Songs of Love & Death (32 page)

Steven hung over his shoulder like a dirty rag doll. I picked up the shotgun but did not stand. I held up my finger. “Give me blood.”

He hesitated, glancing wildly at the monsters surrounding us. I knew what he was thinking. Any minute now they would attack. Any minute, they would try to rip us to pieces and feed on our bodies; as in life, so now in this twilight death. I didn’t understand why they waited—though I had a feeling.

“Please,” I whispered.

Henry’s jaw tightened, his gaze cold, hard—but he leaned forward and bit my finger. Blood welled. I touched the tree.

And went blind. Lost in total darkness. I could feel the sharp tangle of
vines beneath me, and hear Henry breathing—listened, with a sharp chill, to wet, rasping coughs—but those sounds, sensations, might as well have been part of another world.

Another world
, whispered a voice.
We are more than we were.

My finger throbbed. I bowed my head. Pressure built in my stomach, rising into my throat—nausea, but worse, like my guts were going to void through my mouth.

Instead of vomit, my vision returned. I saw those dead bodies again, endless mountains of corpses sprawled on stone streets, and the sun—the sun rising between towers, glowing with crisp golden light. Beautiful morning, with clouds of flies buzzing over blood that was still not dry.

We were born from this
, said the voice, which I felt now in my teeth, in my spine and ribs.
Blood that killed made us live.

Time shifted. Again, I witnessed blood, and the fluids from those decaying bodies flow and settle, feeding the roots of grass and weeds, and the trees that grew from stone inside the dead city. I felt a pulse sink beneath the streets into soil and spread. I felt heat.

A rushing sensation surrounded me—as though I was being thrust forward, like a giant fist was grinding itself between my shoulder blades. Faster, faster, and all around me, inside me, I felt a surge of growth—my veins, bursting beyond my skin, branching like roots, bleeding blood into the darkness.

Blood, that became a forest.

A forest that swallowed a city.

Many forests
, I thought.
Every city swallowed
.

And the blood spread
, whispered the voice.
The blood changed us all
.

As it changed you.

I slammed down on my hands and knees, as though dropped from a great distance. Fire throbbed beneath my skin, a white light burning behind my eyes. I remembered that night, naked and bleeding, on the ground—Henry screaming my name, Steven sobbing, both of them beaten bloody—and I remembered, I remembered a terrible heat. I remembered thinking the men had set me on fire, that I would look down and find my skin burning with flames.

We tasted all your blood
, whispered the voice.
We tasted a change that needed waking
.

So wake. And feed us again.

I opened my eyes. I could not see at first, but the shadows coalesced, and became men and trees, and small furred bodies, growling quietly. My hand was still pressed to the blood-slick roots of the tree, and something hummed in my ears. I felt… out of body. Drifting. When I looked at Henry, I saw
blood—and when I looked at the monsters who had been monsters, too, while they were men, I also saw blood. Blood infected; blood changed by something I still didn’t understand.

The trees are alive
, I thought, and felt like a fool.

The leader of the pack shuffled forward and dragged his clawed fingers over his face with a gape-mouthed groan. He cut himself, so deeply that blood ran down his skin and dripped from his bloated cheek. I heard it hit the ground with a sound as loud as a bell. And I imagined, beneath my hand, a pleasurable warmth rise from the bark of the tree.

“Henry,” I said raggedly, without breaking the gaze of the pack leader, the first and last man who had held me down, so many years ago. “Henry, put Steven down. You’re going to need your hands.”

“Amanda,” he whispered, but I ignored him, and picked up the shotgun. I settled it against my shoulder, my finger caressing the trigger, and looked deep into those black, lidless eyes.

Feed us again
, I heard, rising through me as though from the earth itself.
All we want is to be fed again.

I hated that voice. I hated it so badly, but I could deny it. Like instinct, stronger than knowledge; like my blood on the fence or Henry burned by sunlight. We had been changed in ways I would never understand, but could only follow.

“You know what you’re doing,” I said to the creature, which stood perfectly still, bleeding, staring, waiting. “You know what you want.”

