“Stay away,” Lilly hisses. She places herself in front of Will and Jules. I stand next to her, dagger out. “Stay back!”
“Should I?” Havriel says, and he sounds jolly somehow, desperate and crazy and happy. “Do you know what you did? You, in your desperation to live out your tiny, meaningless lives, killed a great man. A man who had lived two-hundred-and-seventy years, longer than any other. A man who influenced nations, built empires and watched them fall, constructed a creature impossible to this day. And he died like a dog at your hands. Do you think I appreciate that?”
Lilly’s sabre whips out, slashing Havriel’s palm. “Shouldn’t have come after us, then.”
His face turns hideous, a crinkled, vicious mask, teeth bared. He looks down at the cut in his palm, and for a second I think he’s crying, his eyes squeezed shut. But it’s a chuckle, a thin laugh, high in the back of his throat. He steps toward us, his bleeding palm raised. Lilly swings her sabre with all her strength. Havriel’s eyes open wide. He catches the blade on his arm, loops it down. The tip hits the floor. Lilly loses her grip, and Havriel kicks the sabre away. It goes spinning and dancing across the stones, like a tiny wind spout.
“Oh, children,” he says, and he’s right there, right in front of us. His hand—bloody from his wounds, bloody from his brother’s—clenches around my neck. “You should not have made me angry.”
He lifts me up like I’m weightless. I claw at his fingers. He doesn’t let go. Multicolored explosions bloom across my vision. The buzz is rising, painful, filling every crack and fissure in my head, and I don’t know if it’s just me dying, or if everyone hears it. I see the trackers pinning Lilly’s arms while she screams and kicks. I see Miss Sei, pulling on a medical glove with a snap, kneeling next to Jules and Will––
Havriel’s eyes flick away from my face. He’s looking over my shoulder. I don’t know what he sees, don’t even care anymore, but his mouth goes slack. And something hits me, hits us all. A massive shock wave, soft and cold and crushing all at once. I’m flying, rolling across the floor. I see Havriel hurtling into the dark, picked up like a rag doll.
I lie for a second, gasping, choking. Push myself up onto hands and knees. “Lilly?” I cough. “Will?”
The trackers are on the floor, spread around me in a circle. It’s like I’m the epicenter of a bomb. Miss Sei lies crumpled against a boulder about ten feet away, glassy-eyed. Not far away from her, Havriel is sitting up in the faint blue-yellow light of one of the tanks, brushing his hand delicately across a cut in his cheek. He looks almost disbelieving.
“You are here,” he croaks into the darkness, and he must be talking to the pale thing, because it’s walking slowly toward us, drifting over the rocks and the bodies. Its eyes are black, birdlike. “Le petit-ma?tre.”
The butterfly man. It’s got to be. The creature they made. The one they can’t control anymore.
“You brought us our runaways,” Havriel says, pushing himself to his feet. His voice is becoming a strange mixture of contempt and groveling fear. “I am forever indebted, I’m sure.”
Will and Jules are about six feet away from me, tangled with the bodies of some trackers. Further away, Lilly’s trying to push herself out from under the mass of arms and legs. Her hair is sticking to her face in wet strands. I start crawling toward them.
The butterfly man passes me, black eyes pinned on Havriel. The whine rises the closer he comes, until it’s all there is, the only sound I can hear. The butterfly man stops in front of Havriel. The buzzing cuts off abruptly.
“I have not brought you your runaways,” he says. His voice is weirdly soft and uncertain. Almost sweet. Havriel is looking up at him, his expression horrified.
“I have returned them for myself,” the butterfly man says. “I have been waiting for you to arrive, Havriel du Bessancourt. I was waiting for Father as well, but it seems he has been given his just rewards at last. I cannot say I will mourn him. I wish to tell you that our long-standing alliance is terminated.”
Lilly’s up, stumbling over bodies to get to us. I try to stand, feel the black polymer suits against the soles of my feet, sticky and disgusting, the give of flesh.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Havriel moving, backing away from the butterfly man. “Alliance?” he says. “But we are not allies. What a foolish concept. We are brothers! Equals!”
“Equals?” The butterfly man lets out a high, chittering laugh. I notice a disturbance in the air around him, a dark, fuming mass, barely visible.
I’ve reached Will. I heave him upright.