Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(51)

“My sister’s husband is nothing but ashes because of you,” said the sledgehammer man, “and her kids don’t have their father. How is that anything but the devil’s work?”

“If children grieve, then there is a path to release from all hurts and harms,” replied Saint John. “We offered it to you. That offer still stands.”

“Offer?” sneered the man with the pitchfork. “What kind of crap is that? You and your bunch are nothing but killers. You’re no different from the walking dead.”

“Oh, they’re different,” countered the man with the sickles. “The dead can’t think. They’re just mindless corpses, there ain’t no evil in them, ’cept in what they do; but this scumbag and that psychotic witch Rose—they’re pure evil.” He glared at Saint John. “Evil to the core, and may you burn in hellfire forever for what you’ve done.”

“There is no hellfire,” murmured Saint John. “There is only the red doorway and the darkness.”

“Red doorway?” demanded the sledgehammer man. “What the heck’s that?”

Saint John drew his two knives, and in the shadows under the junipers, he showed them.

The screams of the three men chased all the birds from the trees.





37

SO MANY THINGS WENT WRONG ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Chong heard the twang of the bowstring.

He heard Sarah’s inarticulate cry of grief and hatred.

He heard sounds of impact. Meaty and wet.

He heard Eve’s shrill screech of horror.

He heard the laughter of the reaper named Brother Andrew.

Then all those separate sounds and all the disparate events snapped together into one terrible moment of action. Time whipped up and slammed into everyone, and suddenly the lives and fates of every person in that clearing changed forever.

Chong was no longer running.

He stood still, locked into a posture of attack, jerked to a sudden stop as surely as if he’d run into a wall. His bokken was in his hands, but the blade was shattered and the shock of a fading impact still trembled in his arms.

The woman, Eve’s mother, was falling slowly, slowly to her knees, her protests silenced in the ugliest possible way.

Eve’s face was covered with blood that was not her own, and her eyes danced with madness that was equal parts incomprehension and dreadful awareness.

Brother Andrew began to turn toward her.

But the archer.

The archer . . .

. . . was falling.

Danny looked at Chong with a challenging perplexity. His eyes met Chong’s, then drifted down to the arrow he had just fired.

The arrow that stood out straight and immutable from Chong’s torso. Chong looked down to see the feathered end of the arrow standing straight out from his stomach. He craned his neck and looked over his shoulder. The barbed tip of the arrow stuck out red and glistening behind him.

“Oh,” said Chong.

The archer opened his mouth to speak, but instead of words, blood poured from between his lips. His skull looked wrong to Chong. Misshapen. Dented. Chong looked down at the broken wooden sword. The top half of the sword lay on the ground between him and the archer, shattered by the force of the blow he had just delivered.

“Oh,” he said again.

With a wet gurgle, the archer dropped to his knees, then fell sideways, making no effort at all to catch his fall.

Brother Andrew turned away from the woman he had just murdered, and his grinning face went slack with shock.

“Danny . . .?” he asked uncertainly.

Danny—the archer—was beyond answering.

Chong felt his legs beginning to tremble.

I’m shot, he thought.

The handle of the bokken tumbled from his rubbery fingers.

I’m in shock.

There was no pain. There was . . . nothing.

I’m dead.

And . . .

Well . . . that’s what town boys get for trying to be heroes.

Brother Andrew took a step forward as he swung the scythe around to point at Chong. “You little piece of scum. Do you know what you’ve done?”

Chong wanted to explain. At the very least he wanted to ask why this man, this reaper, would be angry at the death of the archer. Clearly they were dedicated to death itself. It did not make sense that he would be angry at an incident that was part of his own beliefs. That was the thread of logic that was sewn through Chong’s mind, and he wanted to discuss this philosophical point with Brother Andrew.

Chong found enough of his voice to croak out two words: “I’m sorry.”

It was the wrong thing to say, and he really did not mean to give that apology to the reaper. He wanted Eve to hear it. Because her parents both lay dead on the sandy ground; but more so because Chong knew that he was not going to be able to save the little girl from this big brute.

He wanted to, though. He would even have accepted death as a price for saving her. That’s what a samurai would do. There was justice in that. There was closure in that.

But to die with half the job done . . .

You’re not a hero, he told himself, but don’t die a loser. Don’t let them win.

Chong took a step, but his knees buckled and he dropped down beside Danny’s body. The bow was right there, inches away. The arrows were spilled all around him.