It’s way harder to knock someone out than it looks in the movies, and that wasn’t what I wanted anyway. What I wanted was for her to fall forward, and she did, right through the doorway.
I knew the pain was all in Vivian’s mind, but that didn’t make her screams any less chilling. Her eyes bulged; her whitened teeth stood out like marble as her lips drew back from them in anguish. She writhed, kicking at the floor, the heels of her hands thrust out, fingers curled into claws.
A twisted part of me wanted to just stand there and drink it in, but I had to take my advantage. If I couldn’t kill her, I could at least take away her weapon.
With only one knee to bear my weight, I needed both my hands. I had to let go of David and Caryl. I scrabbled toward Vivian like a three-legged dog, feeling my BK prosthetic loosen as I did it, but I didn’t care. I left my right foot behind me on the floor of the chapel as I lunged forward to grab Vivian’s throat.
She was in too much agony to fight. I watched her glamour drop, revealing the horror underneath, some unholy hybrid of woman and mantis. Trails of red fluid seeped down her cheeks from the raw, sucking holes where her eyes should have been. Those holes were inches from my face; her teeth were like cactus spines in her too-wide mouth as she screamed. Given all that, I’ll admit I started screaming a little too. But I held on to her throat, because I was damned if she was going to cast another spell today.
She started to shrivel, her white flesh visibly yellowing, creasing, sagging. That, I’ll admit, I found slightly dismaying.
“What’s happening?” I said out loud. Tjuan just backed away onto the porch, grim and silent. When I looked over my shoulder at David, I saw him leaning over Caryl. At first my unhinged mind thought he was kissing her, but then he sat back and started doing chest compressions, and I realized that she’d died.
“FUCK!” I said, bursting all at once into hysterical tears. And then I choked Vivian some more.
Because I knew what was happening. Like me, Vivian had no identity of her own, nothing at the core of her but a black hole. For centuries she’d been animated only by the stolen essence of other fey, and I was drawing that out now.
“You killed Caryl,” I said, squeezing harder. Somehow even on that alien face I could recognize her fear. She faced her death with all the grace of a rabbit in a snare, bug-eyed, thrashing. I watched her skin desiccate and drop from jagged gray bones. I watched that flesh turn to dust as it fell, watched her bones crumble, felt my fists close tighter and tighter until there was nothing left in them but grit.
And then I just sat there crying, listening to the soft, desperate sounds of CPR behind me.
Tjuan came in and tried to hand me my leg, but I didn’t move; I just stared at the pile of ruin that had been Vivian.
“You should try to get on your feet,” he said. He glanced behind me, then out the door. “It’s just us now,” he said to the desert.
“Teo . . . ?”
Tjuan shook his head.
“Tell me he’s going to be okay.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
I fit my legs back into my prosthetics as best I could with shaking hands; Tjuan stood by, looking awkward and running his palms back over his hair. When I finished I reached up my hands, and he helped me get up off the floor. He let go as quick as he could; neither of us even tried for eye contact.
The AK was hopelessly broken. Sensitive electronic instruments don’t take well to being used as weapons. The knee was stiff and unresponsive; I had to lurch out of the chapel and out into the square like a peg-legged pirate, past the well, to where Teo lay curled on his side in the road.
Blood had soaked the dirt beneath him, spreading out like a fallen hero’s cloak. The boy had come damn near to cutting off his own hand with his pocketknife, driving the blade a surprising distance through bone before it had broken. The wound wasn’t bleeding anymore.
I half sat, half fell onto the ground behind him, where there wasn’t as much blood. I didn’t reach to touch the body, didn’t do much of anything.
“We were fighting,” I said to Tjuan. My voice sounded strange.
“He knew you were sorry.”
I just looked at the back of Teo’s head. An illusory fly landed on the edge of his ear, so I shooed it away. Even over the wet, meaty scent of blood, I could smell that gunk he put in his hair.
“Asshole,” I said, and laid my hand on his arm. All those old scars. His skin was cooler than it would have been if the sun had really been shining on it.
“Millie,” Tjuan said, and something in his tone made me look up.
From the chapel, Caryl was making her way unsteadily toward us on Berenbaum’s arm.