Dead ahead.
RIMA
Blood Binds
1
ONCE, IN BIO, they’d sat through a gruesome video of some sadist-scientist injecting formaldehyde into a squeaking, thrashing rat. For Rima, the poor thing couldn’t die fast enough, and yet that was not what horrified her most. The worst was when the red leeched from the rat’s eyes until they were a dead, milky white.
Stealing her mother’s whisper was like that.
Anita was screeching. She tried pulling away, but Rima hung on. The sensation was agony, like a rush of liquid nitrogen churning through her body, freezing her mind, icing her heart. Anita began to jitter and twitch as her whisper—her life and what rode in her soul—oiled into Rima.
And then she knew because she felt it.
No! Her back suddenly bowing with pain, Rima let out an agonized scream, but it was already too late. This is what it wanted. She felt her body expanding and deforming as the whisper-man uncoiled, streaming through her limbs, riding her blood to plump out her fingers, her toes. She felt the bite of rope still cinched around her right wrist and both ankles as the whisper-man squirmed and wriggled and bunched, and then she cried out as the rope split and fell away. For a wild second, she felt a spurt of hope. Maybe she would live through this; maybe she might actually be able to contain the whisper-man without …
All thought whited out as a monstrous pain ripped through her chest: not a single talon but razor-claws that dragged and tore and split. Her scream choked off as blood gushed into her mouth, and then it was all she could do to grab enough air.
Can’t hold it. She sucked in a gurgling gasp. Tearing me apart.
OH, POOR LITTLE RIMA. The whisper-man’s voice crawled over her mind. DOES IT HURRRRT?
“Y-yes.” Her mouth was sour with the taste of copper and pain. “Pl-please, t-take it back. L-leave me …”
TOO LATE. YOU’RE A BRAVE GIRL, AND STRONG, BUT NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO PLAY THIS GAME. IF IT HELPS, YOU’RE NOT THE ONE I WANT ANYWAY. FOR THE MOMENT, THOUGH, YOU’LL DO. NOW, YOU JUST RELAX AND LET ME DO ALLLL THE TALKING.
She felt her consciousness compress as the whisper-man crowded in. She recoiled, tried kicking out with her will, but he was walking over her mind now, insinuating himself into the cracks and crannies and secret places, prying her apart. The whisper-man surged in a river of black through her veins; her heart shuddered with the force of it, and when she looked at her hand, what little breath she had snagged in her throat.
Her skin was moving.
No. She could feel the blackness there, worming and heaving, those dark tentacles eeling over her bones, seeping into the meat of her. This was like Tania. The same thing was inside her now, balling in her gut, ready to skitter up her throat on its spidery legs.
NO, the whisper-man crooned in her mind. YOU STOLE A WHISPER, THAT’S ALL. A BIG BAD WHISPER, BUT NO MORE THAN THAT. ONLY BLOOD BINDS. ONLY BLOOD WILL DO.
She was on her feet. When had she done that? No matter. Warm blood trickled from the corners of her mouth and down her neck to soak her chest. Her vision was muddy and her cheeks were wet; when she put a hand there, her fingers came away ruby-red.
Overhead, the birds boiled and screamed. On the rock, at her feet, Anita was as still as a discarded wax figurine. Beyond the magic circle, the voodoo priestess cowered.
“You say you let me go.” The priestess sounded both aggrieved and frightened. “You make a promise. You say once you have the power, you free me.”
Rima opened her mouth …
2
AND THE GIRL’S lips formed words, but the words were not hers, and neither was the voice.
“YES,” the whisper-man said. It twisted Rima’s lips into a bloody crack of a smile. “BUT … I LIED.”
Then, it brought down the birds.
EMMA
To the End of Time
1
THE PECULIAR SPAT them out. They tumbled, not falling as much as rematerializing in a stagger, hands still linked: Emma first, then Casey, and finally Eric. A ball of sound broke over them, an echoing scream that rebounded off rock and doubled, and Emma thought, Cave. For a second, she thought they might still be in Bode’s nightmare: same story, different page. Then the floor undulated and bunched, and whatever else she might have thought after that turned to dust in her mind.
The birds spread in a roiling, living carpet. Emma smelled blood and the birds’ feral, almost metallic stink. A thousand glassy eyes glittered; black beaks gaped to reveal pink mouths and yellow tongues. Most were crows, but there were a few owls, their curved talons slick and stained with blood, stringy with dark flesh.
As if responding to some signal, the birds lifted as one in a broad, ebony curtain and shot toward some spot high above, leaving behind shredded clothing and a tumble of stained bone. The birds massed—and then seemed to melt into the ceiling. They fell utterly silent without even so much as a rustle. Yet they were there; their beetle-bright eyes studded the ceiling in an alien galaxy, a splash of eerie starlight.
That was when Emma realized something else: she could see herself. Not from their eyes; she wasn’t in the birds’ heads, thank God. But she saw herself, as well as Casey and Eric, reflected from the rock high above, at their feet, and all around. They went on and on, another Emma/Eric/Casey and yet another Emma/Eric/Casey and another and another and another: an infinite number of Emmas and Erics and Caseys marching away to the end of time.
The cave was an immense black-mirror sphere.
“Emma,” Eric said, and pointed. “Look. Inside that circle of candles.”
She followed his gaze, and a blast of horror swept through her body.
“No.” Casey’s voice was an anguished whisper. “No.”
2
RIMA SWAYED. HER body glistened, as if she’d been dipped in red paint. More blood dribbled in crimson rills from her mouth, her ears, her shredded wrists, and a thousand rips in her skin. Her shirt was a bib of purple gore, and Emma gasped as fresh blood blossomed in a dark rose over Rima’s stomach. Blood leaked through tiny fissures in her skin to form rivulets that ran down her legs and dripped from her fingers to puddle on the rock with a sodden, dull puh-puh-puh-puh. Rima looked like a porcelain doll done in a fine crackle-glaze: a leaky vessel through which her life’s blood seeped and would soon drain away completely.
“We’re too late.” Casey was trembling. “We’re too late; it’s got her.”
“Good for you, Casey!” Rima boomed, although the voice was not hers, or the whisper-man’s either, the one Emma had heard in her blinks of Madison and that asylum. Definitely a man’s voice, though.