"Not a good thought." Valid, but not good. I stepped over the body and followed the chain into the blackness. Alice down the rabbit hole. She found madness; so did we. But we found the bodies first.
They hung from the ceiling, a forest of them. In reality, it wasn't more than twenty, but it seemed like a hundred when I caught the first glimpse of them. They hung from hooks fixed in wooden beams that must've supported the floor of the tunnels above us. Like the carcasses of cattle they hung. There was so much dried blood that the dirt floor had coagulated to a hard surface beneath my feet. The hall had ended in a cavern dug by revenant hands. It wasn't the same as a rock cave, but it was as close as you could get. Sawney had come home.
I looked up at all the naked limbs, slack faces, empty eyes and muttered, "Holy shit." Some were decomposing, some were stiff in rigor mortis, and some looked as if they'd been plucked off the street only hours ago. The smell of rot was so thick that it seemed you could've scooped a handful out of the air if you tried. I didn't put it to the test.
"Are you ready?"
I turned my head toward Nik and answered darkly, "More than."
"Be careful," he ordered in a barely audible voice—no giving Sawney any hints of what was going to happen. "Being a distraction doesn't mean being a dead one. Watch yourself. If he gets too close, move back and we'll try something else."
"Don't get killed. Got it." I gave him a grin, because what else could you do in the face of all this death? Grin defiantly or lose it altogether.
"Good. Now don't forget it." With that he moved off toward the left-hand wall. Robin headed for the right, Promise stayed at the entrance, and I went right down the middle.
I wove between the bodies, doing my best to not touch a single one. They didn't move; I know they didn't, but from the corner of my eye it looked like they did. "Sawney," I called. "You worthless child-killing scum, where are you?" The light of my flashlight bounced from dull eyes to white feet to shiny steel hooks. "You're not hiding, are you? Not from the likes of me, full of crazy."
"Sawney!" This time I shouted it. In this place where the silence was as thick as the smell, I dared to raise my voice to a shout and the body hanging beside me shuddered to hear it. It was a nightmarish thing, but it didn't shock me. Terrible or not, it seemed a reaction that belonged here, along with the death and despair. And because of that, it slowed me—only for a fraction of a second, but that was more than enough.
Sawney climbed over the top of the body with the smooth scuttle of a scorpion to grin at me with blazing cheer. "A traveler come to visit." A hand flashed so quickly that I barely saw it move. I jerked back in reaction, but it was too late. I felt the score of a claw along my cheek. The ebon hand was raised for a taste. The red eyes brightened through the white and brown ropes of hair that swung over the black absence of a face. "I remember you, traveler. I remember your taste. Ah, so good. We could be brothers, you and I."
Of course he remembered me. The son of a bitch had been waiting, and he damned sure was no brother of mine. "Then you remember this," I snarled and fired the Eagle.
I missed.
Like I'd said, the bastard was quick. Quicker than me…maybe even quicker than Niko. As quick even as the Auphe, which was as quick as I'd ever seen. I hit the dead body, though, and blew it in half. I sincerely hoped the others were sticking to ground level as instructed and fired again as Sawney jumped to the next body. This time I hit him in the chest. In the double-fist-sized pit I'd created I saw a glitter as bright as glass. The hole I'd created in his side in the tunnel at the SAS was gone, as if it had never been. I fired again, but once again he was gone. But he wasn't getting away, not this time. One way or another this was the last time we took on this homicidal piece of shit. The absolute last goddamn time.
I went after him, pushing bodies aside with my arm, trying to hold the flashlight on his fleeing form. I fired again, hitting him in the back, and that's when he leaped from a body to the dirt and wood ceiling, flipped backward over my head, and cut me from behind. From the fiery pain, I could tell it wasn't a scratch, but neither was it meant to kill me. No, that'd be too easy. Sawney wanted to play. I'd figured on that. He was a playful kind of monster. He was already closer than Nik had wanted, but I wasn't ready to back off. This was it. This had to be it. No more dead little girls, no more dead women in love. No more.
Whirling, I fired, separating his leg at where I guessed the knee would be under the flowing imitation of coat. His enormous grin never faded. He snatched up the leg and disappeared. At least it seemed that way. I barely got an impression of the direction he'd gone—back the way I'd come.