Hell in Heaven

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mouse walked slowly around the couch three times, holding the candle steady except when she would let it drip burning wax down on him. As she passed him, he could see that her body wasn't a child's at all. Her breasts were still unformed and her pubes bare, but her arms and legs were cabled with muscles. How many years, how many decades had she been trapped in the shape of a little girl?

Matt struggled to move, but the ropes held him tightly. Some hero , he thought. Tied up while I'm sleeping, and I don't even notice. Except that maybe it wasn't all her doing. Mr. Dark had been in his dream; maybe he had kept Matt unconscious long enough for the girl to get the ropes on him.

"Mouse, what are you doing?" he gasped as a bead of wax scalded his skin.

"Sending you back." Her voice was hard and cold; the girl was gone from it. She sounded as old and weathered as Orfamay.

"You don't have to send me anywhere," Matt said. "All I've wanted since I got here was to get out."

"I summoned you here just like I summoned her," Mouse said, continuing to circle the couch. "And you ruined everything. I have to get rid of you and get a real lawgiver."

It took him a moment to realize what she was saying. "You brought Joan here?"

"I called her and she came," Mouse said. "The book told me how." She stopped by a table where an ancient volume sat. It was bound in something that looked like leather.

"You brought that monster here," Matt said. "You inflicted all that pain. And now you want to inflict more."

"You don't know anything."

After what he'd seen at the Grange, Matt thought he did. "Constant war between the families. You said your parents died before Joan came. Killed by Vetches?"

"Killed by Vetches because they'd killed Runcibles who had killed Hogginses who had killed Vetches," Mouse said. "Vern and Cal wanted to get revenge, and they would have done it. Then someone was going to get revenge on them. And it was going to keep going until there was no one left. I found the book my grandmother hid away in her root cellar and I figured out how to summon the lawgiver. And we didn't have any fighting anymore."

"And the price?"

"We all paid," Mouse said. "I did, too. When she fed, it hurt so bad. But when she was done you were still alive, and so was your family. And she only fed off the ones who made trouble. You just had to learn not to make trouble. That wasn't so hard, was it? That wasn't so bad."

Matt thought he saw something behind her words – guilt maybe. Every time that Joan thing took away one of the townspeople for a feeding, it had been her fault. And in that guilt Matt found a glimmer of hope.

"If it worked so well, why summon me to kill her?"

"It was for Cal," she said, and this time Matt was certain he saw a flash of the little girl she'd seemed to be when they met. "He was all sweet on that Vetch whore. Mixing like that, if Joan found out that was a lifetime of pain. But he wanted her so bad. Kept telling me he loved her and she loved him. Then you saw. She said he raped her and they killed him."

"She was afraid," Matt said.

"I'm afraid every day of my life," Mouse said. "I'm afraid of what I did, and I'm afraid I'm going to do worse. I opened that book at it changed me and I changed everything. But I would never do what that whore did. And now they're all killing each other and they won't stop until there's another lawgiver."

"I wasn't sent here to be your lawgiver," Matt said. "I think we were both tricked, and I know who did it."

"I saw you in my head before you came," Mouse said. "Knew your face and your name. I paid the price of blood to bring you here. Only those lives were too small to bring the one we really needed."

The lives were too small, Matt thought. All those bones hidden in Joan's woodpile. Sacrifices to summon her replacement?

"I need more blood," Mouse said. "The right kind of blood."

Mouse disappeared from his view. After a moment, he heard the thud of a body falling on the floor. The girl.

"Don't do this," Matt called.

"I can't do anything else."

Matt strained his neck to look around and saw Mouse bent over double, dragging the unconscious girl across the floor. Amazing how much strength there was in that little body.

"Thought I could do it the easy way, using animal blood, not having to hurt anyone," Mouse said. "But look what they sent me in return."

"Maybe they sent you what you needed," Matt said.

"You already said you're not the lawgiver," Mouse said. "No one's going to listen to you."

She dragged the unconscious girl to a spot on the floor where she had marked out a pentagram in chalk and aligned her limbs with the star's points.

"When you needed a lawgiver to stop the killing, they sent you Joan," Matt said. "When you needed to stop the pain she was causing, they sent me. Maybe that wasn't a mistake."

"I saw what happened at the Grange," Mouse said.

She picked up a knife from the table where the book lay and ran it across her thumb. Blood sprung up in its wake.

Matt pulled against the ropes, but they wouldn't budge. "I didn't kill those people at the Grange," he said. "You did."

She whirled around, raising the knife. She looked like she wanted to plunge it into his heart.

"You could have stopped it before it started," she said. "You refused." She thrust the knife at his throat. He felt its point pierce his flesh.

"How long ago did you summon Joan?" he said. "Years? Decades?"

"Don't know how long," she said. "Time went all funny here. But it seems like forever. Not going to make the same mistake with you."

The knife pressed deeper into his throat. "All that time, and what did you do?" he said, fighting the urge to panic, to try to thrash himself free and force the blade in deeper. "You didn't even try to change anything. You let Joan keep you from killing each other, and that was all. Did you ever give one second's thought to making peace between the families?"

"We had peace until you came along."

"You had a cease-fire. You couldn't kill each other, but you never stopped the hating. Why was that, Mouse? Do you even know how this feud began? Do you have any idea why you're killing each other?"

"Doesn't matter why it started. It just is."

"It doesn't have to be," Matt said. "If you don't want it."

Matt could feel the knife blade tremble under his skin. And then it slid out, a drop of blood falling on his shoulder as it went.

She was staring down at him, but he didn't think she was seeing anything in the room. "What are you?" she said finally.

"I'm not the lawgiver," he said. "And I'm not a hero riding in to save the villagers from the monster that's been terrorizing them. I'm just a stranger passing through."

"Then why should I listen to you?" The knife was getting closer to his throat again.

"You shouldn't." Matt fought to keep his throat calm and under control. "Not to me, not to Joan, not to that book. Because none of us can stop this for good. There's only one person who can. And that's you."