Blood Hound

Chapter 23

I spat blood and roared wordlessly in the DOG’s face. The pressure built to a maelstrom as magic caught and tore through the room, lifting my hair, my clothing. It was anger and grief: anger was the wind that snapped the sails taut, fueled by rage and grief so deep that it ripped something out of me. The pallets I’d marked lifted and flung forward, into the descending DOG. They struck it in the flanks, and it laughed as the pallets simply passed through and its body burst into ropes of tar that splattered across the floor, walls, and me.

The stuff burned through my clothes and gloves to my skin, and deeper. I screamed as pain worse than anything I’d ever known wracked my body, collapsing and convulsing as I futilely clawed at the wormlike stuff burrowing into my flesh. White needles of agony pushed through the roof of my mouth and up behind my eyes as the pallets smashed violently to the floor around me, building on the shrieking, yarping howls of the DOG. I heard the plastic hiss and rip. The eggs exploded, and I was covered in those, too—and then the acidic stuff eating into my arms writhed off to flop and squirm on the ground.

The pieces of the DOG jumped and hopped, baying in a clamor of alien sounds as it frantically contorted and squirmed to evade the wave of sticky albumen and yolk that now covered the floor. It grew legs and tried to skitter, which failed when they broke; then it tried to make wings, contortions of bone and slime that flapped uselessly against the floor. I tried to shake off enough of the pain to move and couldn’t. I flinched when something sailed past my head. An egg. It hit the flapping, congealing form of the DOG and broke across it, pitching it back to the floor with a wail.

I heard Zarya’s ragged, consumptive breathing intensify as she hefted again. Another egg flew by, and it hit. The DOG screeched, scrabbling and falling to the floor. It was a quarter of its previous size now, smoking and bubbling whenever it touched the mess of egg and shell. Whenever it slipped, it lost pieces of itself. NOthing was powerless when it was exposed to something that embodied potential life.

I heaved, choking back bile, and forced myself up to one knee. The wounds the DOG had left were burning cold, itching and running freely with watery blood. I touched the edge of one and gasped: the pain made my vision blur. The DOG had nearly taken my arms, chest, and shoulder down to the bone. I felt around until I found an unbroken egg and threw it at the parts of the struggling, snarling demon closest to me. It collapsed and then fell apart to fleshy gobbets that thrashed under their coating of egg, falling still as they shrank, then disappeared. Nothing was left, not even the bones of the fallen men it had consumed. Even the stench of it was clearing, while around me, the remaining albumen boiled and dried.

“Wh– wh–” I tried to speak, failed, and licked my chapped lips to moisten them before giving up on the attempt. I turned to find Zarya sprawling on the floor next to Vassily, who was gaping soundlessly. Agonal gasps.

The bottom fell out of me as I crawled across to them and tried to turn him on his side, pawing at his neck to turn his head and clear his airway. I tried to do chest compressions, but my arms buckled. I fell over his chest, struggled up, and knew that this was the end.

“No! NO!” I gathered him in my arms. Nothing. Fluid drained from his mouth, but he hung limp, convulsing in fits and starts. I’ve seen a lot of men die. I knew the signs: the fluttering eyes, the false breaths that never reached the lungs. Sure enough, his head lolled and he choked out foam and spittle onto the floor, but there was no response. His heart had already stopped. “You can’t, Vassily, you can’t…”

Zarya rasped beside me, her lungs full of phlegm. Bent over Vassily’s body and heaving with dry, wracking sobs, I hardly heard her. No, dammit, no. I clutched him close and rocked. Back and forth, back and forth. No. Everything. Everyone. I’d lost everything.

“Ah–ah–lexi,” Zarya whispered. “P-please…”

I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t speak. I moaned, breathing in Vassily’s smell through his shirt, and then screamed, a harsh sound of pure agony and rage.

“Ah–lexi. Take… the knife,” she gasped, louder. Her lips were flecked with bright silver. “Kill me. Try… feed him… heart’s blood.”

Her last words broke through my fugue. I hunched in a ball around Vassily’s body, tear-streaked and shaking, unable to form any reply.

“Yes.” She breathed the word as a fluted sigh. “Ah–lexi. Kill me. You must… fulfill the Pact. You must.”

“I…” In all the times I’d killed, I’d never done that. I’d never eaten them or fed them to anyone else. “I don’t—”

“Fruit.” She looked up at me, shuddering with the effort. Her veins were visible, shot through with ugly violet streaks, which were spreading like poison as I watched. Her flesh was depressed and soft-looking, bruising under her own weight. Just like a rotting peach, she dimpled when pressed. “I’m… fruit. Made for it. Please.”

