“What do youreallywant from me?”
Silas’s eyes narrowed, his pupils constricting as he stared. He smirked after a contemplative pause and tucked a loose piece of hair behind my ear. The leather of his gloves were cold and impersonal despite the soft touch. “I wanteverything.”
27
THE POISONER
As I walked through to the market square, the buildings seemed much taller than usual. They were misshapen, stretching high and distorted like a caricature. It was like how you imagine a childhood home, or at least an attempt to remember it. The more steps I took, the taller they became. Or, perchance, it was I who was changing in size, becoming smaller and smaller until I could sit on a flake of frost.
No, a simple illusion, nothing more.
The wind howled as it whipped around the corners of the stone and brick buildings. An animalistic yet artificial sound as the buildings groaned, calling, begging me to not continue the path I had chosen.
A chittering rose around me, echoing and knocking against the walls of the alley.
As the small street opened up to the square, a gathering swelled with interest. One or two voyeurs added to the mass, a shuffling of dark figures. Like buzzards collecting a crowd. Their croaks and squawks congealed into one audible mass.
I passed one, then two, then many, the crowd becoming denser the further I traveled, the harder I tried to peer through the crowdat the spectacle. My body was squeezed between the others, unable to move any closer before I saw.
An erected wooden pole atop yule logs, old wagon wheels, anything they could find.
Tied to the pole was a woman. One whom I don’t think I could forget if I tried. An image I remember from two years ago in that Den, resurfacing to me at such a time as these. A tired, exhausted woman, black hair sticking to the sweat of her brow, and her chest pulled open, her ribs spread like wings for the crowd to see. Her chest cavity bare, only trails of blood from what was taken, her heart discarded at her feet. Used while she was useful for what she could provide.
I rubbed the spot on my shoulder, remembering two different pairs of teeth that pierced the spot, both memorable in their own ways.
The voices around me began to change. This was not the noise of chatter, of conversation—not even of outrage. This was squishing, ripping, and chewing.
“Look,” a voice said.
The woman’s blank eye straightened from its dead gaze, slowly sliding across the white of the eye to land on me. She mouthed something.
“What do you need?” My voice was ragged, shoving through the chewing noises, even making it past the mass of bodies, like something was trying to pull me away. “Tell me; I want to help!” Even when shouting to her, the volume was dampened.
I climbed the piles of rubbish; it cracked and snapped under my feet, splintering under the pressure.
“I want to help!” I shouted again, finally seeing her eye to eye.
“You want to help?” she mouthed.
A crackling sound snapped and hissed in my ear. Shaking as I begged, “Let me.”
“Help yourself.”
Her arms shot out, heat searing into my skin as she grabbed my face, yanking me close. Her pale eyes steadied on mine, her brow taut. Her hold on my face was motherly, painful, but out of love, of fear.
“Forevermore, even in death.”
The crackling was louder; it was right under my feet. I winced and tried to pull away, but her grip was tough like ragweed. Red burst from the corner of my eyes, the head no longer just under her fingertips, but the bottoms of my feet, my back, the air in my lungs.
“Wake up.”
My own voice split through my eardrum in a howl I would expect from a madwoman, or a cry marking a death. The fire around seared our flesh.
“Wake up!”
Fingertips squeezed my head and face on either side, shaking my head rapidly as if it would clear the fog.
Everything ached, from my head to my fingernails to the toes of my numb feet. When I opened my eyes, I was met by another pair. Fleeting vulnerability lit them, a haunted intensity that evaporated faster than eighty proof.
