The Beast

FIVE

The water rushing over Mary’s hands was cold, and yet it burned her skin—proving that opposite ends of the thermometer could coexist at the same time.

The ladies’ room sink she was standing at was white and porcelain. Its drain was shiny and silver. In front of her, a wall-length mirror reflected three stalls, all of which had their peach-colored doors closed, only one of which was occupied.

“You okay in there?” she said.

The toilet flushed, even though Bitty hadn’t used it.

Mary focused on her reflection. Yup. She looked as bad as she felt: Somehow, in the last thirty minutes, black bags had formed under sockets that had sunken in, and her skin was pale as the tile she was standing on.

Somehow? Bull crap. She knew exactly how.

I killed her!

Mary had to close her eyes and pull yet another recompose. When she opened things up again, she tried to remember what she was doing. Oh. Right. There was a little stack of paper towels on a shelf, the kind that interlocked fold-to-fold, and as she went to take one and dripped water all over the others, she thought it was strange that Havers, who was so precise about his facility, promoted such messiness. Oh . . . got it. The dispenser on the wall by the door was broken, the lower part hanging loose.

Just like me, she thought. Fully stocked with the education and experience to help people, but not doing my job right.

Take her hand. It’s okay . . .

I killed her!

“Bitty?” When that came out as nothing but a croak, she cleared her throat. “Bitty.”

After she dried her hands, she turned to the stalls. “Bitty, I’m coming in if you don’t come out.”

The girl opened the middle panel, and for some reason, Mary knew she would never forget the sight of that small hand curling around, gripping and not letting go as she stepped out.

She had been crying in there. Alone. And now that the girl was being forced to show her face, she was attempting to do exactly what Mary herself was desperately shooting for.

Sometimes composure was all you had; dignity your only consolation; the illusion of “all right” your sole source of comfort.

“Here, let me . . .” As Mary’s voice dried up, she went back for the paper towels and wet one in the sink she had used. “This will help.”

Approaching the girl slowly, she brought the cool, soft cloth to the child’s flushed face, pressing it onto the hot, red skin. As she blotted, in her mind she was apologizing to the grown-up Bitty would hopefully become: I’m sorry I made you do that. No, you didn’t kill her. I wish I had let you do it on your own terms and in your own way. I’m sorry. No, you didn’t kill her. I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

Mary tilted the girl’s chin up. “Bitty—”

“What do they do with her now? Where does she go?”

God, that pale brown stare was steady. “They’re going to take her to . . . well, they’re going to cremate her.”

“What is that?”

“They’re going to burn her body into ashes for the passing ceremony.”

“Will that hurt her?”

Mary cleared her throat again. “No, honey. She won’t feel anything. She’s free—she’s in the Fade, waiting for you.”

The good news was that at least Mary knew that part was true. Even though she’d been raised Catholic, she had seen the Scribe Virgin for herself, so no, she wasn’t feeding the girl false, if compassionate, rhetoric. For vampires, there was in fact a heaven, and they did, really and truly, meet their loved ones there.

Heck, it probably proved the same was true for humans, but as there was less visible magic in that world, eternal salvation was a much harder sell to the average joe.

Wadding the paper towel up, Mary took a step back. “I’d like us to return to Safe Place now, okay? There’s nothing more we can do here and it’s getting close to dawn.”

The last piece was just habit, she supposed. As a pretrans, Bitty could tolerate any amount of light the sun could throw at her. And the real truth was that she just wanted to get the girl away from all the death here.

“Okay?” Mary prompted.

“I don’t want to leave her.”

In any other circumstance, Mary would have crouched down and waded gently into the waters of what was going to be Bitty’s new world. The awful reality was that there was no mother to leave behind anymore, and getting the girl out of this clinical environment where patients were being treated, sometimes in dire situations, was entirely appropriate.

I killed her.

Instead, Mary said, “Okay, we can stay as long as you like.”

Bitty nodded and walked over to the door that led out into the corridor. As she stood before the closed panel, her heavily-washed dress seemed on the verge of falling off her thin frame, her ill-fitting black coat like a blanket she had wound around herself, her brown hair feathering from static across the knobby fabric.

“I really wish . . .”

“What?” Mary whispered.

“I wish I could go back to earlier. When I woke up tonight.”

“I wish you could, too.”

