Midian Unmade (38 page)

“At least we're on the right track,” I muttered, and she elbowed me.

He turned on his heel and set off up the dirt track. We inched along, his speed matching the truck's idle creeping, his back bisected by one large crease in the linen, a knifecrack of shadow. Up in zigzags, and up, and up. Each turn was hairpin, and soon the trees choked close, their branch-fingers brushing the trailer's side, a lover's caress.

It took a long while, maybe an hour, for the vegetation to draw away. We crept out into a wide half circle of more gravel and flour-dust, and on the other side was a large sloped barnlike shape. The moon had gone down, so all we saw was weatherbeaten wooden planks, a few boarded holes for windows, and the front door, its double leaves flung wide.

Behind it, the mountain rose, a dark bulk against a star-riven sky. The moon had gone down, and our doors slammed loudly in the hush.

There comes a time past midnight when even wild animals are silent.

Pammy's foot-claws scraped gravel as she scratched, luxuriously. Weeds had once forced their way up through the plain of crunched rock, but they were yellowed, blasted where they stood. I took my hat off, shaking out long, fine changecolor hair. Part black, part orange, part other colors, it was the one thing that never shifted.

I unwrapped my scarf, my sweat-damp neck breathing freely and flushing with little pinfeathers. You'd think scales would help me stay cool, but they don't. They just get itchy.

I slid out of my jacket, tossed it in through the open window. My tank top was ancient and yellowed, but it didn't matter. Prickling ran across my bare arms, the changes moving across them before settling on smooth honeybrown skin, even though I never tanned. Pinfeathers moved uneasily over my cheeks and throat, rising on little bumps. After so long walking around muffled except in the hot close confines of a tent or the trailer, the nakedness of exposure, however welcome, was still … disturbing.

There was a pale glimmer in the dark between the doors. The nameless man glided silently up rickety stairs you could pose an extended family on for an interminable photo on a sun-gilded afternoon.

I glanced at Pammy, who stared, rapt, at that shimmer in the door's cave.

The smear of paleness resolved into a too-tall, stick-thin womanshape. She stepped out, onto the porch, and starshine was lost in the inkwell of her hair.

Seraphine …
walked
.

“Welcome to New Midian,” she crooned, and beside me, Pammy began to weep.

*   *   *

Stupid, and careless. I was stupid to not ask more questions. Pammy was stupid to believe so wholeheartedly.

I halted at the foot of the stairs. “Sera.”

“Cal.” A slight tilt of her head. She probably thought it looked regal, but really it just reminded me of the round-faced child she'd been, pasty and burning with sullen, slinking rage. “He found you.”

The nameless man passed her without a word, vanishing into the dark maw of the house. It
was
a house, a large one. Who would build it up here?

Who cared?

“Thought he was looking for any of the tribes.” We locked gazes, again, Seraphine's dark and mine … whatever it was. The shift responded, pinfeathers and scales retreating, meatskin form settling on me with the weight of her will.

Did she expect me to look like one of them, or was it just that we'd been children together? Her with her glass bones and me with scales and hair and claws coming in unpredictable waves.

“He was. But I've spoken of you often.” Her smile wasn't pleasant, but I suppose mine wasn't either.

Pammy scraped tears away with the flat of her hand. “Is this the entrance? To New Midian? Is it really true?”

“It is.” Seraphine's smile was supposed to be gentle, maybe. It showed her teeth far too much for my comfort. “Come on in, Pammy.”

Pammy's claw-feet scraped against the stairs. The blackened stubs on her back twitched, muscle flickering as she balanced. Up, and up again, and she passed by Seraphine without a look back. Which meant I had to follow, stepping on the groaning, worn-smooth wood. Holes in the porch roof let fitful starshine leak through, and the blackness through the door was a balm and a promise at once.

I stopped, shoulder-to-shoulder with Seraphine. She facing the world, me turned toward this New Midian. “Am I welcome?”

A slight, disdainful, chilling little laugh. “Very.” Seraphine moved slightly, and for a dizzying moment I was nine years old again, listening to that laugh. “Very welcome, Calpurnia.”

