Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(88)

“Calm down?” it hissed. “Calm down? Do you imagine that you can even begin to comprehend what the reliquary feels like, after a few years in a pathetic little human shed? I was trapped there for centuries in the silence and the dark. I’ll kill all of you before I let you put me back. I’ll kill all of you,” it snarled, and seized me like a dog with a carcass, driving me to my knees.

In an absurd twist of fate, the grate lay just ahead. I could see it now from my angle on the ground, a square of watery gray light in the tunnel’s ceiling. But I couldn’t get there, because the revenant was trying to possess me.

Its presence swarmed through me, foul and oily with malice, blotting out my senses. Blood thundered in my ears; the patch of sky showing through the grate pulsed from light to dark. I brought the dagger to my arm and heard my skin sizzle, but the revenant only thrashed harder. I tasted copper.

Before, in Naimes, I had thought that I’d fought it off at its full strength. Now I wondered if it had been holding back.

I was at its mercy. I didn’t even have the reliquary. When I had let Marguerite keep it, I had been placing my trust in the revenant as much as in her, because I had known that threatening to destroy the relic was no longer an option. I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it—not after coming to see the revenant as a person. I couldn’t have threatened it that way any more than I could have kicked that scared goat in Naimes to make it obey, or locked my own silent, shivering ten-year-old self back in the shed.

As it fought me, it kept repeating things like, “I’ll kill you all,” and “I’ll rend your miserable soul to shreds,” except it struck me suddenly that it might not even know what it was saying. I shouldn’t have told it to calm down, because it couldn’t, any more than I had been able to overcome the stink and heat of the effigy’s fire or ignore the people staring at me in Elaine’s house.

That was when I realized it wasn’t trying to possess me on purpose.

Not that the revelation helped; I still didn’t know what to do. Grasping, I thought of the goat again, the one that had been kicked and hit and yelled at until all it had known to do was bite. Talking to it had seemed to make a difference, even though it hadn’t understood the words.

“It’s all right,” I gasped. “You’ll be all right.”

“I’ll murder you,” it snarled.

“It’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you.”

I wasn’t sure where I’d learned those phrases as a child. Someone must have said them to me for me to have repeated them to the goat, though I didn’t have a memory of it. Not my parents, I knew. Possibly it had been Mother Katherine, carting my possessed and burned body all the way back to the convent, stroking my hair because she couldn’t hold my hand.

I couldn’t tell if the revenant was listening, but I was able to regain enough control to reach out an arm and drag myself across the tunnel’s floor, toward the weak light spilling in from the grate. I wasn’t certain I could get there, but I had to try, one agonizing inch at a time.

I said, “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again.”

It was an absurd thing to say to a creature like the revenant, but it also wasn’t, because I was certain that no one had ever said anything like that to it before in all the long centuries of its existence. And it worked. The revenant stopped speaking in words. It started shrieking instead, howling wordlessly and tearing at me with its claws. It hurt, but it was a familiar pain, the same pain I had inflicted on myself so many times in the shed. I knew then that we really were going to be all right, because I had survived it before, and I would survive it again.

“We’re almost there,” I told it, and used the final breath of my failing strength to heave myself into the gray pool of light on the tunnel floor.

The revenant let out a horrible cry and renewed its thrashing, but it felt weaker now, a different kind of struggle—the despair of knowing that after the fight ended, it would have to face what it had done. I recognized that feeling too.

Me, the goat, the revenant, we weren’t very different from each other in the end. Perhaps deep down inside everyone was just a scared animal afraid of getting hurt, and that explained every confusing and mean and terrible thing we did.

Leander had been right, earlier. I was the one he had misjudged. The revenant might be a monster, but it was my monster. I wrapped my arms around myself and held on as it screamed and fought and clawed. I held on until, finally, it went limp.





TWENTY-THREE


Neither of us wanted to talk about it afterward, to my profound relief. I was sore all over, and I had plenty else to occupy my thoughts. Some of them were ideas I didn’t want to examine too closely, circling beneath the surface of my mind like sharks. Now that we were back aboveground, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I had to face them. The scorch marks on the altar. Saint Eugenia’s fire-blackened finger bone, her body burned to ash.

But for now I focused on my current problems. The first thing I had discovered after hoisting myself aboveground was that night had fallen; the gray light trickling through the grate had belonged to the moon, glaring over the city’s rooftops like a bright silver coin. The street outside the alley where I had emerged looked empty, but I still checked to make sure no one was watching before I shoved the grate back into place.