The wagon was torn to pieces and spread across the grass like a butchered beast of canvas and tack. The actual butchered beast—a chestnut colt with a frozen look of equine terror on its foamstained mouth—lay a dozen paces off, strewn over a half-dozen more as though he had been dragged through a thresher. Eager insects studded his glistening entrails.
No human or humanoid corpses, not here. But Seth couldn’t imagine a person could leave this much blood behind and expect to survive. Four people couldn’t. The wagon’s peeled-out boards were sodden with it.
Seth had done, in his estimation, a splendid job at not throwing up. He figured that was the universe’s way of giving him an encouraging nudge closer to Anna, who was running her gloved palm along the wagon’s smashed flank.
Her physicality had changed, along with her head. The solid, assured steps of Annalise the Verdugo morphed into a fluid, feline slinking. Her shoulders and neck drooping forward into a predatory slouch. Even with the same tight-packed muscle and the same paperwhite, glyph-encrusted skin, the transformation was disconcertingly thorough.
“So,” Seth said. “New hair.”
Anna grunted.
“New head, even.”
Anna grunted again.
He observed her drop into a crouch, close to the ground, and sniff the earth. “Are you—you’re Annalise, right? Like the same person, still?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay. So is it like a hivemind, or—”
“Stop talking.”
“What?”
Her ink-black eyes glared over her hunched shoulder. “Stop talking, il Gutierre. You’re fucking my focus.”
“Ah. Sorry.” He tried to lean nonchalantly by a wedged-out wagon wheel. Demetrius stood nearby, giving him a skeptical expression. He shifted from foot to foot. “Is there anything I can—”
Anna practically snarled it: “Stop. Talking.”
Seth’s mouth snapped shut.
With a look of unkind satisfaction, Anna turned from him and knelt close to the ground. A flitting shadow across the blood-fed grass resolved into a little brown bird—the wood thrush from the carriage cage. It landed on her shoulder. She absently reached a finger out and brushed the top of its head. “It’s Sik-Ersetim,” she said. “Trail should be crushed grass, blood, and rusty fur. Look for a spring or a karst field. Piled underbrush. She’ll try to disguise the cave entrance.”
The bird nudged its head against her finger. Its marble eye fixed on Seth’s.
“Hey, Tiago,” he said.
The Tiago-possessed thrush fluttered its wing in an avian approximation of a wave, then took to the air once again. Anna stood and climbed back onto Demetrius. She leaned forward and her deep-cut frown softened as she scratched his pale mane. Then she refocused on Seth, and it slashed itself back on. “Up.”
Seth hastened onto Demetrius’ back. “We following that thrush?”
She didn’t reply—just sent Demetrius galloping again as soon as he’d settled. At least he knew the trick by now and managed to grab hold of her midsection before the horse’s sudden jerking acceleration sent him sprawling.
Anna kept her eyes to the sky, tracing her son’s flight. In the face of her stony silence, Seth watched the waving rush of the plain pass them by and tried to spot the path that Tiago was leading them on from his high eye. When that bored him, he found his attention, resentful as he was, straying back to the statuesque woman he was sharing a horse with.
Regardless of the head atop it, Annalise’s body was… distracting. The muscles in her shoulders and arms and stomach moved in elegant concert to guide her horse. Her butt and her thighs flexed as she posted in the saddle. He clung on and wondered if, under her tunic, she had a six-pack.
Bad time to be having these thoughts, Seth. It wasn’t the fox talking, but his own inner voice was just as unwelcome and correct as that furry bastard always was.
They were tracking an eldritch beast, and Annalise had temporarily replaced herself with some kind of seraph-hunting asshole, and he didn’t want to want any of this. But there was nothing to hold on to atop this damn horse but her.
He sought distraction. “So Sik-Ersetim is a species of seraph?”
“It’s her name. I’ve killed her before.”
“They come back?”
“Always,” she said. “Knew it was her as soon as I heard she’d taken a family. That’s what she does.”
