Another movement, nearer the mouth and throat, and the screams were cut off.
Knitting, molding his flesh, almost casually.
My concern was no longer that I’d killed the man. My concern was that he might live.
“Blake!” Rose’s voice, from the living room. “You have to help him!”
I took a step forward, then stopped as the faceless woman continued her work. Her fingers wriggled and crawled across the man’s scalp, just beneath his skin, burying his hair, reaching down to cover his ears. Trapping him in his own skin, so his own flesh was a hood over his face.
“Blake!”
I thought back to one idle thought I’d had in the past hours.
The house was a sanctuary against Other and practitioner both.
I glanced around me, then very carefully took a step back through the door, past the threshold and into the house.
Laird had come to the front door.
“He’s dying!”
There were rules. I couldn’t know which ones still held, here, which ones the locals had called off, while I was a problem. But there were rules.
I remained where I was, watching.
She held the cigarette aloft, poised as if she might take a puff at any moment, while her other hand pulled free, then plunged into his chest cavity.
The muffled grunts and violent jerks he made in response were worse than the screams.
The talkative one kept chattering, nonstop, the ‘children’ making little sounds of amusement, laughing and cooing. The others who’d joined in seemed content to watch, standing silently on the fringes.
I watched a car appear, traveling down the street from the opposite direction the delivery guy had come. The talkative one practically leaped, taking hold of the faceless woman. His momentum turned her around, and he leaned forward, simultaneously leaning her back, so they were pressed together, their bodies covering their victim. I could see the talkative one’s face stop an inch from the smudged blur of hers.
The car passed, the headlights illuminating what the people in the car would see as two embraced lovers, kissing at the side of the street. The remainder were hidden. I watched as the car reached the end of the road, stopping at a stop sign.
“Blake, salt is a purifying material, cleansing. It can work against certain Others,” Rose said. “There’s a ton in the study, if you can’t find any in the kitchen. Go and throw it at them!”
I didn’t move.
“Blake! Please!” She sounded desperate, now.
The car turned and disappeared out of sight. The two Others broke apart, and the faceless woman clawed at the talkative one. Vicious, angry, almost feral. He gave her only laughs in response, as he ducked out of the way.
The faceless woman gave up and turned back to her victim. I could see where she’d reached through his chest to grip the railing, fixing him to the metal.
Rose was screaming, now. “Damn you, Blake! Damn you! God! Fuck!”
She hit the mirror.
The noise Rose was making seemed to get attention. The talkative one looked up at me.
I slowly shook my head. I felt physically ill, all expression and utterances choked from me by the feeling of my heart in my throat.
But there was no fucking way I was going out there.
The talkative one said something to the others.
I saw the delivery guy lurch, tearing free in a mess of blood and ripped skin. His dislocated jaw hung down his teeth a bloody ruin.
He laughed, and it wasn’t a human sound.
When he joined the ‘children’ in cavorting about, I allowed myself to believe it. He wasn’t human. He had never been.
An Other, joining the faceless woman in some psychological warfare.
I could hear them laughing, in the two or so seconds it took me to slam the door.
“It was a trick?” Rose asked, as I crossed the room to where I’d left the mirror in the window. “They-”
I saw a movement immediately before Rose shrieked. I grabbed the mirror, pulling it away from the window.
The little ‘girl’ with the toothy mouth and the pigtails peeking out from a hat that hid her eyes, hair and ears had appeared just outside the window. She now scratched at the glass with long fingernails.
“They wanted me outside,” I said. “The house is a sanctuary, the property isn’t. Staying behind the railing like they were, it was meant to mislead us. I might have fallen for it, if Laird hadn’t come all the way to the front door.”
“They’re clever.”
“The book warned us they were.”
“How sure were you?” she asked. “That he wasn’t human?”
I didn’t answer. Rose was staring at me, and I avoided her gaze.
Others were scratching and tapping on windows, now. I heard a scrabbling, as if something was on the porch overhang.
“God,” Rose said.
“This is what Molly was dealing with,” I said, quiet. My heart was still pounding, my mouth so dry I needed to try three times before I could speak again, but the fear and helplessness were disappearing. I clenched my fist. “All on her lonesome. Hearing things just outside the house, all night. Nowhere good to go for help.”
“We’re not in a great place either,” Rose said.
“No. But we have each other,” I said. “You had my back last night, with Padraic. I might not have made it home in one piece without that. Thank you, by the way, if I haven’t already said.”
“You have, twice, but it’s okay. We’re figuring this out.”
I nodded. My thoughts were going a mile a minute, but I had trouble saying just what the destinations were.
“What are you thinking?” Rose asked.
“I’m thinking…” I said, trying to sum it up. “I think we’re almost ready.”
“Ready?”
“We’ve seen what kind of games the practitioners will play. We’ve seen how the Others function, in part. We have a sense of what we need to accomplish, and an abstract sense of how. And maybe it helps a little that I’m a bit scared and a lot angry.”
“You want to awaken,” she said.
I nodded. “Before the council meeting tomorrow. Getting a familiar, the tool, and the demesne is something that can wait.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “I think we should. You want to do it now, or do you need to eat first?”
“Two things, first,” I said. “Eating isn’t one of them.”
I dialed the pizza place again.
“Bell Pizza, what can I do you for?”
“Hi-”
“No,” he said. “Not doing business with you.”
“It’s about the pizza guy.”
“We never sent anyone. I asked a driver if he wanted to go, he said he wasn’t delivering to a haunted house.”
The irony being this house was maybe the least haunted locale in Jacob’s Bell.
“I say it isn’t haunted, but it’s owned by you fucks, isn’t it?”
“One of us,” I replied.
“You’re Assholes, all of you, holding all the rest of us back. You know my brother bought a place here, because this place was supposed to grow? Except you’re not selling, and it’s losing value every year, needing more repairs. You-”
“I just wanted to check the pizza guy wasn’t going to show,” I said, but he was talking over me.