A Drop of Night(81)

Lilly’s sabre whips out, slashing Havriel’s palm. “Shouldn’t have come after us, then.”

His face turns hideous, a crinkled, vicious mask, teeth bared. He looks down at the cut in his palm, and for a second I think he’s crying, his eyes squeezed shut. But it’s a chuckle, a thin laugh, high in the back of his throat. He steps toward us, his bleeding palm raised. Lilly swings her sabre with all her strength. Havriel’s eyes open wide. He catches the blade on his arm, loops it down. The tip hits the floor. Lilly loses her grip, and Havriel kicks the sabre away. It goes spinning and dancing across the stones, like a tiny wind spout.

“Oh, children,” he says, and he’s right there, right in front of us. His hand—bloody from his wounds, bloody from his brother’s—clenches around my neck. “You should not have made me angry.”

He lifts me up like I’m weightless. I claw at his fingers. He doesn’t let go. Multicolored explosions bloom across my vision. The buzz is rising, painful, filling every crack and fissure in my head, and I don’t know if it’s just me dying, or if everyone hears it. I see the trackers pinning Lilly’s arms while she screams and kicks. I see Miss Sei, pulling on a medical glove with a snap, kneeling next to Jules and Will––

Havriel’s eyes flick away from my face. He’s looking over my shoulder. I don’t know what he sees, don’t even care anymore, but his mouth goes slack. And something hits me, hits us all. A massive shock wave, soft and cold and crushing all at once. I’m flying, rolling across the floor. I see Havriel hurtling into the dark, picked up like a rag doll.

I lie for a second, gasping, choking. Push myself up onto hands and knees. “Lilly?” I cough. “Will?”

The trackers are on the floor, spread around me in a circle. It’s like I’m the epicenter of a bomb. Miss Sei lies crumpled against a boulder about ten feet away, glassy-eyed. Not far away from her, Havriel is sitting up in the faint blue-yellow light of one of the tanks, brushing his hand delicately across a cut in his cheek. He looks almost disbelieving.

“You are here,” he croaks into the darkness, and he must be talking to the pale thing, because it’s walking slowly toward us, drifting over the rocks and the bodies. Its eyes are black, birdlike. “Le petit-ma?tre.”

The butterfly man. It’s got to be. The creature they made. The one they can’t control anymore.

“You brought us our runaways,” Havriel says, pushing himself to his feet. His voice is becoming a strange mixture of contempt and groveling fear. “I am forever indebted, I’m sure.”

Will and Jules are about six feet away from me, tangled with the bodies of some trackers. Further away, Lilly’s trying to push herself out from under the mass of arms and legs. Her hair is sticking to her face in wet strands. I start crawling toward them.

The butterfly man passes me, black eyes pinned on Havriel. The whine rises the closer he comes, until it’s all there is, the only sound I can hear. The butterfly man stops in front of Havriel. The buzzing cuts off abruptly.

“I have not brought you your runaways,” he says. His voice is weirdly soft and uncertain. Almost sweet. Havriel is looking up at him, his expression horrified.

“I have returned them for myself,” the butterfly man says. “I have been waiting for you to arrive, Havriel du Bessancourt. I was waiting for Father as well, but it seems he has been given his just rewards at last. I cannot say I will mourn him. I wish to tell you that our long-standing alliance is terminated.”

Lilly’s up, stumbling over bodies to get to us. I try to stand, feel the black polymer suits against the soles of my feet, sticky and disgusting, the give of flesh.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Havriel moving, backing away from the butterfly man. “Alliance?” he says. “But we are not allies. What a foolish concept. We are brothers! Equals!”

“Equals?” The butterfly man lets out a high, chittering laugh. I notice a disturbance in the air around him, a dark, fuming mass, barely visible.

I’ve reached Will. I heave him upright.

“Equals,” the butterfly man says again, softer, yearning. “You rule the world in secret. I wander a dungeon, alone. You keep me fettered in a gilded wasteland, at every turn a mirror to remind of who I am and what you made me. No,” the butterfly man says. “If we were equal, you would not have done this to me.”

The disturbance around him flares. Havriel goes slamming against one of the tanks. He slides down it, coughing.

“I have had enough of this arrangement,” the butterfly man says, and the longing’s gone from his voice. It’s gone sharp, malicious. “Enough of Father, and enough of your whispers, and enough of this palace and the world above it in all its vile, hopeless cruelty. You know, there is only one cure for pining after something you cannot possess. That is to destroy it entirely.”

Will and I are moving now, squashing over limbs, tripping over helmets. Lilly’s reached Jules. She’s trying to shake him awake.

I feel something brush the back of my neck, an awareness, like a million tiny needles prickling over my skin––

I freeze. The butterfly man: he’s looking straight at me.

I stay perfectly still, trying not to breathe. Will’s so heavy. My muscles are burning, aching.

“Bonjour,” the butterfly man says, and I close my eyes, because I know he’s stepping toward me. I can feel the air sharpening, becoming dense and charged. My back feels like it’s being picked at, like my skin is releasing in particles and dissolving into the air.