Rose’s very head was splitting, her mind now lit afire, as though someone had gone and crammed too much in its bounds. There was a mad whirl to it all, a very mad whirl that made her wonder how she could possibly endure this feeling—this burning feeling—even one minute more—
And then it stopped, and she realized she was on the ground, or near to it. She rolled and found a body, another body, bodies piled on top of others. She rolled and saw her granddad’s face, still in death, eyes open and staring back at her, and she wanted to scream, but something else shut that instinct down. Her mam was just there, buried under another body, face invisible, but there was a clear view of her sleeve that Rose could hardly forget. She knew her mam’s wardrobe, every stitch.
The hawk sounded again, and the riot of noise in Rose’s head stilled, listening for it. There was a raging energy in her mind, an indistinct mass of howling that Rose could scarcely make out between the screaming of her nerves, ever single inch of her flesh howling at the feeling it’d just been overwhelmed with. She’d never felt anything like it, that burning feeling. The closest thing she could think of was—
You dirty little harlot.
The voice burst out of the din in a distinct shock of outrage.
Rose stopped dead, her slow writhe stunned into quiet and stillness by that voice that sounded like a bullhorn out of the heavens.
It was her mam’s voice.
We have to go now, her granddad said, and it was as though he were there, next to her, or louder, even. She rolled to look and—
There was no one there. Above, the hawk was the only thing that was moving, and it was circling lower, like a carrion bird over a corpse.
Rose tried to push herself up and failed.
Come on then, you.
Move it, girl.
Useless thing.
We have to go, now!
The cacophony was deafening, a chorus of voices with an utter lack of unity. They screamed and squalled in indistinct directions, and Rose clapped her hands over her ears, cold fingers against frigid lobes, trying to shut it out but only making it louder in the process.
Go, you stupid girl!
Get us out of here!
Her mam’s voice cracked through it all, sullen and resentful and filled with icy hate. Idiot child. I should have thrown you off a cliff the moment you were born.
Rose got to her feet, wobbling on unsteady legs. Somehow that voice drove her, and she looked up at the hawk, which sounded once more and then—
Something long and sharp buried itself in the bird, appearing as though by magic, a skewer straight through the creature. It arced and fell, thudding to the ground just beyond her house.
Go, you idiot! someone shouted in her head, and Rose staggered forward, trying to find the fallen bird. She traced a path around the house, but when she came to where she thought it might have landed—
Tamhas lay there, a long spear sticking through his middle, and his breath coming in sharp gasps. Rose stood there, at the edge of the house, and then took a tentative step toward him. He met her eyes, and gasped, and motioned her forward.
She came, strangely drawn to him as he lay there, dying. She knew just by looking at him that his time was short. The spear, whatever it was, had pierced him clean through when he’d been a bird. It hadn’t stopped piercing him now that he was a man again. He raised a hand to her, and something urged her forward, a thousand voices in her head telling her to take his hand.
Rose took his hand, and knelt next to him. The smell of his blood as it pumped out onto the cold ground filled her nostrils, metallic.
His hand was cold against hers, another against her this night. “Needed your…help…” Tamhas whispered, and when he spoke blood oozed down his lips. She cradled his hand, thinking of the kindness he’d shown her so recently. Speaking to a body was a strange and small kindness, yet it was the only one she’d received of late. “You’re the only one who can…” His eyes fixed, pain setting in from her touch, and she started to pull away, but he clutched her hand, like the others, shaking in the night against her skin.
He didn’t last long, his shuddering done, his blood stilled. And Rose dropped his hand, feeling him this time, another voice in the chorus, but not loudly. Like a pebble in a pond, the ripples coming out from it, but the rock itself so small and indistinct as to be lost in the volume of water.
Now go, you idiot! someone shouted in her mind.
Go! Go!
Go!
Get, you fool!
Run!
Rose staggered to her feet and did run, making it to a thicket about fifty yards away before she collapsed into them, leafless branches stinging her, hiding herself from sight and feeling the jagged pains of the night like swallowed glass, writhing around inside her with all these new voices. She whispered, almost, to herself, sobbed quietly, even as the chorus of howls screamed in her head to—
Move!
Go, stupid!
Get out of here!
You’re going to kill us all!
But they were already dead, weren’t they? Rose wondered as she knelt there on the frozen ground. It seemed impossible that they weren’t; she felt them in her mind, that frightful sick feeling that she’d—
Well, she’d—
She’d eaten the souls of every single person in her village.
And they’d bloody well lined up and forced her to do it.
The first voice in the night was like a stilling calm, icy and laden with contempt for everything. She couldn’t see the speaker himself, but somehow she knew of him immediately, a vision thrust into her eyes about what he looked like—mop of wild, dark hair and shadowy eyes, his face filled with a barely veiled look of contempt. Tamhas’s voice supplied the name, Weissman, and Rose listened to him speak in the quiet night.
“…turned out pretty well, Raymond,” Weissman said with dripping contempt. “This is the last cloister. And look at ‘em! Other than the shifter, they’re all…” He strolled into the middle of the town, Rose watching him from behind the bushes. “…well, good and dead.”
“People don’t just keel over and die like this,” the second man said, following slowly behind Weissman. Tamhas seemed to hand his name to her: Raymond. He must have overheard it while watching as a falcon.
“Au contraire, Raymondo,” Weissman said, all full of vicious energy, like he was glorying in the pile of dead Rose had crawled out of. “And you should know, you lil’ Hades scamp, you.” Weissman spoke in an American accent, and the lack of formality between them told Rose everything she needed to know about who was boss here. “How many times have we walked into a scene such as this, dead everywhere—I mean, this is your raison d’etre, Ray. This is what you do, keel people over and die ‘em.”
“I didn’t kill these people,” Raymond said softly. She couldn’t see him well, but he seemed like he was…struggling with the bodies, all piled together. Rose could see the corpse of Ronnie Gordon, his youthful face already adopting a grey pallor in death. Someone had lifted him up to touch her, too, and she could hear him seething inside her, slithering in the back of her mind like an angry little snake.
“Hm,” Weissman said, not really seeming too interested. “Well, they’re dead, and that’s what counts. I’m thinking…mass suicide. Like Heaven’s Gate.”
“I was trying to pull them from their bodies, and then, suddenly, they were just…gone,” Raymond said, with soft regret.
“Who cares?” Weissman called into the still night, like the cawing of a crow, black hair like a shining shadow, brighter than the dark around him. “They are dead. Mission accomplished. Let’s move on with our lives like they have. No. Wait. Not exactly like they have, obviously…”
“You’re going to care if a certain succubus who’s been foiling your London operations got ahold of old souls like these, some of whom might know what her power can actually do if she were to…unleash it.” Raymond’s soft voice was like a grenade exploding in the night, and it shut Weissman up hard.