It smells wrong
, I realized, just as a stunning blow smashed against my head. Seraphine laughed again.

“After all,” she continued, Pammy's terrified scream echoing oddly behind the words, “I am
very
hungry.”

*   *   *

“Cal.” A sharp hissing whisper. Blood caking my face, everything hurt. “Wake up.
Cal!
”

I groaned.

A frantic jabbing at my ribs. My head rang.
What the hell?

“Cal, wake the
fuck
up.” Pammy sobbed in a breath, and I jolted fully into myself. Blinking away crusted blood, I scrambled up to hands and knees, searching for a wall to put my back to.

I didn't find one. I found iron bars as thick as my forearm, and a wretched stink, and sterile dirt that hadn't seen light in a long, long time. And Pammy in the cage next to me, the faint gaseous light from above painting shadows on her face.

No, not shadows. Bruises, deep and fresh.

I coughed, rackingly. Spat to the side—the shift twinged and ached all the way through me. Now that I was conscious, the pain was roweled spurs all over. Scales flashed up, fur too, then retreated.

No wonder she'd wanted me pink-skinned and soft.

“What.” I coughed again, retching up something foul that might have been the last bit of meatskin food I ate, swallowed hard—
never
waste anything edible—and found out I could breathe. “The. What?”

“Broke her arm.” Pammy had found a stick somewhere and used it to poke me; it dropped on the floor between our cages. “At least, I think so. There was another Breed down here, they took him—”

“Who? Seraphine?” I winced, my head pounding. “Who else?”
Who's working with her?

“Those … the nameless. Cal, she
ate
them, she hollowed them out. She's halfway to being Titan. They all look the same, and they took another Breed away. He was worked over pretty good too, and she'd been draining him for a while.” Pammy pointed off into the darkness. “He was over there.”

Four cages, familiar iron bars with dappled radiance dying slowly along their edges. Berserker cages, the smaller ones. Nothing Titan-sized, but then, she didn't need those. How had Seraphine brought them
here
?

Probably only Baphomet knew, since it was
his
blessing in the iron, leaching away like the glow in the salve. Maybe Seraphine had been hunting for a while, since Midian fell, and the nameless shadows did all the heavy lifting. She would only need a few cages, because we were scattered to the four winds now.

I scrubbed at my face as Pammy babbled on, trying to think through the noise in my skull. Grabbed Pammy's hand to reassure her, and she finally quieted. There were sounds overhead—wet creakings, slapping noises, muffled howls.

“That's him,” she whispered. “Maldeane. He told me she got him the same way—a nameless came and found him. They bring her fresh Breed. He also said—”

“Shhhh.” I took stock. Tank top and jeans; my boots were gone. They'd probably searched me, and found the knife. Under the thin scrim of cellar dirt on the floor was rock. Our truck and trailer were probably pulled off into the woods—she'd probably go through it for supplies, too.

Resourceful Seraphine.

The cages weren't whole. The doors had been wrenched open, broken when Midian fell. A heavy chain wrapped around the doorfront of each one, locked with a padlock the size of a Berserker's fist. Snugged tight enough, it kept the thing closed, and Seraphine probably kept the keys on her.

“I'm so sorry,” Pammy whispered.

The noise overhead crested, and a choked cry spiraled up into nothingness. I'd never passed words with fish-gilled Maldeane; he'd been one of the solitaries, swimming the underground rivers.

Now I never would.

“I'm sorry,” she repeated, and I patted her hand.

“Shhh. It's all right.”

“I wish we'd never left the carnival.”

I don't
. I exhaled, sharply, and forced myself to
think
.

Because if I knew Seraphine, they would come for Pammy first.

*   *   *

It was silent overhead, the silence of digestion. The shift burned, or maybe it was the bars.

Didn't matter. I tried again.

Pammy's shallow, rapid breathing echoed. She huddled in a ball in the corner of her cage, and it was hard to think with her hyperventilating.

