She reached out her hand to touch it, and couldn’t understand why Melissa was screaming.
Matthew saw both young women hurry across the glass and stones, faster than he could reach them—not that he could have stopped them. Even though he was airborne, and already on his way.
He saw his body react, too—it hurled itself at the edge of the pentagram, hurled and kept hurling, but the wards they’d so carefully constructed held him, and he bounced from them and slid down what looked like plain still air. So strange, watching himself from the outside. Marion and the red-haired girl both crumpled, Marion with her hands over her ears, belly-crawling determinedly toward the running children; Melissa Martinchek down in a fetal position, screaming.
And he saw the cockatrice.
The movement caught his eye first, a ripple of red like brick and gray like concrete, its hide patterned in staggered courses that blended precisely with the blackened wall behind it. It was bigger than a cock, but not by much, and his rooster’s heart churned with rage at its red upright comb and the plumed waterfall of its tail. His wings beat in midair; he exploded after it like a partridge from cover.
It chameleoned from stone to brilliance, colors chasing over its plumage like rainbows over oil. The two girls clutched for it, their feet pierced with unnoticed shards, their hands reaching.
Matthew saw them fall, their bodies curled in around their poisoned hands. He saw the way they convulsed, the white froth dripping from the corners of their mouths.
He shrieked war, wrath, red rage, and oblivion. The spurs were heavy on his shanks; his wings were mighty upon the air. He struck, reaching hard, and clutched at the enemy’s neck.
An eruption of rainbow-and-black plumage, a twist and strike and movement like quicksilver on slanted glass. Matthew’s gaff slashed the cockatrice’s feathers; the cockatrice whipped its head back and forward and struck like a snake. Pearl-yellow droplets flicked from fangs incongruous in a darting beak; the rooster-tail fanned and flared, revealing the gray coils of an adder.
Matthew beat wings to one side; his feathertips hissed where the venom smoked holes through them. He backwinged, slashed for the cockatrice’s eye, saw too late that that wound had long ago been dealt it. A black cockerel was immune to a cockatrice’s deadly glare, and to the poison of its touch. If he could hit it, he could hurt it.
Except it wasn’t a cockatrice, not exactly. Because cockatrices didn’t sing like loreleis, and they didn’t colorshift for camouflage. Maybe it was hatched by a chameleon rather than a serpent, Matthew thought, beating for altitude, and then reminded himself that now was not the time for theory.
Some kind of hybrid, then.
Just his luck.
And now the thing was airborne, and climbing in pursuit. He dropped—the cockerel was not more than passably aerodynamic—and struck for its back, its wing, its lung. The breast was armored, under the meat, with the anchoring keel bones. His spurs would turn on those. But they might punch through the ribs, from above.
He missed when the monster side-slipped, and the blind cockatrice turned and sank its fangs into his wing. Pain, heat and fire, weld-hot needles sunk into his elbow to the bone. He cackled like a machine gun and fell after the monster; wing-fouled, they tumbled to stone.
It lost its grip at the shock of impact, and Matthew screamed fury and pain. The hurt wing trailed, blood splashing, smoke rising from the envenomed wound. He made it beat anyway, dragged himself up, his spurs scraping and sparking on stone. The cockatrice hissed as he rose; his flight was not silent.
They struck hard, breast to breast, grappling legs and slashing spurs. He had his gaffs; the cockatrice had weight and fangs and a coiling tail like a rubber whip. Wings struck, buffeted, thundered. The cockatrice had stopped singing, and Matthew could hear the weeping now. Someone human was crying.
The cockatrice’s talons twined his. Left side, right side. Its wings thumped his head, its beak jabbed. Something tore; blood smeared its beak, his face. He couldn’t see on his right side. He ripped his left leg free of its grip and punched, slashed, hammered. The gaff broke skin with a pop; the cockatrice’s blood soaked him, tepid, no hotter than the air. A rooster’s egg hatched by a serpent.
The cockatrice wailed and thrashed; he ducked its strike at his remaining eye. More blood, pumping, slicking his belly, gumming his feathers to his skin. The blood was venom too. The whole thing was poison; its blood, its breath; its gaze; its song.
The monster fell on top of him. He could turn his head and get his eye out from under it, but when he did, all he saw was Marion, each arm laced under one of Melissa’s armpits, holding the redheaded girl on her knees with a grim restraint while Melissa tried to tear herself free, to run to the poisoned bodies of her friends. The bodies were poison too, corrupted by the cockatrice’s touch. The very stones soaked by its heart’s blood could kill.
It was all venom, all deadly, and there was no way in the world to protect anyone. Not his sacrifice, not the unwitting sacrifice of the black cockerel, made any goddamned difference in the end.
Matthew, wing-broken, one-eyed, his gaff sunk heel-deep in the belly of his enemy, lay on his back under its corpse-weight and sobbed.
The building was emptied, the block closed, the deaths and the evacuations blamed on a chemical spill. Other Prometheans would handle the detox. Matthew, returned to his habitual body, took the shivering black cockerel to a veterinarian with Promethean sympathies, who—at Matthew’s insistence and Jane’s expense—amputated his wing and cleaned and sewed shut his eye. Spared euthanasia, he was sent to a farm upstate to finish his days as a lopsided, piratical greeter of morning. He’d live long, with a little luck, and father many pullets.
Matthew supposed there were worse deaths for a chicken.
Marion did the paperwork. Matthew took her out to dinner. She didn’t make another pass, and they parted good friends. He had a feeling he’d be seeing her again.
There were memorial services for his students, and that was hard. They were freshmen, and he hadn’t known them well; it seemed … presumptuous to speak, as if his responsibility for their deaths gave him some claim over their lives. He sat in the back, dressed in his best black suit, and signed the guest book, and didn’t speak.
Katherine Berquist was to be buried in Appleton, Wisconsin; Matthew could not attend. But Regina Gomez was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Flushing, her coffin overwhelmed with white waxy flowers, her family swathed in black crepe and summer-weight worsted, her friends in black cotton or navy. Melissa Martinchek was there in an empire-waisted dress and a little cardigan. She gave Matthew a timid smile across the open grave.