Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(50)

Screaming with agony and rage, she whipped her other hand up, pulling now with both arms, with the muscles of her shoulders and chest and back.

Suddenly she heard a sharp crack beneath her, and the main branch on which she lay collapsed away from her, leaving her hanging. The pain, clever and deceitful as it always was, revealed that it had so much more to give.

She screamed, but she took it.

The muscles all along her tanned arms stood taut against her skin. Hot wetness ran down from her torn side, and fat drops of blood fell down into the shadows. Below her the infected hogs sent up a squeal of hellish hunger.

“Damn you,” she growled as she pulled herself up.

The whole tree swayed, tilting outward as if trying to shake her off.

Lilah pulled.

The pigs were in a frenzy, smashing themselves against the trunk.

Lilah pulled.

Pinecones rained down on her. Blood roared in her ears.

Lilah pulled.

She forced her knees up, forced her feet out to explore, forced them to find something solid.

And there it was. The stump of the branch that had just broken. Twenty inches of solid wood. Lilah stretched one foot out and shifted her weight onto it. The branch held.

With the last of her strength, she swung her body above the branch and settled her other foot on it.

Safe.

Gasping, bleeding, sweating, dizzy, and sick. But safe.

When she dared open her eyes, she looked down at the boars below her. Six of them. Dead pig eyes stared back up at her. They wanted her flesh. They had the patience of eternity to wait her out. Even with her pistol and spear she could never hope to defeat two of them, let alone a half dozen.

Nevertheless Lilah bent over so they could see her face.

And she smiled at them.





36

SAINT JOHN OF THE KNIFE RAN LIKE A GHOST, MAKING ONLY THOSE sounds he chose to make.

The children—the false Nyx and her knight—were clever, and they had some woodcraft, but they were not a tenth as silent as the man who followed them.

Behind and around Saint John there were other sounds. The distant roar of the quads as his reapers scoured the woods to hunt down the last of Carter’s heretics. And, closer to hand, the artless footfalls of the following dead, coaxed in this direction by occasional blasts of his dog whistle.

Twice Saint John encountered reapers and twice he sent them away, declining their offer of help, ordering them to continue with the hunt for the heretics. By nightfall the last of that party should be accounted for, their bodies opened by sanctified blades so the darkness could enter. It had been a long chase from Treetops, the clever tree-house town in Wyoming. A thousand wooden houses built amid the boughs of the sturdy pines of the Bighorn National Forest.

He smiled at the thought. Wooden houses in wooden trees. Lovely to the eye, but so foolish, and ultimately no protection from torches and blades. No protection from the will of God.

The memories of that conflagration enchanted his mind as he ran. The graceful pines reaching like the arms of green titans into the endless star field of the night sky. The mingling of a hundred shades of yellow and orange and red as the trees caught fire. The screams of the blasphemers, crying out to a god who could not answer, for he did not exist. Saint John wished that he could be inside their minds at the moment when the darkness took them. How wonderful it must be to suddenly see and know the infinite truths.

It made him want to weep, as he had wept then. In the morning he had moved through the ashes, and his tears fell onto blackened bodies that now knew the glory of the eternal darkness.

Saint John had fallen to his knees, his arms red to the elbow with blood, his mouth smeared with it, his cheeks streaked with tears. There he had led the faithful in a prayer. Mercy for those who were too blind to see the truth. Grace for those who had embraced the darkness as the flames and the blades sanctified them. And patience to the reapers who each longed to step into that darkness, but whose sacred duty kept them here. In ugly, mortal flesh, attached to this world of hurt and misery until the work of their god was accomplished.

His wonderful memories were shattered by a gruff voice yelling from the woods. “There’s one of them!”


Saint John slowed from a run to a walk and then stood still as three men emerged from the darkness of the forest. They were tough-looking. Big and muscular, each of them armed with a vicious farm tool. One man had a pitchfork, another had a sledgehammer that he held as if it were a tack hammer, and the third carried a pair of sickles.

Carter’s people. Heretics. Their clothes were filthy and streaked with mud and blood. They were unshaven, and there was a desperate wildness in their eyes.

“Welcome, my friends,” he said.

“Welcome, he says,” growled the man with the sledgehammer.

“I’ll show him a welcome,” laughed the man with the sickles.

“I offer the grace and blessings of Thanatos,” said Saint John, “praise be to the darkness.”

The man with the pitchfork pointed the wicked tines at him as the men closed in and spread out to form a loose ring. “You bastards killed Andy Harper’s family, and the Millers and the Cohens and half the town.”

“More than half, I assure you,” murmured Saint John. “Many more than that.”

The sledgehammer man gaped at him. “And you stand there and make jokes?”

Saint John shook his head. “No jokes, brother.”