The Tiago-bird called out in a high chipping cry, dipping downward and climbing again. Seth squinted past Anna’s pale shoulder and saw the divot in the earth—a low limestone cliff pushing up from the tall grass, with a thicket of brush and branches near its base. Caught on a gnarled branch, fluttering like a flag, was a scrap of fabric with cattails printed on it and a splotch of blood on its corner.
Anna scowled at this accidental banner, brought Demetrius to a halt, and slid from his back with the creak of leather. She retrieved the spear from its sconce on his side. Slowly, carefully, she approached the thicket. After a moment of heart-hammering hesitation, Seth followed.
Anna nudged the spear’s leaf blade tip into the brush; it shifted a patch of dry grass and punched through. She pulled back and crouched to the hole she’d opened in the earth.
“Hidden entrance.” She pulled aside the plant matter and tossed the largest branches away. The narrow crease grew to a crack in the ground large enough to swallow a horse, limned with damp limestone and sloping precariously downward. The spear darted into the cave and tapped rock. “Right,” Anna said, and stood. “In you go.”
Seth’s stomach turned over. “Me?”
“Get in there, find where she’s sleeping and what she’s doing, come back to me,” Anna said. “All you have to do.”
Seth eyed the uncovered cave, the underbrush around it like a peeled-back scab on a wound to the world. “How do we know she’s sleeping?”
“There were at least four people on that wagon,” Anna said. “She’s eaten her fill. She’ll be sleeping it off while she digests. You do what I hired you to do and you won’t wake her up.”
“Do seraphs sleep as soundly as humans do?”
Anna scoffed. “Don’t be a bitch, il Gutierre. Go.”
“Okay, okay. Saints and Seraphs.” Seth dug into his satchel and found his flashlight. “You got a mite?”
“Won’t work,” Anna said, like he was a thumb-sucking child. She retrieved an antique-looking tallow lamp from a saddlebag and held it out.
Seth eyed the pre-hexcraft relic with unease. “How do I—”
Anna made an annoyed noise in her throat, struck a match, lit the lantern’s wick, and shut its glass case. She shoved it into his hands as its light expanded. “You break this, it’s your ass,” she said.
Seth sighed and took the lantern. He found his footing on the limestone lip of the cave and eased himself into the dark, carefully seeking holds that would let him descend with one hand occupied. A short downward climb of ten-odd feet and he slid the rest of the way into a natural cave whose walls and cones bulged and dripped like petrified candle wax.
That was the first thing he noticed—the walls. What he took for water stains the lantern quickly disabused him of. That was blood. A lot of blood. The smell struck him almost simultaneously. An eye-watering curtain of decay. When he’d worked the kitchens at the Sidewinder they’d sent him now and then to retrieve the cuts for the day from Prossimo’s slaughterhouse. So many months of blood spilt that cleansers couldn’t scrub it all away, mixed with a fresher acrid tang, over a ripe sickbed scent of decomposition. Here that smell was again, concentrated further into a reeking weapon driven into his sinuses.
Bones on the floor. Bones and clothes and blackened, dried-up organic… stuff. It was all just stuff. Not people anymore. His hot streak of not puking teetered on itself; he gagged, heaved, and then with sainted strength managed to keep it all inside. Look at that, Seth. You’re a natural.
He slunk through the stinking dark, hating every little scraping sound the lantern made as he bore it aloft. A kicked bone or stone skittered and froze him momentarily; reluctantly he angled the lantern downward and put a pittance of focus into navigating the bonescape at his feet. He stepped carefully over more of that cattailed fabric, and spent too long looking at it, long enough to realize it was part of a small dress. Too small. The lantern caught the gleam of something bright red and horribly new in the crease of that fabric and Seth looked away again before his legs locked up completely.
Find where it sleeps and get the fuck out. That’s all you have to do.
He strained to listen in the dark beyond his lantern-light for some proof of its presence. A snore or a breath. There was a breeze creeping the cavern as he did, yawning its way around the stalactites, but nothing more.
