that couldn’t elongate the way I needed them to, so it was a geometry problem, bone crackling slightly as I pushed further than I ever had. The skull was trickiest, because squeezing my brain in certain ways might even make me black out. Plus, I’d spent so long just showing off for the paying crowds, my control wasn’t what it—
“Sssa!” I hissed in pain as a bar scraped along my narrow, naked hip, scoring a weal along my flank. A sick, appetizing draft of roasted pork rose. My pelvis creaked alarmingly, torqued almost double. Naked, sweat-greased, grimly hanging on to consciousness, I shifted a little more.
Stealthy creakings overhead. The quiet had been so thick they were unnaturally loud, and I strained against the limits of bone and stretched-tight Breed flesh. My foot slid, nails scratching against bedrock, scrabbling for purchase, and I tumbled into a heap with a loud crackle, rolling in grit and a splatter of foulness.
There were no bathrooms down here.
Hands and knees, the shift retreating and my body shrinking back into normal dimensions, head pounding, the smoking burns all over me steaming and grinding with pain. I curled into a ball, and it was a good thing I’d already emptied myself in every possible way. Slick with effluvia, I rested.
Outside the cage.
Pammy scrabbled closer, retreated when the bars of her own cage fluoresced warningly. “Cal?” A shocked whisper.
I’m fine. My voice wouldn’t work. Maybe I’d broken something. So tired. Soft black wings at the corner of my vision, beating in my brain.
Soft and black like hers, before Midian burned.
I spent a little while in a soupy kind of half consciousness, my burnt flesh smoking in the dimness. The cages hummed, and overhead the creakings took on new life.
Thud. Thud. Thudthud.
At first I thought it was my heartbeat, but Pammy made a tiny whining sound and I realized what it was.
Feet. On the stairs.
I strained to move, collapsed, strained again. Get up. Get up now.
* * *
She stopped to sniff the reek of roasting filling the cellar, and that was what saved both of us.
I fell on Seraphine from behind, from the dark, as if I were Peloquin hunting in the ruins of the daylight world, outside the bounds of the law. My teeth sank in at the juncture between her shoulder and neck, and smoky-spiced wickedness filled my mouth as she shrieked, flailing across the stony floor.
Hit the side of one cage, a fountain of blue-white sparks popping, and she howled as her own white flesh, bloated with her recent meal, seared. I tore a great mouthful of muscle free, spat, dug my claws in, tangling in her ribs. They had once been brittle; now, bolstered by the death of her own tribefolk, they were merely spongy-resilient.
Pammy shrieked too, her arms through the bars, wicked claws slashing air as she tried to help. Seraphine spun just like the Tilt-A-Whirl ride, the cellar smearing like grease on slick cheap cardboard. I clung to her back like a habit, monkeylike, just as she had clung to mine during our voyage to Midian, whispering in my ear.
In Midian I’ll walk. I’ll be a princess.
I did not whisper. I bit. Again and again, and there was a clattering as the key ring sailed in a high arc, hitting Pammy’s cage with a heavy clanging.
But I was weak, and she was flush with cannibal strength. Seraphine twisted, and I was flung loose, thrown across the cellar. Fetched up against a stone wall with a sickening crack, and the coppermad scent of my own blood-filled mouth and nose and eyes.
“You bitch!” Seraphine raved, as she bore down on me. “Look what you’ve done!”
I’ll do it again, too. My arms and legs wouldn’t work. Her will, giant pale brooding thing that it was, pressed down on me, the savagely mistreated shift responding sluggishly to my own expecting.
She kicked me, once, and howled afresh, hopping back. She could walk, certainly, but she needed other hands to do her violence.
There was a soft, slithering commotion at the stairs—the hollowed-out nameless ones, pale and stumbling, responding to their mistress’s call.
Then, out of the dark, a harpy descended.
Pammy leapt, her hands and feet smoking—she had clambered atop her cage once the front was open—and her foot-claws sank in with a heavy, meaty sound. Her hands were claws too, burst free of the facsimile of meatskin camouflage. Her head snaked forward, burnt stubs on her back twitching frantically. If she’d still had her wings, the buffeting would disorient her prey. Frothing, rearing back and striking again and again with snakelike speed, her teeth slicing effortlessly …
She was beautiful, in the way only one of the Moon’s children could be.
I crawled forward as Seraphine thrashed. Her cries rent quivering air; her nameless servants fell in writhing heaps, noisome sand tricking through rents and gouges in their pale exteriors.
The cellar resounded with crunching and slurping.
We ate our fill.
* * *
Night fell in great indigo waves across the mountain. At dusk we crept out to the well behind the house, and a sluicing of cold water woke me fully from post-gorging doze.
Pammy made a happy humming sound, clicking her claws and emptying the bucket over her head. Fine bones and leathery skin unfurled, the prickles of black pinfeathers blooming as her wings creaked and crackled, expanding. All that stolen life could work wonders. It let Seraphine walk, and we had eaten our share. Watching Pammy’s wings spread and flesh themselves with feathers in the umber and blue of dusk, I shuddered. The burning crackled as it fell from my skin. Naked, honey-glowing in the dark, I dredged up another bucketful and washed away pain and roasting.
Finally, dripping and shivering, I let Pammy close her arms and wings around me. We stood like that for a long time, my forehead against her breastbone, and we slowly warmed. Her wings kept making little sounds as they grew back, and her humming took on a deeper note. Her claws flexed, and she could stand straight if she wanted.
Straight and proud.
When the shivers were gone, thin traceries of steam rising from us both as we dried, I sighed.
Pammy’s humming stopped. “I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “I’m so sorry, Cal.”
Why? You’ve got your wings back. “Me too. I should’ve suspected she would…”
“We ate her.”
“Yes, we did. She was almost Titan, though. It wasn’t against the law.” At least, I hoped it wasn’t. There was no Lylesburg to tell us Baphomet’s will, no Baphomet to speak. We’d come all the way out here just on the hope that something could be salvaged.
“If there’s a New Midian…” Tentatively.
She was bird-timid, but not stupid. “There might be. We can look. Seraphine kept everything that came in the door, there’s probably cash hidden in that pile. Find our truck, too.”
“I … I have my wings, now.” She spread them, and the sudden chill forced answering fur from my back and legs. A lovely, glossy pelt, black instead of changecolor now. “They’ll let us in. Both of us.” Hope lighting her beaky face, her hair raveling into black feathers along her shoulders, Pammy shifted from foot to foot. She probably couldn’t wait to get into the sky.
I shrugged. Stepped back. “First we have to find it, Pammy. How about you go up and look around, see if you can spot our truck?” If she stayed in the wild places, she could hunt. Meat could be had. She wasn’t helpless now.
Pammy didn’t need me.
She outright danced now, but stayed on the ground. “You’ll stay? You won’t look without me? You won’t leave?”
Fur eased over my breasts. The night wind ruffled it, and I stretched, luxuriously, tipping my head back to hide the sudden welling in my eyes. “I wouldn’t go to any Midian without you, Pammy. Go on, now.”
She cried aloud for joy, and as I stood under the caress of the night, I heard her footsteps drum. She leapt, and the sound of featherbrush wings filled the clearing. Behind me, the house exhaled its stink of rot. I’d have to go back in there and scavenge for anything useful.
Now, though, I opened my eyes and watched while she climbed.
“New Midian,” I murmured. We could look for it anywhere, anywhere at all. Seraphine, bloated and terrible as she was, had the inkling of a useful idea.
If all else failed, we could make Midian ourselves.