What it had wanted, all these years, I realized. Living half-dead, hungry for peace, listening to voices that wanted to be fed. Like me, but in a different way.

So I pulled the trigger. And finished it.

I
NEVER DID
buy those pigs.

I found someone outside the Amish who would trade with me, and bargained for horses, good strong Clydesdales, almost seventeen hands high. Four of them. I had to travel a week to reach the man who bred them, and all he wanted was four boxes of bullets.

We left at the end of summer. No one bothered us, but no one talked to us, either. We were alone on the hill, though people watched from a distance as Steven and I took down the fence, board by board, and used each rail to build the walls of two wagons. Real walls, real roofs, windows with solid shutters. I had seen abandoned RVs, and always admired the idea of a movable home. Even if it was something I had never imagined needing. What we built was
crude, but it would keep the sunlight out.

We left at the end of summer. I wrote a note and left it on the last post standing. My land, free for the taking.

I drove one wagon, while Steven handled the other. One of them was filled with food—everything we could store and can—and the other held Henry and our few belongings. The goats followed without much prodding. Cats were good at herding. When asked politely, anyway.

Henry rode in my wagon. He had a bed behind the wall at my back, and a hollow pipe he spoke through when he wanted to talk. After a day or two, I tied a long red ribbon around my wrist and trailed it through the pipe. Henry would tug on it when he wanted me to imagine our hands touching.

“Do you dream of them?” he asked one day, his voice muffled as it traveled through sawed-off steel. It was sunny and warm, and birds trilled, voices tangled in sweet wild music. Pasture land surrounded us, but beyond the tall grass I saw the dark edge of a forest. I looked at it as I would a narrowed eye—with caution and an edge of fear.

We had traveled more than a hundred miles, which I knew because we followed old roads on my father’s maps, and we calculated distances every evening around the fire.

“I dream,” I said. “Tell me you don’t.”

“I can’t,” he said quietly. “I still taste their blood, and it makes me afraid because I feel nothing. No regret. No sorrow. I pray all the time to feel sorrow, but I don’t. My heart is cold when I remember murdering them. And then I feel… hungry.”

Sometimes I felt hungry, too, but in a different way. I hungered to be back inside the forest, bleeding for the trees, hoping that they would give me knowledge, again. More answers. Not just why we had been changed, but why we had been changed in so many different ways. I told myself that the virus that had caused the Big Death had affected more than humans. I told myself that maybe we had all been infected, but some had lived—lived, ripe for some new evolution. I told myself I was a fool, that it didn’t matter, that I was alive, starting a new life. I told myself, too, that I was a killer.

I tugged on the ribbon and he tugged back. “Do you feel cold when you think of protecting your parents and Steven, or me?”

“No,” he said. “Never.”

“Then you’re fine,” I replied. “I love you.”

Henry was silent a long time. “Does that mean you forgive me?”

I closed my eyes and pulled the ribbon again. “There was nothing, ever, to forgive.”

From the second wagon, behind us, I heard a shout. Steven. I pulled hard on the reins, untied the ribbon from my wrist, and jumped down. The cats that had been riding on the bench beside me followed. I took the shotgun.

Steven stood on the wagon bench, still holding the reins. Fading scars crisscrossed his face and throat, and his bared wrists were finally looking less savaged. Pale, gaunt, but alive. He still wore his plain clothes and straw hat. Unable to let go. If he was anything like his brother, it would be years—or maybe never. His gaze, as he stared over my head, was farseeing.

“Someone will be coming soon,” he said. “Someone important.”

I stared down the road. All I saw was a black bird, winging overhead. A crow. I watched it, an odd humming sound in my ears. Cats crowded the road, surrounding the bleating goats. I couldn’t count all their numbers—twenty or thirty, I thought. We seemed to pick up new ones every couple of days.

One of the windows in my wagon cracked open. Henry said, “Are we in trouble?”

“Not yet,” I replied, but tightened my grip on the gun. “Steven?”

“We don’t need to hide,” Steven murmured, staring up at the crow; staring, though I wasn’t entirely certain he saw the bird. “She’s coming.”

