1.34. Seraph Cult
The Verdugo
“I’m not cute,” Anna snarled.
“Yes you are,” Seth said.
“You may be hiding from the rest of me, thief, but I still have my teeth up here.”
“See, now that I know you won’t actually hurt me, the threats are cute. We’re bantering.”
“We’re not fucking bantering. You’ve gotten far too comfortable with me.”
“Yep.” Seth dug into his satchel and pulled a pair of dented binoculars out. A loaner from one of the pillowbrains. “You told me not to be scared of you. And I trust you.”
Anna lapsed into silence while she tried to get pissed off at that statement.
“And your whiskers are cute, too, by the way,” Seth added.
“This is never happening, do you understand? Never. Annalise is too cowardly and Lisa is too horny. But I’m here and I’m telling you for all of me that you need to give up.”
Seth did not reply. The birdsong was fading around them as the light waned.
“You are thinking with your cock and not your head,” Anna said. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re asking for, and I refuse to be responsible for the rest of your unlife. You think you want me because you’re an overgrown teenager with dumb, raging hormones. And if I give you what you think you want, and you realize the sun does not rise with my smile and my cunt doesn’t grant three wishes when you rub it, I’ll watch you lose all this pent-up lust for me, and it’ll turn into resentment and hatred as you realize your stupid, irreversible mistake. And I know how it’ll be all your damn fool fault, but the naïve idiot rest of me will be fucking miserable with the guilt of it. So I have to be the one with the big girl pants and tell you it is not happening, and if it’s the reason you’re staying, you can climb down this tree right now and fuck off back to civilization.”
Seth gave this tirade an absent “Mmhmm,” from behind the binoculars.
“Do you have anything to say to that?”
“Nope.”
“You told me if I said to, you’d give up,” she said.
“I told Annalise that, and I stand by it. Your other heads I’m taking with a grain of salt.”
“So you’re just going to ignore me? That’s your strategy?”
“Not ignoring you,” he said. “I’m listening. You’re scared.”
“Scared?”
“You’re scared that I’m treating this like a fling when you want something bigger out of it,” he said. “And I can’t make you un-scared by talking. Not while you’re Anna, anyway.”
“Fuck off, thief. I’m scared? I obliterated a seraph in its cave in front of you while you cried and shit your pants, and I’m scared. You don’t know shit about me. My other heads are too fucking nice—”
“Shhh.”
“Don’t you fucking shush me—”
Seth was full of hushed urgency and glued to his binoculars. “I see something.”
Her tuft-tipped ears quivered. “What?”
“Group of kindred with corpselamps.” He frowned. “Thought we were looking for a seraph. What are these guys doing here?”
“Show me,” Anna said. Seth held the binoculars to her eyes. She peered through and blinked them away. “Can’t turn my neck, thief. Hold me straight.”
“I’m trying.” Seth changed his grip on her. His hand slid below and held her there, like a penny-dreadful actor soliloquizing at a skull.
“Fuck’s sake,” she ground out, through the mouth he was holding partway closed.
“Don’t jostle. It’s a long way down.” His thumb laid along the line of her jaw, sinking into her cheek and pooching her lips forward. Thank St. Silas that her jugular was on her body down below so he couldn’t feel her pulse pick up. Of course it did. That’s what happens when someone has their hand near your neck.
It wasn’t oakmoss, the smell on his hands. Tobacco leaf, maybe. Focus.
Four men whose dark clothes blended with the colors of the gathering evening and oncoming autumn. They were trying to look hard for one another, to seem unbothered by the strange and dire business that had drawn them here. The most successful was in front, big and bald and bearded, a hooded lantern held in his hairy-backed hand. Amber light coming out of that, not the green of a corpselamp that a seraph might siphon; he knew what he was coming here to meet. The subtle hitch in his stride told her here was a veteran of violence, and she wondered from where. She could scarcely imagine a fellow baptized in the carnage of the Winter War could return and worship the butcher-birds.
“Seraph cult,” she said. “Coming to meet their master.”
He drew a sharp inhale. “Saints, really?”
“What else’d they be? This is what Tiago and I pieced together in Sondam. What that scarecrow got mixed up in. How’d you think we knew where to look?”
