"Thomas Hawthorne." The voice came from behind me, and the sound of it turned the air cold. "Do you think this will kill me?"
I turned slowly, and what I saw was the kind of thing that rewires a person permanently — the kind of image that doesn't have anywhere to go once it's in your head except deeper. His body was coming back together. Not healing. Assembling. The pieces of him that I'd separated with two controlled bursts of carbine fire were finding each other in the dark, drawn together by something that had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with whatever kept him walking around on the wrong side of death. Like watching a film run backward, except the film was obscene and the subject was looking at me with those sunken, burning eyes while it happened.
My hand went to the bundle of frags on my belt without conscious instruction. Five of them. Heavy and cold and very finite.
"Aphanea." I kept my voice level and didn't look away from him. "Take those women to the westside wall and run."
She didn't hesitate. I heard the chain of movement behind me — her voice low and urgent in that liquid language, the sound of feet on packed earth, the warmth of her brief presence as she passed close enough that I felt the displaced air of her — and then she was gone, and it was just me and what was left of Qrurcean and whatever was pulling his pieces back into alignment.
I knelt beside him. The reforming was almost complete. Up close, the process was worse than from a distance, the kind of intimate horror that the distance had been merciful enough to soften. I held his gaze.
"Maybe this will kill you," I said, my voice dropping to something that didn't need volume to carry weight. "Maybe it won't. For me, it does not matter. I will find a way to kill you. I promise that. That's something to look forward to in the very near future."
His mouth — still reconstructing itself around the words — curved into something that had forgotten what a smile was supposed to feel like. "You have no concept of the power I wield, or of my master. I shall ensure your death is as excruciating as the imagination allows."
"My gut tells me you're dead weight." I pulled the pins, one after another, the familiar mechanical sequence of each one grounding me in the specific and practical. "I'll tell your master you tried. If that's any consolation."
I stuffed the frags into the reforming cavity of his chest and ran.
Behind me, inhuman screaming began — his name for me mixed with sounds that had never belonged to any human throat, cascading out into the night air in waves that bounced off the tent walls and came back changed. I counted back from five and didn't slow down.
*BOOM — BOOM — BANG-BANG.*
The percussion hit my back like a wall moving fast, and I leaned into it and kept running.
---
The mob of women moved north ahead of me, their shapes pale and various in the dark, the ones like Aphanea distinctive at the edges of the group by the particular quality of their movement — fluid and low and alert, like creatures born into a world that required constant threat assessment. Aphanea was at the front of the column, her voice steady and guiding, the chain at her wrists swinging as she moved. The flimsy robe they'd put on her was doing very little against the night air, and the moonlight found every curve it touched with an attentiveness that I forced myself to redirect toward the perimeter.
The roar of the fifty-cal and the M249 ended with a clean finality that told me the job on the ridge had been done properly. Rhonda's voice came over the radio with the same economy she brought to everything.
"Enemy hostiles neutralized. Coming to you, over."
"Copy that. Mission complete, over."
I looked to Aphanea. "Are there any more captives in the camp?"
"No," she said. "These are all."
I pulled out the remote, flicked it open, and held it for one breath. Then I pushed the button.
*BOOOOOM.*
The C-4 went all at once, and the sky lit up for miles in every direction — a sunrise made of fire and concussive force, orange-white and total, the sound of it rolling outward across the dark landscape like something announcing itself to everything within range. Many of the women dropped to the ground in instinctive response, arms over their heads, their bodies pressing flat into the earth. In the firelight, the curves of them were momentarily, vividly present — the arc of a hip, the press of a breast against the dirt, bare skin catching the distant glow — and the image of it hit me somewhere complicated before I locked it down and put it where it needed to go.
Aphanea moved through them, speaking in that liquid language, her hand touching each woman's shoulder as she passed. They looked up at her, then at me. The eleven who resembled her pulled back slightly, their inhuman eyes reading me with a wariness that I understood and didn't take personally. I gave the group a nod and got a hundred and fifty nods back, which was one of the more affecting things I'd experienced in a night full of affecting things.
The engine came out of the dark before the headlights did — a familiar sound, Rhonda's particular way of taking terrain in a vehicle, aggressive and precise at the same time. The headlights swept over us, and she stepped out and walked over with that stride of hers, taking in the assembled crowd of women with an expression that moved through several stages before landing on something appropriately focused.
"Shit, Thomas. All those women were in there?"
"Chained up like cargo," I said. "Your cover fire bought me the time I needed. Not one of those things knew I was working the tents."
She absorbed this with a short nod, and then her eyes moved past me and found Aphanea, and the air between those two points became something different. Aphanea met the look directly, neither advancing nor retreating, and the moment stretched for exactly as long as it needed to before both of them chose, independently and simultaneously, not to make it something it didn't have time to be yet. A silent negotiation, concluded in under three seconds, and neither of them blinked through it.
I felt the sweat on the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the combat I'd just come through.
Grace's head appeared out of the top hatch of the Humvee. "Sheriff Orkan is inbound with transit and school buses from the city."
I turned to Aphanea. "Tell them to move together. We'll lead them to safety."