Forcing the shift this far was dangerous. There were some things that couldn't elongate the way I needed them to, so it was a geometry problem, bone crackling slightly as I pushed further than I ever had. The skull was trickiest, because squeezing my brain in certain ways might even make me black out. Plus, I'd spent so long just showing off for the paying crowds, my control wasn't what it—

“Sssa!” I hissed in pain as a bar scraped along my narrow, naked hip, scoring a weal along my flank. A sick, appetizing draft of roasted pork rose. My pelvis creaked alarmingly, torqued almost double. Naked, sweat-greased, grimly hanging on to consciousness, I shifted a little more.

Stealthy creakings overhead. The quiet had been so thick they were unnaturally loud, and I strained against the limits of bone and stretched-tight Breed flesh. My foot slid, nails scratching against bedrock, scrabbling for purchase, and I tumbled into a heap with a loud crackle, rolling in grit and a splatter of foulness.

There were no bathrooms down here.

Hands and knees, the shift retreating and my body shrinking back into normal dimensions, head pounding, the smoking burns all over me steaming and grinding with pain. I curled into a ball, and it was a good thing I'd already emptied myself in every possible way. Slick with effluvia, I rested.

Outside
the cage.

Pammy scrabbled closer, retreated when the bars of her own cage fluoresced warningly. “Cal?” A shocked whisper.

I'm fine.
My voice wouldn't work. Maybe I'd broken something. So tired. Soft black wings at the corner of my vision, beating in my brain.

Soft and black like hers, before Midian burned.

I spent a little while in a soupy kind of half consciousness, my burnt flesh smoking in the dimness. The cages hummed, and overhead the creakings took on new life.

Thud. Thud. Thudthud.

At first I thought it was my heartbeat, but Pammy made a tiny whining sound and I realized what it was.

Feet. On the stairs.

I strained to move, collapsed, strained again.
Get up. Get up now.

*   *   *

She stopped to sniff the reek of roasting filling the cellar, and that was what saved both of us.

I fell on Seraphine from behind, from the dark, as if I were Peloquin hunting in the ruins of the daylight world, outside the bounds of the law. My teeth sank in at the juncture between her shoulder and neck, and smoky-spiced wickedness filled my mouth as she shrieked, flailing across the stony floor.

Hit the side of one cage, a fountain of blue-white sparks popping, and she howled as her own white flesh, bloated with her recent meal, seared. I tore a great mouthful of muscle free, spat, dug my claws in, tangling in her ribs. They had once been brittle; now, bolstered by the death of her own tribefolk, they were merely spongy-resilient.

Pammy shrieked too, her arms through the bars, wicked claws slashing air as she tried to help. Seraphine spun just like the Tilt-A-Whirl ride, the cellar smearing like grease on slick cheap cardboard. I clung to her back like a habit, monkeylike, just as she had clung to mine during our voyage to Midian, whispering in my ear.

In Midian I'll walk. I'll be a princess.

I did not whisper. I
bit
. Again and again, and there was a clattering as the key ring sailed in a high arc, hitting Pammy's cage with a heavy clanging.

But I was weak, and she was flush with cannibal strength. Seraphine twisted, and I was flung loose, thrown across the cellar. Fetched up against a stone wall with a sickening crack, and the coppermad scent of my own blood-filled mouth and nose and eyes.

“You
bitch
!” Seraphine raved, as she bore down on me. “
Look what you've done!
”

I'll do it again, too
. My arms and legs wouldn't work. Her will, giant pale brooding thing that it was, pressed down on me, the savagely mistreated shift responding sluggishly to my own expecting.

She kicked me, once, and howled afresh, hopping back. She could walk, certainly, but she needed other hands to do her violence.

There was a soft, slithering commotion at the stairs—the hollowed-out nameless ones, pale and stumbling, responding to their mistress's call.

Then, out of the dark, a harpy descended.

Pammy leapt, her hands and feet smoking—she had clambered atop her cage once the front was open—and her foot-claws sank in with a heavy, meaty sound. Her hands were claws too, burst free of the facsimile of meatskin camouflage. Her head snaked forward, burnt stubs on her back twitching frantically. If she'd still had her wings, the buffeting would disorient her prey. Frothing, rearing back and striking again and again with snakelike speed, her teeth slicing effortlessly …

She was beautiful, in the way only one of the Moon's children could be.