Hell Followed with Us(20)

I have a knife. What if Alex has a knife too? What if they stick it into my lung?

I lean on them, putting all my weight on them until they choke, their nails cutting into my face. Our shoes dig into the grass, and their knee hits my stomach as they buck and twist. I have to get my knife first, I have to—

A hand grabs me by the hood of my jacket and yanks me back, dragging me down to the dirt. I snarl and lash out with my foot. Alex scrambles back, clutching their neck. Ghost-white marks around their throat fade as blood rushes back into the skin.

Above me, Cormac steps back, heaving with anger. Hair has fallen out of his ponytail and hangs around his face in a mess.

“What the fuck,” he spits. “What the fuck?”

The stranglehold on my vision eases. The world comes into focus: the entire ALC staring at us. Nick holding Erin by the wrist. Everyone frozen, even the Watch, eyes wide like they caught me reciting an Angel prayer.

“Jesus Christ,” Cormac says. He holds out a hand for Alex, who scrabbles farther backward before finally staggering to their feet, ignoring him entirely. Cormac turns to me, face contorted. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I don’t answer. There are no words. I barely hear him, just the thrum of my heartbeat and the creaking of my bones. Just Flood in my mouth, burning, tasting like corpse flesh. I swallow it down even though I know it will come back up later.

Cormac turns his glare away from me, marches up to Nick, and jabs a finger into his chest. Nick recoils. Erin puts an arm between them.

“If you think I’m going to work with that motherfucker,” Cormac hisses.

Nick replies, simply, “Don’t touch me again.”

Alex flings open the back door and flees into the ALC. Cormac shakes awkwardly for a second, looking from face to face, waiting for someone else to speak up. Nobody does. Aisha, Faith, and Salvador all turn away.

Giving up, Cormac grunts and follows Alex inside.

And all that’s left is me.

The burning is stuck under my fingertips, searing hot, my cells breaking and bursting. My thoughts are an angry swirl of words, none of which I can get past my tongue. Everyone saw that they started it, right? I did what I had to. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t look at me like that.

One word gets past the block in my throat: a bloody, rot-splattered, “What?”

Nick breaks from the group and hauls me to my feet, not at all gently.

“I think,” he says, his face right next to mine, “it would be best if you turned in for the night.”

It isn’t until I nearly try to pull his arm out of his socket just for touching me that I manage to take a step back from myself and realize.

Something is really, really wrong with my head right now.

I don’t do this kind of thing. This isn’t me.

So what was it?





As the church is to Christ, a wife is to her husband, and Graces are to our Seraph.

—Reverend Mother Woodside’s notes



The Flood works in stages, but they pass so quickly—you’re dead by the fortieth hour, tops—that they blur together. It moves more like a parasite than a virus, devouring everything it touches. It starts with the insides, unraveling your organs for spare parts, and it gets into the brain so quickly that you don’t notice your spine growing out of your back until you’ve already tried to put your teeth through the nearest piece of flesh.

Seraph, though, is slow and meticulous. It has a vision in mind, and it’s going to do it right. I get to see the stages play out perfectly, all in order, ticking off each box as it goes. I watched it happen to the failed Seraphs before me, and now I get to watch it in the mirror.

This is the second stage. Sister Kipling had a specific word for where it happens: the blood-brain barrier. The virus gets from the blood into the brain and starts twisting it the way it twists the body. The way toxoplasma makes rats love cats, the way cordyceps makes bugs hang from the stem of a leaf. It makes you more likely to pass it on; it makes you angry. First you start puking up your organs, and then you get pissed.

I can’t say I didn’t know what came over me, because I do. And I can’t join the Watch if I’m going to hurt the people I’m supposed to be helping.

So I am going to do to Seraph what I can do to any other Grace: Look it in the eye and control it.



* * *





If Nick didn’t want me to leave the ALC, he shouldn’t have shown me how easy it was to get out without the sniper guard noticing. He had to whistle to get the guard’s attention when we left for Wagner Commons, and only then did they notice, acknowledging us with a wave: Fine, I won’t shoot you since you asked so nicely. All I have to do is wait until dark, then pull up on the gate handle so the hinges don’t squeal when I open it.

I am alone in Acheson.

The city is beautiful if you can ignore that, for months after Judgment Day, it stunk of dead bodies decomposing in beds, hospital gurneys, carpets, and alleyways. They baked in the sweltering sun, splitting down the stomach when they swelled too large with putrefaction gases. If you can ignore that some of the corpses track you with their eyes when you walk past. If you can hide well enough from the death squads.

But there is a beauty to the city. There’s no light pollution anymore, so you can look up at the night sky and see the entire universe twinkling between clouds and skyscrapers. Nature creeps back between cracks in the road and up the sides of buildings. I pull down my mask and breathe in fresh, cool, silent air on a street corner.