CHAPTER 8
Andi
They were watching
the town under Edmund Slider’s dome, the two of them, again. They
hadn’t talked much in the last couple of days, since Skip had
argued with Tavia. Tavia herself had disappeared—presumably to
summon her “pathetic siblings,” as Skip had called
them.
Andi watched Skip
carefully out of the corner of her eye. He kept his gaze locked on
the bridge.
“What do you think
will happen at the rally?” she asked.
“I don’t care,” he
lied.
“Why not go back to
the restaurant, then?” The Cliffside Restaurant had been their
primary home since last autumn—as a business it was abandoned
earlier than the residences nearby, it had a generator that
operated easily once grid repair crews stopped coming anywhere near
the dome, it had everything from food to television, and only
required small modifications to allow for comfortable sleeping
quarters.
“Maybe I will.” They
both knew he wouldn’t.
“Hank Blacktooth
looked pretty gaunt in that video. Food must be pretty scarce.” She
thought about what it would be like, to have to ration food and go
a little more hungry every single day.
“Susan looks fat
enough.”
“You’re a
jerk.”
He shrugged. “I
didn’t mean it as an insult. We’re good enough friends, she and
I.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet she’s
a huge fan.”
“She let me feel her
up in the back of a Ford Mustang, once.”
Andi rolled her eyes.
Was this supposed to make her jealous? Having been raised in a void
for most of her formative years by the reclusive Dianna Wilson, she
really didn’t know for sure. She didn’t feel jealous. Mostly, she felt pity for Susan
Elmsmith, who probably let Skip touch her for the same reason Andi
did: low self-esteem.
“They’re starting,”
she noticed with no small amount of relief.
Outside Winoka City
Hall, a crowd was forming. Some of the participants were coming out
of the charming three-story domed brick building. More came out of
the police station, which was directly across the street. They all
wore white and black dress robes over their clothes, and a few of
them sported ceremonial helms that reflected the morning
sun.
Then they saw a
figure that made them both stand up straight.
“What the
fuck,” he said.
“Oh, no,” she
whispered. “I didn’t think she would.”
He turned sharply.
“You didn’t think she would what?”
She motioned
uselessly at the scene by city hall. “She said to summon her
siblings, she needed to go back to your house and gather a few
things. Her sorcery isn’t horribly powerful—you know that—and she
needed little trinkets from each of them, to make it all work. I
offered to help her, so she wouldn’t have to return, but she
insisted, so—”
“So you let her go into the town?”
“She’s an adult!
Cripes, Skip, it’s her house, she’s been living there, she knew the
risks . . .” The words felt empty, and she crumbled into
silence.
“We’ve got to go down
there.”
She did not bother to
protest. She simply followed.
As they stepped onto
the highway and turned toward the bridge, she saw that nearly three
hundred people had gathered on the bridge. Someone had set up a
makeshift gallows out of scaffolding and industrial supplies. Four
people were standing on it: Hank Blacktooth, two helmeted guards .
. . and Tavia Saltin.
The woman’s hands
were cuffed behind her back and a rag tied tightly over her eyes.
Another rag was stuffed in her mouth, and she had bruises and welts
all over her face.
Hank, standing in
front of her, saw them right away. He pointed and said something,
and the crowd on the bridge turned and cheered.
“Skip.” Andi pulled
back on his shoulder before the boy could run ahead. “They want you
in there more than anything. Don’t give them what they
want.”
They came closer,
still more than a hundred yards from the edge of the barrier, which
split the bridge in two. They could make out weapons on the mob
around the gallows—handguns in holsters, swords in sheaths, even a
chain saw tossed casually over someone’s shoulder.
“They’re going to let
her go,” he muttered so that only she could hear. “They’re going to
let her go.”
She didn’t dare
answer. She brushed violet strands of hair off her face and thought
about the sorcery her father had used to have her execute Glorianna
Seabright.
It had been a
powerful feeling, tapping into the beaststalker within. Her father
had known that, and what had compelled her to kill had been less a
matter of possession than encouraging something that was already
there.