I didn’t question him. Steven had become more enigmatic since that night in the woods—that second, bloody, night. Or maybe he had stopped fighting the change that had come over him all those years before.

Clear day, but after a while I heard thunder, a roar. Faint at first, and then stronger, ripping through the air. I couldn’t place it at first, though finally I realized that it reminded me of the military caravans. A gas engine.

A black object appeared at the end of the road, narrow and compact. Sunlight glittered on chrome. It took me a moment to recognize the vehicle. I had seen only pictures. I couldn’t remember its name, though I knew it had two wheels, like a bicycle. And that it was fast.

None of the cats scattered. I steadied myself as the machine slowed, stopped. Dug in my heels. Didn’t matter that Steven seemed unafraid. I had no trust in the unknown.

A woman straddled the thing. Dark hair, wild eyes. Her jeans and shirt looked new, which was almost as odd as her gas-powered machine. I saw no weapons, though—and was comforted by the sharp look she gave me. As though she, too, had no trust.

“Your name is Amanda,” she said.

I held steady. Made no reply. Watched, waited. The woman frowned, but only with her eyes; a faint smile quirked the corner of her mouth.

“I’m Maggie,” she added, and tapped her forehead. “I saw you coming.”

Steven jumped down from the wagon. I stepped in front of him, but he tried to push past me and choked out, “Are you like us?”

High in the sky, the crow cawed. Maggie glanced up at the bird, and her smile softened before she returned her gaze to me and the boy.

“No,” she said. “You’re new blood. I’m from something… older.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” I told her.

She shook her head, rubbing her jaw. “It’ll take time to explain, but there are others like you. Changed people. I’ve seen them in my dreams. I’m trying to find as many as I can, to bring them someplace safe.”

“Safe,” echoed Henry, from behind the wagon door. Maggie glanced sideways, but didn’t seem surprised to hear someone speaking. The crow swooped close and landed on her shoulder. Cats made broken chattering sounds. Golden eyes locked on the bird.

“Something is coming,” said Maggie, reaching around to place a cautious hand on the crow’s sleek back. “I don’t know what. But we need to be together. As many of us as possible.”

I stared, feeling the cut of her words. Cut, like truth. I knew it in my blood. But I held my ground and said, “You’re crazy.”

“Amanda,” Henry said, and I edged sideways to the back of the wagon. “Wife,” he said again, more softly, for my ears only. “What did we run from before, and what are we running toward now?”

“Possibilities,” I whispered, pressing my brow against the hammered fence rail, dotted with my blood. I touched the wooden heart hanging from a delicate chain around my neck. “All those frightening possibilities.”

“I was never scared of loving you,” he murmured. “But I was a coward with the rest. I don’t want to be that man again.”

And I didn’t want to be that woman. I scratched my fingers against the wagon door and turned back to look at Steven, who gave me a slow, solemn nod. I stared past him at the forest—silent and waiting, and full of power. Power it had given us—and maybe others. I leaned against the wagon, feeling Henry on the other side of the wall, strong in the darkness.

My blood hummed.

Jacqueline Carey is a
New York Times
bestselling fantasy/romance novelist best known for her Kushiel’s Legacy series. The first novel of this series,
Kushiel’s Dart,
won the Locus Award for best first novel in 2001 as well as the 2001
Romantic Times
Reviewers’ Choice Award, and was listed by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble as one of the top-ten fantasy novels of the year. Since then, there have five more books in the series, including K
ushiel’s Chosen, Kushiel’s Avatar, Kushiel’s Scion, Kushiel’s Justice, Kushiel’s Mercy,
and the start of a related series with
Naamah’s Kiss.
Carey has also written the Sundering books,
Banewreaker
and
Godslayer,
a stand-alone novel,
Santa Olivia,
and a nonfiction book,
Angels: Celestial Spirits in Legend & Art.
Her most recent book is
Naamah’s Curse,
the second book in the Naamah sequence. She lives in Michigan.

Here’s a compelling and intricate tale that follows the consequences of a promise between star-crossed lovers down through the generations—one with quite a high price in blood.