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My peacock was not impressed.
“Madness,” Pan grunted.
“What?”
“They’re mad,” he snapped, louder. The trees rustled and birds flapped away.
Pitch-black eyes zeroed in on me. I shook my head, hoping that even if he couldn’t understand my words, he could grasp what I meant.
“You just said you’re the god of madness. Fix them—”
It lunged. I sidestepped, dashing away to avoid a confrontation.
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t help them.” Emotion weighed his words down like lead bricks. I wanted to ask what good a god of madness was if he couldn’t fix it, but that wasn’t going to help us right now.
“How do I get them to stop?” I asked instead.
“You can’t,” he answered. A crack echoed. I saw a body drop out of the corner of my eye. The raccoon creatures snarled. “There’s no cure save death.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, continuing to evade my pursuer.
At full strength it wouldn’t have been such a difficult task. But after being awake all night, hiking for hours, starving, and fighting off a head injury ... I’d seen better days.
Another crack sounded. The breaking bones were like a chill running down my spine.
It was one thing to kill for vengeance or in battle, but this ... they weren’t in their right mind ... and it felt wrong. The same way their malformed bodies were a perversion of what we were, so was killing them.
“Don’t you think I’d take it if I had another option?” he said, frustration bleeding through every syllable. “They aremypeople, and my power is corrupting them ...”
I missed a step, distracted by his admission.
The kid used that moment to close the distance between us. I lifted the knife, hoping to deter it and buy myself time to find another solution.
Hot blood slicked my fingers.
The creature gasped, crimson bubbling up and spilling out its mouth. I stared in horror as it pulled itself off my blade, then lurched forward again.
Time slowed, and I found myself counting its breaths.
One. Two. Three. Four.
It didn’t breathe again.
Slowly the body fell back, sliding off my blade and falling onto the forest floor. Eyes glazed and utterly unhuman, it died like an animal.
My chest tightened.
It was only my months of training with the Portal Watch that kept me grounded in that moment and instead of collapsing into a crying mess. They’d prepared us for every situation they could think of, and that included child soldiers.
It hadn’t sat right with me then, and it didn’t now.
I lowered my blade to my side, fingers stiff with congealing blood.
Silence fell between us.