She spoke, and the group responded, and we began to move — the Humvee at the lead, the column of women behind it, Aphanea at the center of them like she'd been doing this her whole life, which for all I knew she had.
I secured my M4 in the vehicle and was moving to the passenger door when Kathy yelled from somewhere behind me, her voice cracking with urgency.
"Thomas!!! Behind you!"
The vine hit me before the warning fully landed — something thick and muscular and impossibly fast coiling around my torso, the grip of it immediate and total, and then the world became horizontal motion at a speed that turned everything into blur. I hit the ground on my back with an impact that moved through my spine like a current, the pack absorbing enough of it to keep me conscious, and I was dragging myself upright before the ringing in my ears had finished deciding how loud it was going to be.
Instinct moved my hand to the sword before thought had finished forming the instruction. I pulled it clear of the pack harness and felt the familiar weight of it drop into my grip — enormous and cold and, as it turned out, the thing he was afraid of.
Qrurcean was not what he'd been in the camp.
Whatever the frags hadn't destroyed, he'd incorporated. Four arms now — his original two and two more sourced from somewhere I didn't intend to examine — plus four arachnid appendages spreading from his lower body like a nightmare scaffolding, and from his back an architecture of branching vines that moved with their own agenda, reaching and testing and searching for things to grip. He was taller than he'd been. Wider. The reformation process had not been conservative about scale.
He turned toward the women, and I charged him without deliberating about it.
"Tonight I'll kill you as many times as I have to!" The words weren't performance — they were directional, pulling his attention from the column of civilians back toward me, and they worked because they were true, and he could apparently tell the difference.
"Puny mortal." His voice had deepened into something below the frequency of comfort. "Do you know how many centuries I have lived? You are an insignificant annoyance. Behold what I wield!"
The volley of thorns and needles came in a spread pattern, dense enough that blocking everything cleanly wasn't possible and I didn't try — I deflected what I could with the flat of the blade and took the rest in the vest and the thick Kevlar weave of the jacket, feeling the impacts as pressure rather than penetration, the clothing doing what it was built to do. I kept moving through it. Distance closed. The spider arms came at me in quick succession, and I rolled out of the first and under the second and came up inside his reach with the blade already moving, separating both arachnid limbs at their joints in a single lateral arc.
The cry that came out of him had a quality of genuine pain under the anger, and the anger it produced was useful information — he could be hurt, which meant he could be finished.
"Where did you get that blade?" The question came with ground-eating backward movement, his remaining arms reconfiguring around him like a defensive architecture.
I didn't answer. The women were no longer in sight, which meant Rhonda and Grace had done exactly what needed to be done and gotten them moving. The knowledge of that settled something in my chest and cleared the last of everything that wasn't this fight.
I controlled my breathing. Let the noise and the fury and the specific horror of what was in front of me move through the body and out the other side, the way you learn to do when the alternative is freezing and freezing is dying. I zeroed in on him the way a scope zeros in on a target — everything peripheral losing resolution until only the target remained.
I charged.
His remaining arms lashed outward and the glowing book appeared from nothing, hanging in the air in front of him, its green energy painting the ground between us in sickly light. His lips moved. Beneath the earth around us, things began to stir — the particular wrongness of dead weight being animated below the surface, fingers and arms beginning to claw upward out of the packed dirt in a ring that expanded as I watched, his fresh army pulling itself into the world one undead body at a time.
I cut them down as they surfaced, working the blade in efficient arcs, not letting any of them fully clear the ground before they were separated from the capacity to be useful. It cost him something — I could see it in the escalating rage, the fraying edges of his composure, the way the chanting broke and had to be restarted each time my blade interrupted the rhythm of his supply.
"What's the matter?" I said, cutting down two more before they'd finished emerging. "Running short on cannon fodder?"
"I have more than enough mana to finish you, human!" The rage in it was real. Real enough to make mistakes.
I came in hard on his left, drew the swing that I knew was coming, let it graze past me close enough to feel the displaced air, and took both his remaining arms at mid-length with a single powerful horizontal cut, the great blade going through them with the particular resistance of something that's being separated from something it thought was permanent.
The chanting stopped.
I followed through without pausing, adjusting the angle, and the horizontal slash caught his torso at its widest point and kept moving, separating his upper body from his lower in a way that physics and anatomy agreed was not recoverable. He hit the ground in portions.
I stood over him. Let my breathing come back from where it had gone. Looked down at what remained of what had presented itself as something I couldn't kill.
His eyes found mine. The burning in them was still present — centuries of it, whatever he'd told me about that was true — but diminishing, the way a fire diminishes when you finally starve it of what it needs to keep going. He was still angry. He was going to die angry, which was probably the most honest thing about him.
I raised the great sword above my head and brought it down with everything I had, angling the blade at the precise degree that the moment required, and the burning in his eyes went through rage and then past rage into something that might have been, at the very extreme end of its range, surprise.
Then it went out.
The book lay beside him, its green light stuttering. One of his severed hands was reaching for it — fingers still working, still trying, the body's last instruction still executing even without a body to execute from. I stepped on it, felt the resistance, applied weight until the resistance resolved, and picked up the book.
It was heavier than it looked. It always is.