Alfie shot the creature in the chest again, punching Root into a sitting position atop the crate. The monster looked ridiculous, a gentleman at rest, as if seated for a portrait. Its undamaged eye studied Malcolm, strangely patient. Violet might have been right—there might be no way to kill this thing—but it could be hurt. Damaged. If they could force it off the train, they might still leave it behind.
Or so he told himself.
He crouched and retrieved the chain from the floor. “Let’s try this again. Only this time, we’re gonna smash that head like a rotten pumpkin. We’ll see if you can grow that back.”
The little boy clung protectively to the monster and hissed. Malcolm and Alfie stepped toward the monster and its stolen child, and then Violet’s voice cut through the rattle of the train.
“My God. Elias!”
Malcolm spun to see his brother struggling to stand. Elias swayed, caught his balance on a stack of shipping crates, and raked at his face with his free hand. The ruined skin came away in strips and shreds. Beneath was flesh that had the same gray mushroom tint as Root, and those pulsing black veins.
“Hello, little brother,” Elias said.
But Malcolm saw in his eyes that whatever this thing might be, it wasn’t Elias anymore.
Root threw its head back and shrieked, a hideous, earsplitting cry that blotted out the noise of the train and the storm pelting the roof, even the sound of Malcolm’s heart racing in his chest. The creature began to attack Maggie’s crate again.
“Elias,” Violet said. “You can’t let this happen.”
Alfie aimed his gun at Elias. “Sorry, lady. This thing ain’t him.”
The nails holding the lid on Maggie’s crate gave a small shriek of their own as they began to come loose.
Malcolm swung the chain. He smashed it across Elias’s face, then grabbed it with both hands and dropped it down over Root’s head, hauling backward with all his strength, strangling the monster and jerking it away from the crate. They had to find a way to destroy it.
And Elias. Malcolm would have to obliterate his brother. Erase him from the world, whatever it took.
Another shriek tore through the baggage car. As the train tipped to the left, he realized the sound hadn’t come from Root and Elias this time. It came from the Imperial Limited—from the tracks. They were rounding a long curve, and the engineerhadn’t slowed them down. The rain and wind punished the train. He wondered if part of the track had washed out, but explanations no longer mattered as the noise grew louder—a shriek of metal.
The train broke free of its tracks, engine first.
They were falling. Alfie roared in protest. The baggage car hit the ground on its side, glass shattering. Trunks and crates and suitcases tumbled and broke open. Crates of wine and whiskey smashed. The train plowed into the dirt, sliding sideways. He heard the rending of metal and muffled screams, quickly silenced.
He smashed his head against the ceiling, and unconsciousness claimed him.
The stink of blood chased him down into darkness.
20
Pain forced Elias awake. He felt the rain. Felt himself dragged over slick grass, sharp stone, and broken glass, but that discomfort seemed so distant. The real pain seared his guts and constricted his muscles so fiercely he wanted to scream. His mouth hung open, lips flayed by the sharpness of his own teeth, and his senses flared as he understood that he was, indeed, screaming.
Root lifted him with one hand, stared eye to eye with revulsion. They were the same—Elias knew that much—and yet they were not the same. When the monster had caught him half an hour outside of Buffalo, tracking the scent of Maggie Wise’s blood inside her son, Elias hadn’t gotten a good look before it drove him to the pavement and drank his blood.
Now Elias saw it up close and understood why such things had once been worshiped. Root must have been more than seven feet tall. Time had turned its flesh into an ageless thing, but its eyes spoke of unimaginable age and the same yearning to scream. But Elias saw that Root would not scream, and it disgusted him that Elias had surrendered to pain so easily.
“Hush,” Root said, and flung Elias to the ground.
The impact jarred Elias’s bones, but that pain also seemed numb and distant as a memory. His bones felt as if something clawed at them, and the weight of the air seemed to suffocate him.
“My God,” he whispered, staring at Root, thinking of thethings he’d thought and felt on board the train. The sickness, the rotting, the way he’d slipped down into cold nothing.
Dead.
The realization shook him. He remembered it, that moment of dying. But now he was alive again, still Elias Wise but something else as well. Something in agony. Death proved itself more painful than life had ever been.
The wind gusted, rain slashing at him. The intensity of that sound rose, joined by voices screaming. Now that he’d swallowed his own pain, those voices seemed to merge with the wind, blowing and breathing and swirling around him. Hisses of steam came from the wreckage as Elias pushed himself up to a kneeling position. His subconscious stratified the screams all around them, separating the shrieks of pain from the wailing of grief. Somehow it was easy to tell them apart.
The train had derailed. Back along the tracks, a few cars remained mostly upright, but everything forward had crashed. There seemed no way to know which car had been first to slip its iron traces, but the wreckage told the rest of the story. The engine lay on its side, cracked open, nose pointed at the tracks. The baggage car had torn away and come to rest upside down. The sleeper cars had torn up the ground as they skidded to a halt, also on their sides. They’d pushed into one another, closing like an accordion.