He hunched around a corner and the light from his lantern fell across more fabric. Canvas, grass, cloth, hide. Arranged in a great oval on the cavern floor, its lip nudging up against a scratched-out wall. Something had expanded the cave here. Expanded it and built a nest.
An empty nest.
No seraph. If it’s asleep then where’s the—
Drop, the Fox said.
He dropped to his stomach, and that’s why his ribcage stayed in one piece. The clubbing limb that would have otherwise powderized his chestbone looked as though it had begun its life as a wing before being hastily converted to an arm, and then a tentacle. The knob of gory gristle at its end would be better called a cannonball than a fist, and when it connected with the wall of the cave it stamped an orb-weaver web of cracks onto the stone with its gunshot impact.
The limb snapped backward bonelessly to join its five fellows on a hulking crimson body like a violent collision between a grizzly bear and a deep-sea squid, sliding glutinous and horrible down the cave wall. A thick neck rose from the ruin, hairless and cancerously caruncled with flaps of discolored flesh like a nightmare vulture’s wattle. Three faces crowned the beast; the left a skull, the right a rotting, dripping corpse, the center a woman’s, staring wild-eyed down at him, supernaturally beautiful, with high cheekbones, eyes in unlit black and skin either naturally red or coated in blood, Seth couldn’t say.
All three jaws unhinged. Her roar sounded like a lion and the women’s choir it was messily massacring had momentarily paused the carnage to share a primal scream.
Seth’s limbs hitched in place as if he was having a nightmare, but you can’t feel the hot, rancid breath of a nightmare on your face. He scrambled backward, palms biting into the stone as he tried to get back to his feet, and the seraph Sik-Ersetim pounced, its limbs wide, its rubbery body spreading above him in a terrible canopy and there were teeth, there was a mouth on its underbelly full of teeth, so many teeth, opening wider and wider—
A dark flicker whirred into the crimson beast and slammed into its distended chest, splitting the clavicle with a dry tinder-wood crack. Anna’s spear protruded from the seraph’s middle, buried so far into its hide that one of its spiked lugs had breached the seraph’s rubbery bulk.
The seraph wailed in a distressingly human tone and reared back; its horrible gristly limbs jerked and stuttered through the air like a demented marionette’s as it grasped the thick haft. Seth seized the chance to roll from beneath it and scramble to the edge of the cave, heedless, now, of the detritus and the soft organic horrors beneath his feet.
Anna’s illustrated skin gleamed in the lanternlight as she sprinted from the dark.
She ducked a desperate swipe that caromed off the cave wall in a shower of stone chips. She dropped to all fours and the beast’s malformed bludgeon-wing whistled over her head. Then her muscles fired into a peregrine leap, and she seized the impaling spear one-handed, mantled herself around and up onto the seraph’s barbed spine, and the seraph howled as her weight and violent motion wrenched the spear stuck in the vault of its ribs and tore a deepening rent in the eldritch flesh.
Anna was atop the monstrosity now, thighs cinched around the garden-hose cords of its neck. The executioner sword rose. Its dynamos sparked ghostly green, illuminated her pale and wrathful and leering with a mouth full of arrowhead teeth and threw her bent shadow across the melted karst-cave walls.
The seraph’s rubbery arm bent and raked in an attempt to dislodge the monochrome hellion on its back. Another piteous wail and a geyser of black blood and the limb was severed, pumping and twitching, and the black cavernous mouths on the seraph’s rotting faces and its deep-sea belly wailed in unison:
“YDRIS”
The Verdugo blade swung upward and the light danced and dazzled, and then down it whistled with a splintering crunch, and then another, and a third, wet and membranous. And the seraph went rigid.
Anna rode its dying thrash to the floor. She performed a sinuous dismount as its cleaved-open face connected with the stone. The bluntheaded bar of sorcerous steel departed her prey’s cranium with a sawing hiss of bisected bone and a lava-cake pooling of brain matter.
Three of the sword’s emerald dynamos lit up and slide across their abacus rows. She smirked and settled the blade on her shoulder, heedless of the ichor dripping thickly from its edge.
“Light work,” she said.