Bitty looked over her shoulder. “Why can’t you go back? It’s so strange. I mean, I can remember everything about her. It’s like . . . it’s like my memories are a room I should be able to walk into. Or something.”

Mary frowned, thinking that was a way too mature comment for someone her age to make.

But before she could reply, the girl pushed her way out, clearly not interested in a response—and maybe that was a good thing. What the hell did you say to that?

Out in the corridor, Mary wanted to put her hand on that small shoulder, but she held off. The girl was so self-contained, in the way a book would be in the midst of a library, or a doll in a line-up of collectibles, and it was difficult to justify breaching those boundaries.

Especially when, as a therapist, you were already feeling very shaky in your professional shoes.

“Where do we go?” Bitty asked as a pair of nurses ran by them.

Mary glanced around. They were still in the ICU section of the clinic, but some distance away from where Bitty’s mom had passed. “We could ask for a room to sit in.”

The girl stopped. “We can’t really see her again, can we?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should go back, I guess.”

“Whatever you want.”

Five minutes later, they were in the Volvo heading for Safe Place. As Mary took them over the bridge, she once again bobble-headed the rearview mirror, checking on Bitty every fifty yards. In the silence, she found herself back on the apology train in her head . . . for giving bad advice, for putting the girl in the position of suffering even more. But all that gnashing was self-serving, a search for personal absolution that was totally unfair to the patient, especially one that young.

This on-the-job nightmare was something Mary was going to have to come to grips with on her own.

An entrance onto I-87 appeared as soon as they were on the downtown side of the bridge, and the directional signal sounded loud in the interior of the station wagon. Heading north, Mary stayed at the speed limit and got passed by a couple of eighteen-wheelers doing eighty in a sixty-five. From time to time, lights marking merger zones flared overhead in a rhythm that never lasted long, and what little local traffic there was thinned out even more as they continued onward.

When they got home, Mary decided she was going to try to feed the girl something. Bitty hadn’t had First Meal, so she had to be starving. Then maybe a movie until dawn, somewhere quiet. The trauma was so fresh, and not just the stuff around losing her mother. What had happened at Havers’s had to be bringing up everything that had come before—the domestic abuse, the rescue where Rhage, V and Butch had killed the father to save Bitty and her mom, the discovery that the mother was newly pregnant, the loss of the baby, the lingering months afterward where Annalye had never fully recovered—

“Ms. Luce?”

“Yes?” Oh, God, please ask me something I can answer decently. “Yes, Bitty?”

“Where are we going?”

Mary glanced at a road sign coming at them. It read, EXIT 19 GLENS FALLS. “I’m sorry? We’re going home. We should be there in about fifteen minutes?”

“I thought Safe Place wasn’t this far away.”

“Wha—?”

Oh, God.

She was heading for the damn mansion.

“Oh, Bitty, I’m sorry.” Mary shook her head. “I must have lost track of the exits. I . . .”

What had she been thinking?

Well, she knew the answer to that—all the hypotheticals she’d been running through her head about what they were going to do when they got out of the car were things involving the place where Mary lived with Rhage, the King, the Brothers, the fighters and their mates.

What the hell had she been thinking?

Mary got off at exit nineteen, went under the highway, and hopped back on going south. Man, she was just hitting it out of the park tonight, wasn’t she.

At least things couldn’t get any worse.

Back at the Brownswick School for Girls, Assail, son of Assail, heard the roar even through the sensory overload of battle.

In spite of the chaos of all the gunshots and the cursing and the mad sprints from cover to cover, the thunderous sound that rolled out across the abandoned campus was the kind of thing that got one’s attention.

As he wrenched around, he kept his finger on the trigger of his autoloader, continuing to discharge bullets straight ahead at a line-up of the undead—

For a split second, he fell off from his shooting.

His brain simply could not process what his eyes were suggesting had magically appeared a mere fifty yards away from him. It was . . . some kind of dragon-like creature, with purple scales, a barbed tail, and a gaping mouth set with T. rex teeth. The prehistoric monster was a good two stories high, long as a tractor trailer, and fast as a crocodile as it went after anything that ran away—

Free fall.

Without warning, his body went flying forward and a searing pain streaked down the front of his calf and sliced across his ankle. Twisting in midair, he landed face up in the tangled grass—and a breath later, the partially wounded slayer who’d gotten him with a knife lurched up onto his chest, that blade arc’d over its shoulder, its lips curled into a snarl as black blood streamed out all over Assail.

