Hell Followed with Us(46)

“I said back up!” Cormac snaps.

“No.” I say it before I can stop myself, grabbing his sleeve. “Put that down.”

“What?”

“Just trust me.”

Cormac coughs out a sick-sounding noise. “Trust you?”

Joey says, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“She’s not a monster,” I say. “She’s a kid.” I could have said the same for the choirboys. I could always say the same for something else. “If you won’t talk to her, I will.”

Joey says, “Talk to her?”

Faith says, “Benji, don’t.”

Cormac says, “Don’t you dare.”

Nick says nothing.

Nick is the only person whose opinion I give a shit about.

I step off the concrete foundation and into the grass. The sun soaks into my black clothes, turns what should be winter into near summer, burning the earth like God’s wrath setting fire to the grasses and trees.

We meet between the pavilion and the pond, on the edge of the path. Her head lolls, and her eyes whirl like a scared animal. Her breathing is wet and labored, her lungs full of fluid. Dissolving from the inside, turning into something else, the same thing that’s happening to me.

Oh God, this is me. This is me.

“Hey,” I murmur. Soft nonsense, anything to calm her, to keep her from screaming. This is me, this is me. “Hey, there.”

She says, sick burbling up with each word, “It hurts.”

This is me. If Nick hadn’t found me, I would’ve become a half-dead kid wandering the city, stumbling up to the first person I saw, begging for help they couldn’t give. My skin cracking, black shit coming up my throat as my organs are eaten away.

I am still going to be this, no matter what. Just with four walls and some people who might not kill me, might, might.

“I know it hurts,” I whisper, “but you need to leave. It’s going to hurt more if you keep walking toward us.” She stares, but her eyes aren’t focused on me. She doesn’t have long. “You need to get away.”

Get away.

Almost like this can make up for the dead boys in Reformation, for the ears in that bag, for what the Watch has to do to keep our people safe, alive, and okay.

Instead of Seraph’s warmth, there is a deep, rough sound. The sound of grinding teeth.

Of breaking bones.

Her face shatters into a spray of pieces, coming apart in chunks barely held together with stretches of sinew and Flood—eyes, teeth, tongue. Rot splatters my mask and hair. Her fingers curl back, and bones tear out into claws. She shrieks loud enough she could bring the world down around us, and she yanks me closer by the lapels of my jacket until her massive, dripping teeth are inches from my face.

I say, “Stop.”

She stops. Trembling. As her body crumbles and breaks apart around her, she stops.

And there’s a crack like thunder and her body jerks once, crack, again. Black-red blood seeps out of her shirt as she stumbles and tries to hold on to me, but it isn’t enough, and she hits the grass, dead.

Her body doesn’t make nearly enough noise for how loud it feels.

Exodus 21:23–25—But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Those boys died in Reformation, and she will die in turn because that is how the world works. In what world was my God ever a benevolent one? I didn’t even try to save them, so what gives me the right to save her just to make myself feel better? How dare I call myself good? How dare I even try?

She convulses once. Her insides leak into the dirt just like Dad’s insides did, her face broken like Dad’s face. Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I swallow it because I can’t throw up here, not in front of the Vanguard and everyone else. My eyes water with the strain of it, and it’s the closest I’ve come to crying in a long time. I hate it.

A stick snaps behind me. I turn, trying to breathe and failing. Nick is stepping down from the pavilion. Every member of the Vanguard has their guns trained on me.

He holds out a new mask, taken from the Vanguard’s cart, still wrapped in plastic.

“Catch,” he says.

He tosses it to me. I fumble, it hits the grass, and he backs away to let me pick it up. We do the same dance with a rag taken from the Vanguard’s stash, wet with water from Faith’s bottle. I clean myself and show off the gore-stained rag, fingers splayed. It goes on the ground too.

Everybody waits. We wait a long time, long enough that a flock of birds comes to the trees and sweat trickles down my spine, pooling in the excess material of my sports bra. Long enough that my feet start to hurt from standing so still. The body smells, but I’m used to it. I stand in the sun with a dead girl until I finally say, “None of it got in my mouth.”

“Or your eyes?” Joey says.

“Or my eyes.” I think some of it did but it doesn’t matter. “I’m fine.”

“She didn’t bite you? Or claw you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Unzip your jacket.”

I do what Joey asks even though they can make out the curve of my chest. I even pull down the collar of my shirt so they can see the skin her claws grazed. There’s no mark.