Beaststalkers, Andi
now knew more than she ever wanted to, lived to kill. The blood in
their bones ran warmer when they spilled others’ blood, broke
others’ bones. Knowing that feeling firsthand made Andi absolutely
certain of one thing: Tavia Saltin was about to die.
“They come!” Hank
Blacktooth called out through a bullhorn. “The mighty spider- folk!
Chief of Police, let’s give them a formal welcome and
salute!”
About two dozen of
the crowd, dressed in dark blue uniforms and well-shined black
shoes that peeked out from under their robes, stepped
forward.
A small redheaded
woman with an athletic body and soft eyes pulled out a Kel-Tec P-32
from her shoulder holster. She raised it, and the other police
officers—for Andi could now see that they were indeed so—pulled out
their own sidearms and pointed them west, away from the gently
glowing barrier.
“Prepare yourselves,
or prepare your souls!” she cried out in a tinny voice, and two
dozen firearms, mostly Beretta and Desert Eagle pistols, went off.
The rest of the crowd hooted, and several more unseen guns
fired.
The closer they got,
the more detail Andi could see: the modern body armor under some of
the robes, the Ford pickup truck behind the scaffolding which was
lined with modified vehicular armor, the M3 carbines with infrared
scopes, the small blades that everyone carried as a secondary
weapon—from hand axes to kitchen knives. The police chief herself
sported a catlin, a long, slender, double-bladed knife used for
amputations before oscillating saws came into vogue.
She couldn’t help it:
she admired the knife, and wondered where she could get one
herself.
Peering beyond the
crowd to city hall, Andi was fairly certain she spotted two shapes
patrolling in the tower window. Snipers, she guessed. In case
everything else isn’t enough.
It made some sense to
be this well armed, of course. They had advertised the event, and
dragons were out and about. Even the most powerful dragon would be
lucky to get within spitting range without encountering lethal
force.
Thinking of powerful
dragons made her think of Jennifer Scales. She glanced down the
river, up into the beams of the bridge’s arch, anywhere she thought
the girl might be. Would she be afraid of all of this,
too?
Well—she’s not here, is she? Question
answered.
Skip stopped inches
short of the barrier, and Andi tried to hold his hand. He shook it
off.
Hank motioned to
someone in the crowd with a video camera, then brought up the
bullhorn again. “Ladies and gentlemen—and honored guests!—we are
here today to celebrate the spirit of this amazing American
community. Here in Winoka, we have what I like to call ‘town
spirit.’ Y’all know what town spirit is?”
The hoots and hollers
suggested that yes, in fact they did know exactly what it was, but
Hank continued anyway.
“Town spirit is about
pride in where you live. It’s about loving and looking out for your
neighbor. It’s what keeps us up, when others try to bring us down.
Which brings us to today’s guests.
“Tavia Saltin,” he
continued, as his other hand brought up a thick manila folder. “You
are a resident of this town—or at least, you pretend to be one as
you walk among us. In fact, you are not at all what you seem.
According to the town files—files carefully created and maintained
by the late, great Glorianna Seabright herself”—he added with a
flourish, earning a new round of applause—“you are in fact a
monster. Specifically, the eight- legged sort, unnaturally large,
unnaturally poisonous, unnaturally vicious.
“While we would
normally wait a few days for the waning crescent to present our
case, in this case there is no need. Our evidence is legion: your
disappearance from public during past crescent- moon phases; your
associations with known arachnids like Edmund Slider and Otto
Saltin, both implicated in the arachnid plot to destroy this
universe and replace it with one overrun with monstrous things; and
most recently, your attempt to use your own sorcery within city
limits, not more than forty-eight hours ago.”
Tavia, who had been
working her lower jaw this entire time, finally managed to spit out
the rag that had been stuffed there. “The attempt was successful,
and my brothers and sisters are on their way. You will have them to
answer to if you don’t release me at once!”