Right, fuck this, mate.

Assail grabbed a fistful of still-brown hair, shoved his muzzle into that wide-open maw, and hit the trigger, blowing open the back of the skull, incapacitating the body such that it fell on him as a writhing deadweight. Kicking the animated corpse off, he sprang to his feet.

And found himself directly in the cross hairs of the beast.

His movement up to the vertical was what did it, the dragon’s eyes snapping to him and narrowing into slits. Then, with another roar, the killer came at him, pounding over the ground, crushing slayers under its massive hind feet, its front claws curled up and ready to strike.

“Fuck!”

Assail surged forward, no longer worried about where his gun was pointed and absolutely unconcerned about the fact that he was now headed directly into an advancing line of lessers. The good news? The beast took care of that little problem. The slayers, likewise, garnered one look at all the hell-hath-no-fury coming at them and scattered like leaves unto the autumn wind.

Naturally, there was naught directly up ahead that provided any cover. By bad luck, his escape route offered nothing but scrub and brush, without any meaningful protection. The nearest building? Two hundred yards away. At least.

With a curse, he ran e’er faster, reaching down into the muscles of his legs, calling for more and more speed.

It was a race the beast was due to win—a victory that was inevitable when a five-foot stride tried to outrun a set of legs that could cover twenty-five in a single bound. With every second, that pounding grew louder and closer until hot blasts of breath hit Assail’s back, flushing him in spite of the cold.

Fear struck to his core.

But there was no time to try to harness the panic that flooded his mind. A great roar blasted at him, the force of the sound so great that it spurred him forth, providing a gust of foul-smelling air that ushered him along. Shit, his only chance was—

The bite came after the great roar, those jaws snapping so close to the nape of Assail’s neck that he cringed down even though it slowed his gait. Too late to save himself, though. Airborne. He went airborne, plucked from the ground in mid-stride—except why wasn’t there more pain?

Surely if the beast had gotten him by the shoulders or the torso, he would have been racked with—no, wait, it had him by the jacket. The thing had him by the leather jacket, not the flesh, a band of constriction cutting across his pecs and lifting him by the armpits, his legs flopping, his gun firing as he made fists of his hands. Below him, the landscape tilted like it was on a seesaw, the bolting lessers, the fighting Brothers, the overgrown bushes and trees flipping around him as he was shaken all about.

The fucking thing was going to toss him up and gullet him. This back-and-forth nonsense was just tenderizing a meal.

Goddamn him, he was the vampire equivalent of a chicken wing.

No time. He let his gun go and went for the zipper at his throat. The shaking motion made his tiny target fast as a mouse, slick as a marble, all needle-in-a-haystack for his trembling hands and slippery, sweaty fingertips.

The beast’s very hold did more for him.

With those teeth locked in the back of the jacket, the leather couldn’t hold his weight, and he broke free, falling from the jaws, the hard ground rushing to greet him. Tucking into a roll so that he didn’t break anything, he landed in a heap nonetheless.

Directly on his shoulder.

The crack was something that registered throughout his body and rendered him as useless as a babe unattended, all breath lost, his sight blurring. But there was no time if he wanted to live. Wrenching around, he—

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop—BOOM!

His cousins came out of the night, running as if they were being chased when in fact they were not. Ehric had two autoloaders up and discharging . . . and Evale had an elephant gun on his shoulder.

That was the BOOM!

Indeed, the weapon was, in fact, an actual elephant gun, an enormous firearm that had been left over from the time of the Raj in India. Evale, the aggressive bastard, had long ago seemed to have bonded with the thing in an unnatural, “my precious” kind of way.

Thank the Fates for unhealthy preoccupations.

Those forty-millimeter bullets did nothing to slow the beast down, pinging off the purple scales as if they were peas cast upon a motor vehicle. But the elephant gun’s payload of lead caused a howl of pain and a recoil.

It was Assail’s only opportunity for escape.

Closing his eyes, he focused, focused, focused—

No dematerializing. Too much adrenaline on top of too much cocaine with too much pain from his shoulder as a chaser.

And the beast went right back on the attack, refocusing on Assail and giving him the dragon equivalent of a fuck-you in the form of an enormous roar—

The massive shotgun went off a second time, catching the thing in the chest.