“I never… I guess I knew they existed, I thought they were out on the edges of the world. Like in Sektorbrav, or…”
She sneered at his hesitation. “Or Orwiny?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re here, too. More and more. Nihilists, madmen, worshippers of some Antisaint or another. These fuckers, though.” She shook her head, and then remembered her head was on the forest floor, shaking its severed neck. “Turning on your own people for a gray feather is fucking low-rent. Find the seraph. Should be coming in from the southwest, along that switchback.”
Seth returned her to his lap and peered back through the binoculars. A probing minute and then his body stiffened. “Saints preserve. There it is.”
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“Show,” she commanded, and she was in the air again, staring down the binoculars at a shambolic thing that looked halfway direwolf and halfway vulture, with a scabby, bulbous head perched on a body so cruelly striated with animal muscle it looked as though it were a wound winch, a quivering tensile knot of quadrupedal muscle that’d snap and whirl apart if it weren’t lashed to bones the size of staves.
“That thing looks more like a big dumb beast than a deity,” Seth said.
Anna blew a lock of silver hair out of the way. “Yokels are dumber.”
“But if this guy was part of it, what made him turn unlit? Is there something more going on, maybe?”
“Maybe. I don’t care. Fanatics don’t interest me other than they’ve got enough soul for the sword.”
“We gonna try taking one alive? Make him talk?”
“Stop acting like you know what you’re doing, il Gutierre,” she said. “There’s four of them plus a seraph, and three of us. Focus on coming out of this, and if one of them lives long enough to spout his horseshit, it’s a pleasant bonus before we lop his head off. Understand?”
He slow-blinked. His eyelashes were long, for a man. Long and dark. “You want me in this?”
“The fuck do you think? You said you’d live the life, this is the life. I need hands.”
“Okay. But promise—”
“Not promising anything.”
“Stop,” he hissed, and to her surprise, she did. “Promise you’ll use me how I should be.”
“And how’s that?”
“You’re the one who kills people,” he said. “You decide, and I’ll trust you. But promise.”
She sighed. The wind whistled through the hexis-limned hole in her neck. “I promise,” she said. “Coward.”
He smiled that dimply smile. “Thank you.”
“Whatever.” She turned her eyes from him. “Throw me down.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I can catch myself.”
“What if I miss?”
“Don’t miss.”
“I’m gonna climb you down.”
“No. Hey, no. Seraphs dammit, no, don’t be a coward. Seth, stop, we have no time, it’ll be too much noise—”
“I’m quiet,” he whispered. “I’m fast. But I need both hands.”
He carefully placed her in his satchel and half-zipped it, up to her quivering nose.
“You are such a fucking pussy, Seth il Gutierre,” she whispered.
Seth put a finger to his lips. “Wink.” He swung himself down from the branch. She glared furiously at the sky as the forest canopy occluded it.
A humiliating half-minute and they were back on the ground. She snatched herself from him without a thanks. The magnetic twang of the Darkness interlocking her back to her body was as satisfying as a last puzzle piece clicked into place.
“Take this.” She unbuckled her holstered wheelgun and handed it to Seth by its blackwood stock. “Go off Tiago’s cue and see if there’s a potshot you can take.”
“Where is he?”
“Deeper into the woods. You’ll know when he shoots. It sounds like the world ending.”
He fastened the gun to his side. His hips were so much narrower than hers that the gunbelt’s prong stuck through the furthest hole in the strap.
She let out an unkind scoff of air through her nose. Skinny little slip of a man. You could fit two sets of his hips in the span of hers. You could fit both his wrists in her fist. If she rode this boy as hard as he clearly wanted her to, she’d snap him in half. Or if she wrapped him in her thighs and squeezed hard enough. He’d probably thank her for it, the little pervert. Probably scream her na—
“Anna?” he whispered, with the air of a man repeating himself.
“What?”
“You listening?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What’d you say?”
“Who do I aim at?”
She waved the last of that little digression out of her mind. “Whoever you can hit. If Tiago yells you an order you follow it.” She pointed at the tree. “Move.”
He mounted the tree and scampered up it. Without a head to cart around he was fast. Had to give him that.
She tracked the flattened grass and rustled ferns to Tiago’s perch and hunkered next to him. “Counted four,” she muttered. “Plus the gray feather coming the opposite way.”
He didn’t look up from the ironsight tunnel he’d zeroed into the clearing, fifty paces south. “Do we wait for them to come together?”