With a vicious swing,
the bullhorn smashed into her thin lips. “Silence her!” Hank
snapped (unnecessarily, Andi thought) at the guards, before the
bullhorn came back up. Then the Master of Ceremonies was back
again, smiling and playing the crowd. “You say your brothers and
sisters are coming—perhaps they are already here, watching from the
woods? Perhaps they are plotting to save you?”
Tavia, bleeding from
her mouth, did not answer.
“Or perhaps all the
help we will see for you today stands before us. Here on the bridge
we see Francis Wilson, a blood relation of yours, also documented
by Glorianna Seabright as an enemy of the town.
“Next to him, his
whore, also known as Andeana, also known as the notorious assassin
who killed our dear Glory.”
Whore? Andi thought, puzzled. That’s a bit—
“She proved that your
kind can slip in and out of this barrier. She proved that you have
power over it—power, we can only presume, that includes knowledge
of how to end it.”
He jumped down from
the scaffolding and pushed past the police officers. He was almost
touching the barrier now, and his glaring brown eyes tried to burn
a hole through.
“Tell me,” he
continued through the bullhorn. “Would you like to demonstrate that
power now, to save one of your own? Would you dare show the secrets
of your sorcery, in front of our eyes, so that we may judge how
powerful you truly are?”
When they didn’t
answer, he smiled grimly and extended the hand that held the
bullhorn. It plunged into the barrier before Skip’s face, and then
doubled back above Hank’s own arm, pointed at the crowd now. To
someone unfamiliar with how the dome worked, it would almost appear
as if Skip himself was holding the bullhorn.
“Come on,” Hank
encouraged them quietly with a wink. “Speak up. Share the secret of
this barrier, and we will honor your aunt with a quick death. We
can be merciful, even toward our enemies.”
“Can you?” Skip
didn’t sound worried, or upset, or anxious. Merely curious. For
some reason, that made Andi more nervous than anything else that
had happened in the last ten minutes.
“Skip!” Tavia called
out from the gallows, before a guard punched her in the stomach.
The older woman doubled over, retching—as was the guard’s intention
and besides that, as had been Hank’s intention.
Andi didn’t dare
touch Skip. She was certain he was going to go through, and was
trying to decide how she would react when he did—defend him to the
death, or retreat into the safety of the woods—when Skip actually
laughed. Laughed.
“Go ahead and kill
her, Blacktooth. She doesn’t mean shit to me.”
Hank frowned and
withdrew the bullhorn. “I doubt that. She raised you.”
“My mother raised me, you strutting, bullying dumb-ass.
I’ve known my aunt for all of a year. She’s a clueless, whining,
overbearing loser who needs to wax. A lot. Torture her, kill her,
snap her bra strap, see if I care. I have better things to
do.”
Skip turned and
walked away. Andi shuffled back, unsure once again of what to
do.
“Jannsen!”
One of the two guards
pulled out a bastard sword, held it high behind Tavia with the
point straight down, and shoved it down her spine before
withdrawing quickly.
The woman collapsed,
screaming. Andi grabbed Skip, who had already turned at the
sound.
Hank never took his
eyes off them. “Again, Jannsen!”
The sword came down a
second time, this time cork-screwing through the nerve bundles it
had already violated. The sound of metal scraping bone made Andi
gasp.
“Again!”
Again the blade came
down, and Tavia fell forward. The second guard grabbed her by the
shoulders and dragged her back to her knees, so the hobbling could
continue.
The sword continued
to rape her spine, eliciting a shriek with each plunge. Maybe there
were still nerves tough enough to survive the first few thrusts;
maybe Jannsen was finding new angles; maybe she was simply still
screaming from the first stroke.
Andi began to sob,
but Skip stood like a statue. He and Hank stared at each other
through the barrier with no facial movement, no signal that
anything around them affected them at all.
Skip was not upset
about his aunt, and Hank was not enjoying the reaction he was
getting from Andi. Not at all.
Finally, the bullhorn
came back up. “The rally is over, folks. Let’s put her back in her
cell. Once the crescent moon is up, she’ll start feeling it again.
That’s when we’ll start pulling those pretty feet and hands
off.”