The Book Eaters(38)
In fact, they always had been. However loving her childhood, her flesh was still theirs, her goods for the selling. Like pigs or chickens raised for the slaughter, she had developed affection for her keepers, and they for her. But that did not stop her from being consumed; pig farmers still chewed their bacon with enjoyment. Affection only made cruelty rueful.
In the distance behind her trilled a soft, high whistle.
Pursuit. Her skin broke into goose bumps and Devon ran harder. She hadn’t done much running about since Salem’s birth but desperation lent her strength. Evasion should still be possible if she could get somewhere with people, where the knights might be shy to accost.
Except she feared dashing across the moorland, out in the open with knights streaming toward her on motorcycles, dragons clinging to their backs. Here, at least, she could lose them for chunks of time, hide her tracks and her noise in the tangle of frosted woodland.
Closer to a town, and she might have made it. As it was, less than two hours after leaving the manor she had knights fanning out on all sides, barely fifty meters away, and Ramsey among them. She couldn’t see him but she’d heard him shouting, knew his voice too well.
Other figures darted with furtive strides, all of them black-clad and wearing ubiquitous motorcycle helmets. A snapshot flashed through her brain as she ran: Luton, bending over a newborn Salem. The tongue. Has anyone checked?
Dragons lived at the periphery of her world as voiceless apparitions. She knew them to be the twisted, crazed children who sported proboscises instead of bookteeth; who hungered for minds instead of books like a kind of watered-down zombie; who lived in a knight-run facility somewhere near Oxford because they could not be trusted to resist their own hunger, even with Redemption to hand. She knew, too, that they were now wielded by knights to troubleshoot Family problems, as an uncle had once put it.
Devon, it seemed, was now a Family problem. One they had no compunction about solving in violent or lethal ways should she step out of line. If a dragon caught her, he’d unfurl a hideous mosquito tongue and stick it down her ear, a gross parody of intimacy, and suck her life, memories, entire psyche away in less than a minute.
Ramsey called out something in Latin. The high-pitched whistle sounded again. And fear like Devon had never known before riddled her body with sudden weakness. She zigzagged in a blind panic, too breathless to even scream.
“Girl! Stop!” The closest dragon had a voice like a bullhorn, and he wore no helmet. Veins ran dark beneath his abnormally pale face, the skin pallid from lack of sunlight. So much for voiceless, faceless, or mindless.
Fear lent fire to her feet. She didn’t stop, choosing instead to sprint across a dry brook and up a crumbling bank. Devon ducked beneath a set of low-hanging branches and crashed straight into a living nightmare: another mind eater, who had somehow circled in front and now flung himself at her.
They both fell to the ground, struggling. He was even taller than she and more thickly built. Dark eyes bulged, the pupils mere pinpricks. He tried to hold her down, spittle flying from parted lips.
Lips. Hiding a proboscis tongue.
Revulsion surged into strength and she headbutted him, hard. He howled like a wounded wolf, blood splattering from his nose. Devon shoved him to the side, rolled to her feet—and lost the breath from her lungs as two more dragons barreled her over.
Outnumbered three to one, Devon punched, clawed, kicked with a fierceness that surprised and exhilarated her. She’d tussled with her brothers as a child but not for years and never like this. Fear melted away, freeing her limbs and tightening her reflexes.
It wasn’t enough. One moment she was ripping someone’s hair out by the fistfuls while kicking another person in the shins. The next moment she was somehow down on the ground, the first man kneeling on her chest with his hands around her neck while a second grabbed her legs and a third pinned her wrists.
She never even saw the knights arrive, didn’t notice them filtering through the trees or hear Ramsey shouting Locum tenentem! to the dragons.
A snapping sound, like an oversized rubber band, followed by a pinch in her chest. A sky’s worth of lightning bolts flooded Devon’s body. Pain crackled through her muscles. It felt like strings of acid winding through her flesh.
The longest five seconds of her life before the Taser burst finally ended. Her mouth was full of blood; she’d bitten her tongue. None of her limbs worked and wooziness crept into her skull. Someone gave a sharp whistle, and the dragons withdrew, making grumpy huffing noises.
“I’m sorry, Dev.” Ramsey came to stand over her, Taser gun still pointed her way. “But you have to learn, and this is your lesson. If you run, we will always catch you. I will always catch you.”
Devon stared up at him, crucified by a mix of emotions. She should have been getting up to flee but lethargy weighed her bones, and her body cringed in remembered agony. Was a Taser supposed to hurt so much? Or was this a particular agony that only book eaters felt?
“Back in the day, they had ways of dealing with girls like this,” said a green-eyed knight, stepping into her field of vision. “Fit girls with ankle tags and all sorts. Maybe your sister needs one of those, huh?”
“Nah. She won’t do it again.” Ramsey nudged her with his toe. “Will you, Dev?”
She tried to speak, couldn’t. Tried to spit, couldn’t do that either. Breathing was a challenge. Knights filtered through the trees around her, soundless and eerie. No, not soundless—she was losing sound, and sight. Dizziness encroached, bringing blackness with it.