“Yeah. My people need me,” I conceded, calmly. “Maybe they should’ve thought of that before they tried to kill my wife.”
I’d been hiding May in the old highway tunnel, shackled, her screams turning to howls, her eyes turning from sweet brown to demon red. If Finch hadn’t followed me that night—if the shackles hadn’t snapped—
Very gently, the knight said, “She is not thy wife any longer.”
“So long as we both shall live—isn’t that what your priests say? I’m not dead yet, and neither is she.”
“Lady Shrike—WidowShrike.” His voice was not gentle any longer; it was sharp and brittle, like old plastic. “However well thou hast loved her—however beautiful or clever she was—thy wife is gone. And nothing—nothing—will bring her back to thee.”
It was easy then: the hammer was in my hand, singing downward. It would land at the point of his jaw, just below his missing ear. He might have been a Knight of the Enclaves, but Iron Hollow survived by chiseling rebar out of ancient concrete and floating it downriver to the enclaves, in trade for vaccines and painkillers; even a Secretary knew how to swing a hammer, and I had not always been a Secretary.
But somehow, though Sir John moved only the slimmest inch, I missed. I turned the bar in my hand and swung it upward—this time the claw would catch right beneath his cuirass, scooping into the meat of his belly—
I missed a second time. Swore, viciously. “But you’reold!”
Sir John lifted both his palms, affable, almost apologetic: “How dost thou think I became so?”
I raised my hammer again—but something sharp raked my scalp. Wings slapped my ears. The hammer was twisted out of my grip, and something popped, nastily, in my wrist. Gauntleted hands pinned my arms behind me, and cold gunmetal pressed into the hollow of my jaw.
“Settle down, now,” said Sir John.
All firearms, ammunition, and related accessories were the property of the enclaves, technically, but Finch had kept her great-great-grandmother’s pistol in her bedside table. I’d only seen her pull the trigger once, and still woke sometimes with the sound of that shot in my ears: like a hundred hammers, like a crack that divided the world intobeforeandafter.
I settled down. Asked, sullenly: “How can your stupid bird even see, with that thing on?” There was blood running from my scalp down my temple, thick and warm.
“It doesn’t blind her. I had it specially fashioned to protect her eyes when she hunts high, where the ozone is thin, and the sun is harsh.”
“Sweet of you. Now imagine what you’d do for yourwife, if she was—” From up the creek there came the animal rustle of something moving in the undergrowth. It moved without caution, as only bears or big dogs did, ripping carelessly through grapevine and honeysuckle.
Above us, the hawk cried again. Sir John stopped speaking. I felt a hunter’s stillness fall over him, fixed and breathless.
I said, “No,” but I don’t know why; Mayapple Coal had never done a thing I told her to.
She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.
A leg, emerging from the trees: many jointed, plated in scales, ending in a cloven hoof. An elk’s long, sloping throat. A vixen’s skull beneath a wild crown of antlers. Moss and torn vineshung from the antlers like the veil of some mad bride. Behind the veil, her eyes gleamed a wet, arterial red.
A patchwork monster. A nonsense of scales and fur which bore no resemblance to the girl I’d loved or the woman I’d married. Except, of course, that I loved her.
I said, on an aching breath,“May.”
Sir John pressed the rifle harder into my jaw and said, “Shut the hell up,” in perfectly ordinary commontongue. I wondered, suddenly, how long it had been since he’d returned to Cincinnati. If he was even a true enclaver any longer, or if all his years in the outlands had changed him into something else.
May shivered at the sound of my voice. No—sherippled, the whole shape of her shifting, rolling, remaking itself. The scales turned to dense hide and back again. A fifth leg sprouted from her belly. Feathers shingled up her throat, over her jaw. Her mouth ripened into a pair of girlish lips, pink and wet, full of fox teeth.
This was what a demon was—an endless churn, an infinite becoming—and this was what made them so damn hard to kill. Shoot them, and they might grow a second heart. Drown them, and they might sprout gills. Hunt them, and they might take flight.
May lowered her chin. Her face was vaguely human, now, but sleekly feathered. The feathers were bright silver, save for a black band across her eyes like the mask of a cardinal or—my heart stuttered—or—
She took a step toward us, hoof clattering on the creek bed. Another. She moved with a muscled, mesmeric grace, like some ancient god of the woods, back when gods were not dead men but living things, untrustworthy, changeful.
Sir John said, “Shit,” and the rifle disappeared from my jaw.
I saw him take aim, the barrel settling fluidly, pointing straight between May’s red eyes.
I shouted“Run!”and threw myself sideways, knocking into Sir John. The rifle swung upward and fired into the sky with a great slap of sound. The knight swore.
May shied and wheeled away, vanishing back into the woods. The last I saw of her was a flash of silver feathers.
