'Sarah,' he breathed, his voice a rustling of old mildew-spotted paper. 'You weren't supposed to see me like this. Ever.' His body convulsed against hers. He was trying to push her away. She let him go, let him slip out from her hug like a piece of ratty cloth falling away. 'This is my spider hole. You weren't supposed to see me this weak.' His eyes flicked away from her for a split second, just as long as it takes the sun to hide behind a cloud. She saw where he looked and shook her head. His shame had made him look at the dead slack on the platform. The one he'd been feeding from when she came in. 'I held out for so long. I just went hungry'I thought I could do it.'
The skull moved behind him but they both ignored it. He stared at her. She could hear the word in his mind, as clearly as if she had a telepathic link to him, though she didn't. The word was 'cannibal,' and it made her shake her head again. 'He was already dead, and''
'And I didn't so much eat him as drain him,' he agreed, a little too quickly. Dekalb lifted one hand creakily and put it against his cheek as if to hide a blush. The color of his face, which was the color of a white concrete sidewalk after a summer rain, did not change. 'You can... you can just take their darkness. You can absorb their energy and they fall down. I think they want it, that peace.' He shook his head and she saw his neck was as thin as a length of pipe. 'It makes you strong again but it doesn't diminish the hunger. Nothing ever does. I'm so hungry, pumpkin, you can't know.'
He kept looking at the corpse. She wanted to tell him it didn't matter, that she didn't care. She remembered the lich in Cyprus, and how Osman had needed more than words. She needed to show him. With all her strength she grabbed the corpse's thin ankles and pulled it, shoved it, heaved it over the edge of the platform. It fell into the dark shaft below with a long-lived series of clanks and bangs and thrumming impacts. Dekalb moved his hand to cover his mouth. He had grown so weak, so thin since she'd last seen him. So used up. Death wasn't all of it, though, it wasn't just undeath that made him so pale and attenuated. She heard a narrow scuttling sound behind her and spun on her heel.
The insectile skull with the blue eyes looked up at her from the platform. It sprang into the air, rising a few inches off the floor, and fell back. It wanted her attention.
'Is that Gary?' she said, just a hunch. She couldn't imagine who else it might be. The two of them were linked so tightly in the story, at least the way Ayaan always told it'Dekalb and Gary, good and evil locked in epic struggle, and Dekalb had only won that battle by sacrificing his own life. Of course in the story Dekalb didn't come back as a lich and Gary was an enormous and deadly monster who burned away to nothing but ashes. This creature, this human skull was like nothing she'd ever seen before and it worried her. She knew Ayaan would have had a million questions. You never turned your back on the new or unusual, that was one of her rules. As much as Sarah wanted to talk to her father she knew this mystery had to be cleared up first. Sarah turned the crawling skull over with one boot and saw the segmented limbs underneath, hidden like the legs of a horseshoe crab. The legs pedaled madly and she drew her foot back squeamishly, wondering if she should kick the evil thing into the darkness of the shaft. It pistoned on its tiny jointed feet and skittered away from her. She looked back at her father.
He nodded. 'He's not human anymore, I think he's dead so many times over he's forgotten what a living human body is like. He's healing, and he's growing, in ways I can't anticipate. He doesn't seem to be able to just die. I've tried everything, I even had the mummies smash him to bits with a sledgehammer. The next day he had put himself back together the way they used to put broken vases back together with superglue. I locked myself in here, I sealed myself away because I needed to watch him. To make sure he didn't get loose.' He stared at the skull bug then as if it had changed colors. 'No, I don't think that's appropriate,' he said, and she frowned at him until he looked back at her face. 'He and I can communicate, sort of. He wants to talk to you, he'Gary, don't make me crush you again, or maybe we could boil you in a pot... no. Never. You will never get near her, do you hear me? Never!'
'I'd like to hear what he has to say,' Sarah told Dekalb.