"Stay with her," the older woman replies.
"I am not leaving you?—"
"You will do as I say."
She turns and moves toward the stair before the argument can continue. I reach for her without thinking. "Don't?—"
Another wave tears through me and the word breaks apart before it fully forms.
She disappears up the steps.
The sound comes quickly after. A struggle. A body hitting wood. Then another sound, one that does not belong to the living. The younger woman flinches but does not move.
"She knew," she says, more to herself than to me. "She knew what this would be."
Something hits the stair, then falls heavy, the sound of it carrying through the floor. Silence follows for half a second and then movement again, coming down.
I try to move and the pain locks my body in place, forcing me to stay where I am even as everything in me pushes toward the stair.
"I cannot—" I start.
"You do not need to," she says, though her voice is thinner now.
A figure appears at the top of the stair, and another behind it, their bodies moving wrong, uneven, dragged forward by something that no longer resembles intent. The first one reaches the bottom step and the woman moves before it does, grabbing a tool from the ground and driving it forward with everything she has, catching it in the throat and forcing it back against the wall hard enough to stop it for a moment.
More come down behind it. Too many.
She steps in front of me and does not look back, meeting the next one head on and then another, her movements quick and precise in a way that tells me she has done something like this before, even if never exactly like this.
It is not enough.
One breaks past her and reaches for me. I try to pull on my light and it rises before the pain hits harder than anything before it, tearing across my abdomen and dragging through my pelvis with enough force to collapse whatever I was trying to gather.
The thing reaches me.
It is there for less than a second before something else takes it apart. Another follows and then another, each one that reaches the bottom of the stair cut down before it can fully enter, bodies coming apart as though whatever is doing it does not need to fight them, only pass through them.
The woman freezes. So do I.
Something moves at the top of the stair, slow and controlled, descending into the space as the air shifts around it. I reach outward without thinking, not for help but to understand.
Something answers, carrying intent that does not belong to anything living, turning outward toward everything else in the room, toward the bodies on the stair, toward the dead still forcing their way down.
Not toward me.
It steps fully into view. Black wings fold close to its body, streaked with blood that does not belong to it. Its eyes fix onme for a moment, red and unblinking, its head tilting slightly as though measuring what it does not immediately understand. Then it turns away, takes position at the base of the stair, and waits. Anything that comes down does not make it past.
The woman stares at it. "What is?—"
"It is not here for me," I say, though I cannot explain how I know that.
Another wave tears through me before I can think further, and this one is different. Stronger in a way that has nothing to do with the wound in my side.
The woman drops beside me immediately. "Now," she says. "You cannot hold it back anymore."
"I am not?—"
"You are," she says. "Your body has already chosen."
