'That's death,' Ayaan said, 'for you, anyway.' She lay back on the table and closed her eyes.
The wizard grabbed her leg and shook it painfully. 'Now you start talkin', gal, as I will have none of that. Who is that, and what does he want? His boys are awful fast.' He grabbed up an iron poker and laid it across the crook of his human arm. 'Don't you go astray now, you mind?' he told her. His smile told her he had meant it as a joke. Throwing open the kitchen door he strode out into the barnyard to do battle with the green phantom.
Before he'd taken three steps an accelerated ghoul leapt to his shoulders and slammed him to the ground. He cried out and tried to raise his wooden arm in self defense but the ghoul raised its doctored arms and jabbed his belly, chest and face over and over again, the sharpened bones moving so fast they shimmered in the air. Blood leaked out of the wizard in great gouts and his energy started to flicker.
'Da,' someone said from near Ayaan's face. She turned to look and saw the interior door ajar again. A skinny little girl, maybe thirteen years old stood there, her face pocked with acne but her hair the color of corn floss. She looked up at Ayaan with very wide eyes. 'My Da,' she said, as if that conveyed a full message on its own.
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.