Hell Followed with Us(7)

There’s a person in its mouth. A boy. It’s pulling him, thrashing, down the front stairs.

Nick’s tapping stops.

This is nothing I haven’t seen before. This is nothing I haven’t done before. I’ve whispered against a Grace’s neck and turned the Flood against the Angels, but sick still wells in the back of my throat. This is what my power looks like. This is why the Angels made me a monster.

Bullets slam into the Grace’s back, blowing apart what’s left of its face, but it keeps moving. It drags the boy into the street, lifts him high like it’s showing off a kill, and bites all the way down.

The sound is thick and wet. Like a soggy branch snapping underfoot. Pieces of bone glint in the sun. The boy does not make any noise at all as he drops to the ground, his severed leg dangling from the Grace’s mouth.

An Angel cries, “The Lord is good!” and Nick says, “Cover your ears.”

I don’t hesitate. I clamp my hands tight, but it’s still so loud. A burst of three bullets: one hits the sedan, the other nicks the Grace’s shoulder, and the other hits it right in what once had been the jaw. None do anything. Gore splatters the road, but the Grace just brings its giant, clawed foot down.

Onto the boy’s chest.

His body gives instantly. Dozens of bones crack at once. There’s a chorus beyond the ringing in my ears—the death squad howling praise and holy words like dogs.

The Grace will hunt down every one of Nick’s people and slaughter them. Nobody stands a chance against a Grace, the ones built into perfect blessings of war. Unless you get a bullet through what’s left of its brain or take off enough limbs that it can’t come after you anymore, there’s nothing anyone can do.

Except Seraph. Except me.

No. No, no. I promised I wouldn’t. Evil begets evil begets evil; giving into Seraph is what the Angels want; I promised I would be good. I can’t.

Dad told me to keep the monster hidden as long as I could—chain it between my ribs, to never accept what the Angels did to me. But if I sit back and watch them die, how can I call myself good at all? I wouldn’t be ending lives; I’d be saving them. Turning away from Seraph isn’t good if it means leaving people to be devoured.

And I won’t let the Angels get their hands on me.

I whisper, “Stop.”

I don’t have to say it out loud, but if I don’t say it at least to myself, it feels like I’m throwing my mind to the ether and letting it fall. Mom always said I should pray out loud because it lets God know I’m not ashamed of my love for Him.

I say it again, softer, so small there’s no sound, but it’s there. “Stop.”

Stop.

STOP.

The Grace stops.

The boy’s leg falls out of its mouth. Piles of skin and knotted muscle twitch in fear. In confusion. In pain.

If I whisper one more word, the Grace will turn on the Angels with the scream of burning sinners, a choir of voices swallowed whole by the Flood. It will break their spines and crush their skulls the same way it killed that boy.

It would be so easy.

“What—” Nick starts.

I say, “Take the shot.”

Nick needs nothing else. He yanks the gun to his shoulder and lines it up—between two shards of glass clinging to the windowpane, above the sedan, into the gaping maw of the Grace’s mouth, where it will hit the brain and turn it off like a light.

One day, somebody is going to think the same thing about me.

In the half a second between Nick deciding on the shot and reaching for the trigger, it dawns. This is my future. I’ve seen the failed Seraph trials. I’ve seen martyrs pull off their skin, desperate, afraid, aware.

That’s going to be me, and there’s nothing I can do.

CRACK.

It’s a perfect shot. One bullet. Instantaneous. Not like Dad, where I watched him bleed out from a gaping wound and pressed my hands to the raw meat of his chest, as if I could have ever helped. This borders on merciful. The Grace stumbles, almost as if it’s tripped, and falls in a jumble of limbs.

I did it. I actually did it. It worked.

It hurts.

I fall and hit the cabinet. Pain burns down like I swallowed hellfire, and my black liquefied guts come out of my mouth, and they’re dripping onto my lips. I press my hands to my mouth because those are my insides, those are my insides coming out, and maybe if I hold them in, they’ll go back to normal, if I just— There’s a noise. My vision is a narrow blurry point, or maybe my eyes are just squeezed shut. Something’s touching me, and I want it to stop. Another noise. I think it’s a voice. The Flood rot is bitter and way too sweet, the way a corpse smells sweet in the summer sun, and someone is saying my name. Lord, I kneel before You a sinner, have mercy, have mercy.

“Up here,” Nick says. “Benji. Up here. Focus on me.”

Benji. That’s my name, the name I picked. Nick catches me by the shoulders and presses napkins against my face the way you’d clean a fussy baby.

“Look at me.” When he’s done, he pulls my mask up over my nose. “Keep that there, no matter what. Am I clear?”

The pain has settled into a throbbing ache like a bad period cramp. Bad, really bad, but nothing I haven’t felt before. Nothing I haven’t survived before.

“Clear,” I say.