“Too damn many. We tried to drive them away from towns, but sometimes they wouldn’t go. Mothers who wanted to stay near their children, young men who wouldn’t leave their husbands ... I did what I must. The enclaves would have heard, if I hadn’t. They might have asked questions, chased me down. Discovered ... her.” His sentences were listing badly now, half-sunk by the weight of ellipses, but he still managed to curl his lip. “Wouldn’t you do the same, for someone you loved?”
For a moment—just a moment—I saw Finch Secretary as I’d left her: dead on the floor of the old highway tunnel.
She must have known what she’d find when she followed me there. My wife had stopped taking her meals in the common house, and I had started spending a lot of time in the woods; change is always the first sign of a demon.
But she hadn’t known how far along May was. Neither had I. When I stepped into the tunnel that night I saw the broken shackle, the claw marks in the dirt—and then my demon wife was on me. Hide and hair. Wolf’s teeth in a woman’s face. And those eyes, pox red, demon red—
Finch had flung herself between us, pistol gripped in both hands, barrel aimed straight at May’s skull. Finch was old, but still fast.
I was faster. I swung my hammer without thinking, without hesitating, and Finch’s shot went wide.I’m sorry,I told her afterward, over and over,it was an accident.But the head of my hammer was buried neatly in her temple; good aim, for an accident.
Finch had never been very affectionate with me—I was her apprentice more than her daughter. But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
May had hated blood.
I stood and kicked Sir John lightly with the toe of my boot. He started awake, having fallen into a stupor. “I’ve decided I won’t kill you tonight,” I told him.
His demon—mostly snake, now, twined around him—hissed at me.
“I saidwon’t.” She hissed again.
Suspicion settled slowly over Sir John’s slack face, far too late. “What—” He tried and failed to sit up, landing in the jumbled posture of a dropped doll.
The snake swelled, grew legs and claws. A dragon’s head with a lipless mouth, which said:“What the hell have you done to him?”
“Crushed a bunch of Finch’s sleeping pills into the mead. Figured it was sweet enough to cover the taste. I planned to smash in his skull while he slept, but I don’t think my wife would like it. And neither would his.” I gave her a small, respectful bow, and hoped she wouldn’t killme. She must love Sir John very much, to stay prisoner to him. “Anyway, I owe him. I’d planned to cut and run, but now ...” I tipped my face toward the tangled black woods, where May was waiting. “Now I know I don’t have to run alone.”
It took longer than I’d hoped to find her.
The moon was thin and translucent as a clipped nail, and the woods were treacherous here. Three hundred years ago there had been a little village of tin boxes lined up in rows, but now the boxes were buried beneath dirt and ivy, where they waited as empty coffins do—for one wrong step.
It was after dawn when I found the remains of Trillium’s sow, rib cage cracked wide and licked clean, and nearly noon when I found the tracks: cloven, but far too big for a deer.
It was almost dusk when I found her. She was asleep, curled in a gooseberry patch. Maybe she remembered the taste of them; maybe she was dreaming of me.
She was antlered again, but more catlike, with a pelt the exact shade of May’s hair (sunlight through sap). She shifted gently in her sleep, antlers branching and dividing, pelt rippling. A row of eyes sprouted down her spine, all of them closed.
I hesitated at the edge of the berry patch and hated myself for hesitating. Had I not slain my own mother for her, and poisoned a Knight of the Enclaves? Had I not abandoned my people and broken my vows for her?
May’s transformation struck me suddenly as the lesser one. Would she still know me?
But Sir John’s wife still knew him, and he’d grown old! And murdered so many more people than me.
I stepped forward, opened my mouth—
And choked, as a black vambrace closed over my face. I yelled into his elbow as Sir John’s voice hissed in my ear, “Shut up, Shrike.”
He began to drag me backward, away from the berry patch. I tore at his arm, biting uselessly at his cracked rubber armor. The taste of asphalt and oil filled my mouth, a dead world on my tongue.
He pulled me around a poplar and shook me, hard, by the shoulders. “That thing will tear you apart. Didn’t you hear me calling after you?”
He’d done quite a bit of yelling as I left him, but his voice had been smeared into the dirt, and I hadn’t cared. I stamped my foot. “No, she won’t! You thinkyourwife loves you so much better than mine?”
“Mywifeate my left ear.”Sir John bent so that our eyes were dead level. “And a good piece of my face, as well. You could see my molars through my cheek.”
“But—she—”
“She’d changed, and I refused to admit it. I went to her unarmed, defenseless. Well, I was raised in the church, wasn’t I? That’s how a believer proves his love: blindly, on his knees.” I was trying very hard not to look at his missing ear, but he turned his face so that I could see it all: silvered flesh, pocked and pitted like the surface of the moon. I thought of the story where a bride must hold fast to her husband as he changes from lion to adder to burning coal; did she wear scars, afterward?