She shook her head. “That fucker’s big enough to give them cover, and fast enough we want the extra distance. It’ll be coming from there.” She pointed past the cultists and to the right. “Soon as the cultists hit the clearing, you fire.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tiago slid the bar down on his ladder sight. “He give you trouble?”
“Always.” She pointed toward the distant, bobbing lights. “One full drum downrange, then move in to take the survivors and help me with the gray feather up from the other way. I break right, around il Gutierre’s tree.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They were close enough now to hear the crackling of underbrush as the beast approached.
“Low in the brush,” she whispered. “Nothing above the midsection. I want them all for the sword, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She thumped him on the shoulder. “Aim true, boy.”
They watched the lights bob through the wood toward the circle. They listened to the unquiet crunch and crash of the seraph on the other side. The men emerged around their stone circle, talking low and peering into the forest. Waiting for their monster.
“Three. Two.” Tiago flexed his finger and rested it on the trigger. “One.”
A sound like the world ending. The forest lit up bright as day.
Branches splintered. Stone chipped. Tracers burned through the night. Cries of pain and confusion threaded the ringing milliseconds between bullets. Ten popmites a second squelched into utilitarian death and strobed a curtain of lead through the forest. The bald man went down to a knee and then another bullet took that knee’s cap, pulverized the bone.
One man pulled a popgun from his belt as if to reply and three barking blasts from above bowled him over. In the scaffwood canopy, Seth had opened fire, and blown a chunk from the small of the cultist’s back, big and ruinous enough to put him in a chair for life, if such a life could last past the night.
The machine gun’s drum emptied. A dry click and its storm ended.
Anna sped from the underbrush, a silver streak, and as the seraph roared and thundered into a charge she was there to meet it, spear-first. The thing was bigger than even it had looked through the binoculars, the size of a black bear, but the leaf blade did not care and nor did its wielder; its tip found the gap between sternum and shoulder and ground its way into the striated layers of muscle. Anna heard them shred, heard the grotesque little twangs of the tensile muscle’s packed potential energy fire off and uncoil under the beast’s gray-stubbled skin.
The seraph’s charge was checked, and though its momentum stumbled Anna back several feet, it only forced her into the edge of the stone circle before she twisted her weapon and wrung a snarling stop from her quarry. Its claw batted toward her and didn’t bridge the distance; so assured of her guts’ place in their cavity, she risked a glance to the addled cultists as they tried to rise from her son’s fusillade.
One of them—an older man, felt hat, battered rim—was up on his feet, hands before him, and in the snap second before another titanic push from the seraph, Anna saw what he was holding.
What he wasn’t holding.
He had no gun; a gun wouldn’t work anymore, not this close to a seraph. He didn’t need one. The forefinger slid into place. Anna knew what he was.
“Sorcerer!”
The word came out of a jaw locked in primal effort against a shoving seraph. They were animated by adrenal panic into an animal roar barely shaped by civilizational syllables. But Tiago understood, or he’d seen for himself, because a black shadow darted from his singed outcropping, kicking up an inordinately cheerful jingle of spent brass as he sprinted away from those outstretched hands.
A sizzling line of jagged light etched itself across the forest. It bloomed into a white-hot ball of flame the size of a horse for a split second that printed a photo-bleached tadpole across the eye and then with a CRACK it burst, toppling a three-story tree and firing forth whirling stone shrapnel and combusting the ferns and the grass and leaves into a field of flashburned embers.
Tiago had dived to escape the blast and was scrambling back to his feet now, mud spattered and steely-eyed, a fresh cut raked across his forehead by some flying splinter or stone. The man’s horrible open hands swung around and fixed on her son. Her only son. The only son she’d ever have and through the distance and the gloom she saw him as if in a spotlight back through time. As if the years of weary seasoning had stripped themselves from him, and for one final terminal instant he was her baby boy, staring into the face of a man who was about to hurt him worse than he understood someone could be hurt.
A dark shape thwacked into the sorecerer’s back, knocking his stance out of hexithaumic alignment. A gun, rendered useless by the seraph’s hexis-sucking aura, hurled from the forest canopy.
Descending like a falling star, his cutlass bared, his mad, crashing dive slowed by the branches that slapped into him on his way down, Seth il Gutierre followed.