Monster Planet(73)

Maybe it did. Ayaan nodded solemnly. 'I know. But we have to think now. We have to think about what we're going to do. Are you alone?' That elicited an obedient nod. 'It's just you and your Da?' Another. Crap, Ayaan thought. This wasn't going to end well. 'Do you know how to undo these chains? This is very important.'

The girl looked out at her father's corpse'the ghoul still stabbing away at what had become a skin full of blood and liquefied organs'and then stepped into the kitchen. She took an enormous iron key out from under the kitchen table and made short work of the manacles. Ayaan sat up on the barn door table. 'What's your name?' she asked. She had a duty to this girl.

'I am called Patience, if you please,' the girl said, and did a little curtsey. She smiled sweetly. She would have been trained to smile sweetly. Ayaan knew that training would only get her so far. The girl was going to collapse in tears very soon. She stepped down from the table and took Patience's hand.

'Well, Patience, it's very good to meet you. Now. Come with me.' She kicked the door closed so the girl wouldn't have to look at her father's body, or what was being done to it. Very little of Urie Polder's face remained.

Ayaan lead the girl deeper into the house, into a room where the breaking dawn barely lit up an over-stuffed couch and a few simple end tables. There would be a root cellar, of course, and probably other places to hide. The hex signs outside would protect the house for a while'at least until the goat blood powering them dried up and flaked off.

Patience flopped down on an ottoman and studied the seam of her little black dress. She found a loose thread and started picking at it. Any second now, Ayaan thought. Any second and the girl would lose her calm.

But what could be done with her? If Ayaan hid the girl, well, then what? Ayaan couldn't stay behind to protect her. She couldn't send anyone else to pick her up and take her to a better place. There was probably plenty of preserved food in the house but it wouldn't last forever. Eventually Patience would have to come out of the cellar and face the big bad world. She would have no chance out there, not without her father's magic to protect her. Ayaan hadn't seen any firearms in the house. Certainly not the kind of weapons the girl would need to survive on her own.

Ayaan could turn the girl over to the green phantom. She could be raised as one of the Tsarevich's zealots, get a little education, be well fed and brainwashed and turned into one more slave of the dead. She could look forward to the day when she, too, would die and have her hands and lips surgically removed.

Wouldn't it be better, Ayaan thought, to just put her down?

It could be done so simply, so painlessly. Ayaan could hold the girl against her breast and then just use her power, just a little, to end the girl's life. Or even better, she could just... just...

Patience was the first living human Ayaan had been near since the Tsarevich remade her. The girl's energy burned inside her hotter than the stove in the kitchen'Ayaan hadn't really expected that, that it would be so warm or radiant. She felt quite cold, suddenly, quite chilled, and she longed to have a little of that heat inside her. No malice, no threat came attached to that desire. It was the simplest, most wholesome feeling in the world.

'Come here, Patience,' Ayaan said. 'I want to hold you in my arms and make everything better.'

The girl slid off the ottoman and onto her feet. She looked down at the carpet but didn't come any closer. Tears slicked down her cheeks.

'Come here,' Ayaan said. She took a step closer to the girl. 'Come here.' She reached out one hand and touched Patience on the elbow. The little girl's face came up, her eyes tightly shut as if she knew what came next, as if she was bracing for it.

Behind Ayaan a door opened and Erasmus stepped inside. Ayaan could feel his energy behind her, cold and unwanted. 'Well, what do we have here?' he asked in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, and held out his arms. The girl ran to him and embraced him like she would a giant teddy bear, her arms tight around him, her sobs buried in his fur.

A tremor of revulsion went through Ayaan's body. She had considered something so terrible it made her bones ache. She wouldn't have done it. She told herself she never would.

'We all make mistakes,' Erasmus whispered, and she spun around to glare at him. 'It can be so hard.'

Ayaan stormed past him and out to the barnyard. The green phantom stood there waiting for her, his ghouls standing as motionless as statues in a line behind him. No sign remained of the skinless horrors from the barn. The body of the dead wizard had been completely devoured. Only bloodstains remained in the barnyard.