Mei shakes it even harder, and it goes limp.
“MEI!” Ronit screams.
“Oh, God, she killed her. What’s wrong with you?” The necklace woman cries out. “You’re a monster.”
Mei ignores everyone, she continues shaking the body of that child, and for the first time, I get this sick feeling that we made a mistake. Did Mei actually kill a human child? I step towards her, but she whirls away from both me and Ronit, who looks like he might actually kill her this time.
“Let that child go!” Ronit commands, his voice hoarse and filled with ghosts.
She falters, her fingers relax, just for a second, but there is something about the fact that she almost obeyed him that triggers some hidden piece of knowledge. I don’t have time, so I shove it aside.
I lunge towards her, but she whirls and kicks me in the balls, bringing me to my knees.
“Show yourself!” Mei snarls.
The girl is white. She’s not breathing.
“Strega, what the hell have you done?” Lirin shouts. “Let the human child go!”
She ignores everyone and gives one more violent shake. The head of the child snaps up, but it’s the wrong shape, it’s almost cone like. Its eyes are milky, and there’s almost no colour in them, and when the girl, Cassidy, opens her mouth, it’s full of serrated teeth.
The crowd draws back, horrified.
Mei snarls and draws a rune on its forehead, and it falls asleep. She lets it drop to the ground, standing tall as the crowd draws back, staring at her in horror. Mei stands alone, silent and sneering, furious at all of us.
I don’t blame her.
Diablos and Hartley are watching from a wall not far away, and judging from their expressions, we failed.
We failed this mission spectacularly.
Mei swipes her hair back and throws the sleeping Nightmare creature to Ronit.
“Your human child, Siren,” she says scornfully.
He blinks, but for the first time that I’ve ever been able to witness, Ronit is speechless.
Mei sketches a rune in the air and disappears. Leaf lunges forward, but she’s gone. He whirls on us.
“Couldn’t you smell the rot? Couldn’t you see past the disguise? How were you that blind?”
No, we couldn’t see it because we got caught up letting the fact that it was a child distract us from the fact that we were here to do a job.
Fuck.
Leaf lunges into a portal and disappears with a wave of ocean water. He can do that? I stare at the spot, even more startled.
“He can open the portal to the Black Death Oceans?” My mind is reeling.
I walk over to Diablos. Waiting for his fury to spill over. This time, we deserve it.
“That went rather well, don’t you think?” he says in absolute disdain.
“We made a mistake.”
“Oh, don’t bullshit me, Siren. You made repeated mistakes. One, you didn’t look, you didn’t see. You ignore the obvious clues. When your nightmare teammate indicated that there was a creature in the human skin, you let humans attack her, then you tried to attack her. And then, to top it off, you didn’t even apologise or make good. You just left her to face the fear and scorn of the people she had just saved.”
I stare at the furious demon, hearing the long list of things I had just fucked up. For a moment, I’m back in the barracks, getting my ass handed to me.