I swallowed and lowered Vassily to the ground, touching his face, his unseeing eyes, his mouth. I turned to the Gift Horse, this strange familiar woman, and thumbed the box cutter blade to its full length. Her eyes were flickering, and as I watched, she heaved and brought up a gout of clotted silver streaked with black. The air was full of sweet perfume, but Zarya gagged, a horrible sound that wracked the air of the room. It was beginning to smell like Nacari on the docks… and I realized what the rotten sugar smell really was.

“Feed… him.” She reached up, clawing weakly at my thigh. “My… heart’s… blood. And eat. We will… see you again.”

Beside her, I fell to my knees. “Zarya—”

“Trust… me.” She smiled, and it was ghastly: her teeth were covered in tarnished chrome. “I’m… here, now. On this Cell. Trust… me.”

I brought the knife up like a sacrificial priest. Zarya relaxed and fell back, lifting her chest up towards the blade, as if she’d done this a hundred million times. I brought it down without hesitation. Her flesh was so soft that I punched it through her ribcage without resistance, deep into her heart.

Zarya’s eyes flew open, and she choked, staring up at my face with an expression of blissful relief. Unable to look away, I felt my Neshamah take my hand and draw the blade through her ribs and then pulled it free. She cried out, and her pupils expanded completely until they filled her irises. They unfolded into a spiral that led my gaze down, down… drawing me into a vortex of energy that took my breath away.

“The Hunt will go on,” her voice ruffled through my mind. “Until we meet again.”

The blood that ran down her torso was mercurial, a thick spill of silver. I could see my reflection in it as it spilled over her chest and pooled on the floor, evaporating upwards in thin runnels that disappeared as they decayed. My face loomed larger and larger as I bent down over Zarya’s body. She was gasping in agony now, chest rising towards me as I bowed towards her and, with a trembling tongue, lapped at the shivering pool that welled up from her heart.

Time slowed… and then wound in to a single point in space.

I was gathered up in a rush of wings that carried me down a long tunnel, and they broke me into pieces, into dust that was carried, rushing, down a river of light; a water chute flung me out into a sea of endless GREEN.

A throbbing, booming sound rolled through my being, through every bone, every muscle, every cell as the scope of the ocean expanded exponentially. There was the seething Green cauldron, burning like the heart of an enormous star, and there were its innumerable, uncountable filaments—branches of GREEN bigger than my entire universe. At first, I thought they were veins, until I registered the minute twinkling flashes along their lengths and realized they were ropes of neural tissue. Each nerve strand was roped with pearls, and I knew without knowing that they were universes, entire universes, and there were BILLIONS of them. Billions and billions of flashing specks, in all directions, as far as my eyes could see. They expanded through a rippling aqueous structure that went from white to green to yellow to orange then red—but it was the core of this enormous thing which drew me to face it as the pounding, the booming, began to resolve into a chorus of genderless voice.

loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou

It was looking back at me. The voice intensified and deepened. I was not even one cell within its mass. I was perforated, penetrated, a membrane full of holes that writhed and sobbed and screamed as my head was filled, full of it.

loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou

Images flashed in a whirlpool of sensation. I saw myself split and brachiated along many of its nerves, living many lives on many worlds. I was a blond youth, laying my head down on a hexagonal stone in the seconds before a sacrificial hammer fell. I was on horseback, straight-backed and proud… I was riding in a car, I was sitting on a bench in the drop bay of a spacecraft. I saw Zarya and others like her. I saw Crina: female, male, arching back against a sofa, a stripper pole, braced with a gun in the door of a helicopter. And I saw Vassily, shadowed by the streetlights beyond a window as he came to me in bed…

loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou

I woke over Zarya’s body, sobbing. Seconds had passed, but I was no longer in pain. I scrambled upright, remembering her last words. Feed him. Give him my heart’s blood.

The Gift Horse’s flesh was turning translucent, trembling as it began to fade and peel away into the air. I cracked her chest and pulled her heart free. It was an enormous organ, half again as large as a human heart and with arteries like the spokes of a wagon wheel, blue and sweet smelling. Shaking, I shuffled on my knees to Vassily’s cooling corpse and wrung it over his face and into his mouth. It felt stupid, and once more, the dry retching of grief began as I looked down into my sworn brother’s wide black eyes and saw nothing there.

The silver fluid soaked into his skin, ran into his mouth, over his cheeks, disappearing into his pores as I watched with wide, frightened eyes, and set the organ down on the middle of his chest. The structure of it clarified, turning as clear as glass, and then dissolved into his body.

I saw and felt some kind of energy ripple outwards from him, and his darkened eyes turned numinous, an incredible, fathomless blue shot through with stars. For a moment, I thought I saw him in there… but then the color left, and so did Vassily. Whatever I had seen in that moment—his Neshamah, my own desperation—left as quickly as it had come. I was too late.

He was gone.