How many Morák were in that culvert? Root and Elias and one or two others, she thought. The boy wasn’t one of them. She could save him, couldn’t she? But what about Elias?
“Is there anything left of you?” she asked her husband.
A loud hiss issued from the culvert, echoing around the gully. She staggered backward, thinking for a moment this had been Elias. Then she realized.Root.It hadn’t liked the question, which seemed at least a kind of answer. Her skin felt oily with her nearness to these inhuman things.
“Nothing, really,” Elias said. “Memories of things I once believed.”
“Things you felt.”
“They’re fading.” The words floated from the darkness.
“Send Benjy out,” she said. “Let me help him.”
“He’s coming out, but there’s nothing you can do,” Elias replied.
Something splashed in the brook, inside the culvert.
Root spoke. “He’s not for you.”
Violet tried to think of what else she might say, some fresh appeal. The boy burst from inside the culvert, shoes splashing in the brook. He cut immediately up to his right, trying to scramble out of the gully before she could stop him. Violet ran and lunged and reached, grabbing hold of his left ankle before he could escape. Nobody had stepped in to save her when life took its darkest turns, and she refused to let Benjy be twisted into something awful. Not without a fight.
The boy kicked her with his other foot, heel striking her in the face, then the skull. Still, she held on until he managed to get enough leverage to start kicking the wrist with which she held him.
Shouting, Violet yanked him down the dirt wall of the gully. He flailed at her, and she managed to hold him down just for a moment. Face-to-face, she tried.
“Fight it, Benjy! You don’t have to serve them!”
The boy shot his face forward and tried to bite her nose, a guttural snarl in his throat. Violet jerked backward, the boy raised both legs and kicked her in the chest, and she tumbled backward down the gully to sprawl into the icy-cold brook.
When she stumbled to the edge, soaked and heavy, she looked up to find that the boy was gone. Whatever words he’d passed to Root from Alfie, he’d now run back toward the jail, presumably to deliver whatever message their master had ordered. Some instruction or other. Breaking the influence Root had over him would be much more difficult than she’d hoped, perhaps even impossible.
“Violet,” Elias whispered from the culvert.
A shudder went through her. She had thought she wanted to see him, but now she knew there would be no satisfaction there. Whatever conversation they should have had as estranged husband and wife, recriminations or amends, would never happen. For better or worse, that Elias had died on the train. Perhaps earlier, when Root had first taken Elias’s blood.
“Don’t come back,” he said.
“I don’t plan to.”
She ran after the boy. The man inside the gas station looked even more concerned than before as she trotted across his parking lot. Violet told herself it wasn’t too late. As long as Benjy still lived, she could find a way to free him, to purify him and give him back the life that ought to have been his. She rounded the corner and came in sight of the police station, heart pounding, short of breath.
In the side yard, the boy had reached Alfie, and the two spoke calmly, features expressionless. Alfie patted Benjy’s shoulder, then strode to the police station’s side door and kicked it in. The sound of splintering wood echoed in the rain.
Alfie went in, and the boy followed.
The first gunshot came a moment later.
33
Malcolm didn’t realize he was humming until Jennie snapped at him.
“Can you cut that out? What the hell are you so happy about, anyway?”
“Just passing the time,” he said. “Trying to figure out how to get out of here.”
Jennie stood up from the bunk on what had become her side of the cell. She went to the bars and held on as if to keep from drowning.
“I think violence is the only answer,” she said quietly.
