Then yellow light.
It feels like it’s coming from inside me, bubbling up from the base of my throat, exploding out of my eyes to blind me. The brown-gray-blue of the world is replaced with a flat screen of dazzling yellow. My curse lunges forward, whining as if its legs are being piloted against its will.
Dust in the air. Veer driving away. I blink again, and the road is filled with blood.
The Camry’s wheels churn uselessly, and without warning it swerves to the left, off-road, and stops with an ear-splitting crunch.
I want to scream. It comes out a howl. I see a canyon before a flash flood, rocks cast pyre red with excitement, chalk white with anticipation.
The flayed man paints one final message across my mind as I turn to face him.
Give up.
25
MY FIRST IMPULSE IS TO LET GO OF THE CHAIN, LETbrutality infect me, let my jaws grow so long they’ll run him through. I’ll burn when the sun comes up, same as he will, but that happens slow and violence can happen fast.
But I need him alive. He knows where my mom is. And through the queasy stench of decay, I can still smell Veer. If I let go completely, what happens to her?
Don’t bother.
Asphalt shimmering on an August highway. Creosote crackling underfoot.
It won’t work.
Fuck you. I reach for the waiting chain, and—oh. He’s right. My curse is paralyzed, suspended midleap, ears pressed flat to its skull and eyes roving desperately. My knees are still bent back, my elbows still weeping, but it’s not getting any worse.
My body is my own to destroy. Who is he, to be allowed such power over it?
“Where’s my mom?” I demand.
The strands of muscle around his mouth draw back in a ghoulish smile. I look up into his lidless eyes and his deathless, worm-woven face, and my senses are caked with the smell of rot.
“You want to see her.” It’s not a question, and it’s no longer in my mind but spoken out loud in a voice that sounds like it hasn’t been used in centuries. The chasm in his torso pulses.
“Please.” It rips out of me, almost like I’m not speaking at all. Please. I came all this way, I fought my body for every step, and not even because I owe her. Though I do, I do, that’s been carved into the lining of my organs and I can’t escape it. It’s because I need her, because she’s my home and she’s all I have left, and because if she’s stolen from me now, then what was the point of fighting my whole life to be enough for her? What’s it all been for, if she can’t look at me and finally say she’s satisfied?
The flayed man’s torso spasms, and he laughs a raw, scraping noise that sounds like torture. From somewhere behind me comes an answering howl. Loping animal footfalls. The smell of rancid yogurt and pink lipstick, silk pillowcases and rose hand cream, but scorched and sticky, caramelized by viciousness. Before, I would have sworn I’d die before I ever saw my mom turned monstrous. But now…
“Mom?” My voice cracks. I know it’s her. I’d know her anywhere, even like this. Skinless and bestial, head hung low between exposed shoulder blades, her chest a writhing mass of maggots. She folds herself at the flayed man’s feet and vomits a sound halfway between a sob and a snarl. Her dull gray eyes weep a milky mixture of blood and vitreous fluid.
Worms ripple over the mountain ranges of the flayed man’s sharklike fangs. “You’re welcome.”
“What did you do to her?”
“She chose the hunt.” I’m flooded with more images. A desert-bleached neon sign, glass jagged, corrupted by sand. A leg, fleshy, then gangrenous, then stripped to bone, while clouds speed overhead.
“What about my uncle?”
The flayed man coughs, a sound like canyon walls scraping together. He coughs again, and this one sounds like a botched operation. I can see the heave of his throat echoed in the empty space of his chest, and then I’m not looking at him at all because I smell blood. Like instant coffee and engine oil and veins so pickled by chemicals and resentment that they’ve forgotten there’s any other way to be. Then I see what he’s vomited up.
The desert constricts until the only things in the world are my useless body and the flayed man’s worm-ridden tendons and the half-digested heart that he’s puked onto the sand in front of me. It weeps blood into the cracks of the desert. Worms untwist themselves from the flayed man’s wrecked tendons and drop onto it, fat pale teardrops burrowing into withered muscle.
“He came to visit too. But he wasn’t ready to hunt.”
Behind him, my mom climbs to her feet. In this form, her bones are no longer brittle, her body no longer frail. She rolls her shoulders, and skinless muscle ripples.
“Mom,” I beg. “It’s me. It’s Ellis. Don’t you want to go home?”
