Summer Sons(112)

“Do as I ask,” she said, “and we won’t.”

Andrew released his fervent resistance with a pop like cracking knuckles. The remainder of the power he’d used to barricade himself gushed into the dirt and the waiting haunt. Without that final barrier holding it away from the deepest parts of him, the revenant rushed in and filled him to the brim. Troth’s expression went slack with surprise. She lifted a hand to the air in front of him, grasping at something he was unable to sense through the haze of reunification. He had become a passenger in his flesh, one half of a whole, as he’d thought of himself for so long.

Eddie stretched at the boundaries of his being with a tearing discomfort. Their union was not the pleasure he’d imagined it might be. Andrew’s pulse struggled to beat, erratic. The knife glistened in Troth’s hand, droplets of Andrew plunking to the ground beneath their feet.

The sun set, and the revenant stilled, the taut pause of a predator.

Their inheritance was strong—not Andrew’s thought, though it occupied his head. A concentric ripple washed from the site of his unmaking, his possession, through the earth and dust and bones the plantation was built on. The thing that had been Eddie was him, and he had become it as well. The crush of their beings slid home together, filling the gaps and crannies he had left, coursing through his blood and occupying his wounds. The pain lessened in his arms.

“Now give it over to me,” Troth commanded.

He remained silent. She drove her thumbs into the meat of his arms; he shrieked again. One of the horses whinnied in empathetic distress. Another kicked the stall. The witch-lights of Troth’s own power, some other eldritch thing with its own unwritten histories, set her eyes aglow with desire.

“Fuck,” gasped her husband across the room.

Sam snarled with the wildness of a trapped bear. Andrew heard a choked, wet gagging and a thump. Troth glanced up, startled, and her expression morphed into a mask of desperate fury. She released Andrew, scooping her knife from the floor mid-stride. Sam and his captor were struggling in the dirt, the sick man’s legs kicking while the handcuff chain sliced across his throat like a garrote. Sam buried his face into the bony hollow of the man’s shoulders as he scratched and slapped, clumsy with loss of oxygen. The nervous horses whinnied and bickered. Troth sprinted across the barn with her weapon at the ready as Sam rolled onto his back, Mark’s spasming form shielding his chest and face. He maintained the choke-chain pressure.

Troth grabbed one of Sam’s forearms and angled her knife at his unprotected side, but he twisted to slam their combined weight into her, throwing her aim. Her stab skidded harmlessly across the dirt. Three bodies writhed in violent tandem, indistinguishable. The revenant that was Andrew wrested himself an inch left and an inch right, straining at his ropes without loosening them. Troth slashed at the meat of Sam’s thigh, splitting denim and skin. His blood mingled with the same earth that had drunk Andrew’s, and Eddie’s, feeding the growing storm beneath it—and as if called, the rush of death beat through the room like a hundred pairs of wings. Mark had gone limp.

Troth wailed, grasping at her husband’s fragile torso as Sam crowed a hoarse laugh. Her hand raised again, knife held high. Sam freed the handcuff chain in time to deflect the blade with a metallic ring, but the tip caught his face on the altered path with a spray of red. Andrew jolted at Sam’s punched-out yowl of shocked agony.

He’d never heard someone make a sound like that before. The disorienting wonderment of a fresh kill on the air coalesced with his own frantic need to help Sam. If he’d found the richness of his fully realized power intoxicating before, the added burst of sustenance made him and the revenant feel like a small god in their new flesh. Filmy, auric impressions radiated from Sam—and from Troth, who throbbed with the malevolence of a siren. He recognized the ochre sourness of her magic from the ring, the baited gift she’d used to confirm him as her next target. But, he realized with a grim flowering of determination, she’d made a miscalculation—leaving him unattended, as if he occupied a limited human body. Ropes weren’t sufficient to restrain the thing she’d forced him to become. Troth’s knife lifted and Sam fumbled to free himself of her husband’s corpse, bound at ankles and arms. He wouldn’t get loose in time. The revenant wrapped their starvation tight around the oil-stained vibration of her power, with the same instinct as a python testing the size of its prey.

Eddie’s remainder murmured with Andrew’s mouth, “She’s ours.”

The wind that lashed through the barn frightened the horses into a shrieking frenzy as he poured himself into Mark’s responsive corpse, now twitching it like a marionette. Things inside Andrew wrenched, and Mark’s limp arm flopped up to catch the next stab Troth aimed at Sam’s throat. Her knife stuck on bone. He severed the connection and the arm dropped, twisting the hilt loose from her flinching hand.

Compared to the darkness of Troth’s void, Halse burned bright as an ember in their unearthly sight. His life was precious; on that, he and the remnant agreed. The doubled creature returned their attention to the viscous sore that was Troth, and Andrew followed his animal instinct—allowing the revenant to tear in with abandon, gnawing through the foul source of her magic.

Troth made a curious noise, pausing mid-reach for her blade. Her balance wavered where she knelt above her husband’s corpse. Incomprehension washed across her expression. She toppled to the side. Andrew saw the terror twisting her face and hesitated as she seized on the ground. The revenant didn’t hesitate. The revenant was the one who sank fangs into her core and shredded and shredded, until only the finest thread connected her flesh to her being.