“Run!” Ehric bellowed as he reloaded his forties, clips kicking out of the butts of his little guns. “Get up!”

Assail used his good arm to shove himself off the ground, and his legs reengaged with admirable aplomb. Holding his injured limb to his chest, he hauled as hard as he could, the remnants of his jacket flapping, his stomach rolling, his heart pounding.

BOOM!

Anywhere, anywhere—he had to get anywhere the fuck out of range—and fast. Too bad his body wasn’t listening. Even as his brain was screaming for speed, all he could do was lurch like a zombie—

Someone caught him from behind, hipping him up off the ground on a snatch-and-drag that quickly turned into an over-the-shoulder fireman carry. As he slammed into place head-down, he vomited from the agony, starbursts lighting his eyes up as his stomach emptied itself with violence. The good news was that he hadn’t eaten for twelve to fifteen hours at that point, so he didn’t cream up his cousin’s pant leg too badly.

He wanted to help the effort. He wanted to hang on himself. He wanted . . .

Bushes lashed him in the face, and he squinted to protect his eyes. Blood began to flow and it filled his nose. His shoulder got more and more painful. Pressure in his head grew unbearable, making him think of over-inflated tires, bags with too many things in them, water balloons that popped and spilled their contents everywhere.

Thank God for his cousins. They never deserted him.

One must remember to reward them in some manner.

The outbuilding seemed to canter toward them as opposed to the other way around, and from Assail’s upside-down vantage point, the thing appeared to be hanging from the earth instead of planted upon it. Brick. Even with the jostling and the darkness and the alternating strides, he could tell the shack was brick.

One could only hope for a sturdy construction.

His cousin broke down the door, and the air inside was musty and damp.

Without warning, Assail was dumped like the trash he was, and he landed on a dusty floor with a bounce that made him retch again. The door slammed shut, and then all he heard was his cousin’s heavy breathing. And his own.

And the muffled sounds of the battle.

There was an abrupt flare of orange light.

Through the haze of his pain, Assail frowned—and then recoiled. The face illuminated as a hand-rolled cigarette was lit was not that of either of his cousins.

“How badly are you hurt?” the Black Dagger Brother Vishous asked as he exhaled a most delicious smoke.

“’Twas you?”

“Do I look like Santa Claus?”

“An unlikely savior you are.” Assail grimaced and wiped his mouth upon his jacket sleeve. “And I apologize for your pants.”

V looked down at himself. “You got something against black leather?”

“I vomited down the back of them—”

“Shit!”

“Well, one can get them cleaned—”

“No, asshole, it’s coming for us.” V nodded to a cloudy window. “Damn it.”

Indeed, off in the distance, the thundering pounding of the dragon’s gait sounded once again, a storm gathering and heading in their direction.

Assail flailed around on the floor, looking for somewhere to hide. A closet. A bathroom. A cellar. Nothing. The interior was empty except for two floor-to-ceiling supports and a decade’s worth of rafter decay. Thank the Virgin Scribe that it appeared to be a stout brick and more likely to withstand—

The roof lifted and splintered on a oner, debris raining down, asphalt shingles slapping on the floor as if the shed were heralding its own demise with a round of applause. Fresh night air cleared away the musty smell, but it was hardly a relief given what had precipitated the access.

The beast was not a vegetarian, stipulated. But it also wasn’t worried about its fiber intake: the thing spit that old wooden roof out to the side, arched down, and opened up its jaws, releasing a sonic boom of a roar.

There was nowhere to run. The creature was standing over the building, poised to strike at what had become its lunchbox. Nowhere to take cover. No suitable defense to bring to bear.

“Go,” Assail said to the Brother as those great reptilian eyes narrowed and the muzzle blew an exhale as hot and fetid as a Dumpster in summer. “Give me your weapon. I’ll distract it.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I am not one of your brothers.”

“You gave us this location. You gave us the head of the Fore-lesser. I’m not fucking leaving you, douche bag.”

“Such gallantry. And the compliments. Do stop.”

As the beast let out another roar and tossed its head as if it were prepared to toy with them a bit before consuming them, Assail thought of his drug dealing . . . his cocaine addiction . . .

The human female with whom he had fallen in love and had had to let go. Because she couldn’t handle his lifestyle, and he was too caught up in it to stop, even for her.

He shook his head at the Brother. “No, I’m not worth saving. Get the fuck out of here.”