I was stuck in the larger of the two mirrors, slowly recovering from a dozen scratches, and a gaping hole in the center of my body. I could step outside, but the shutting of the door meant even I didn’t have passage. I could step to the mirror Alexis wore, but the window was small, and she was active. The risk of being locked out, unable to stop the problems inside the library from coming to pass, kept me from leaping behind the clockwork man and trying to interfere with it.
A brave little sparrow flew down, sweeping past the clockwork man. Making some attempt to push, to drive him back or put him on his heels.
Nothing. He only narrowly missed being torn to shreds by the group waiting behind the man.
Something clipped him, and he struggled to fly as he came back. He landed at the edge of the desk, a short distance from me, his head jerking this way and that as he tried to take it all in.
The group was making more headway on the door.
There was a loud click, another k-chunk, and the automaton lost most of the ground it had gained, the bookcase doors sliding within an inch of being closed. Sparks flew as spinning gears on different knuckles touched.
But in that click and shifting of gears, it had gained new strength. The assembled group couldn’t stop it from pushing the doors apart, until its arms were outstretched to either side, the bookcases held apart as far as the automaton could manage.
The skeletal thing with great bone praying-mantis limbs ducked its head under the automaton’s outstretched arm, stepping into the library. Three more homonculi passed under the mechanical man’s other arm.
Ty and Alexis’ paper tags touched the skeletal thing, and the papers stuck, a mixture of two very different handwriting styles.
“Nope,” I heard Eva say from upstairs.
The thing brushed at itself with one of its scythe limbs, and the papers came free.
She knew. Is it an anti-practitioner measure? Something special made for coming after people and creatures like us?
Green Eyes pounced on the scythe-armed thing, teeth gnashing as she bit into the bones of its shoulder and neck.
But it was only bone and tattered cloth.
There was refuge in simplicity, it seemed.
“Shit,” Callan said, watching the various measures fail, “Shit, shit, shit.”
Largely ignoring her, it turned toward Callan.
“Shit!” Callan said, his voice higher pitched at the end.
Like a fencer with a foil in hand, the thing stepped forward. From the elbow on, its limb was like a great rib, sharpened at one side and drawn to a point. It moved faster than I would have expected.
Callan’s throat opened up, blood welling. He clasped one hand to his throat, eyes going wide.
Shit.
Black veins opened up around the wound site. Where they traced the faint blue and red lines at his skin, the skin cracked. The wound yawned open.
I could see his expression. The fear. The thought crossing his mind, the expression of agony, as he opened his mouth and tried to scream, but only burbled blood.
“Callan!” Christoff shrieked.
Christoff was just at the cusp of being a teenager and being a child. In that cry, he was a little boy again. Callan was his role model, old enough to be his father figure.
Maybe ignoble of me to think so, not so different from thinking ill of the dead, but he really could have done with better.
The black veins of poison, venom, or magic-induced necrosis were reaching Callan’s face now. As the skin cracked, blood fell out in spurts or trickles, before the necrosis turned it black. The skin between the dark tracks in his flesh was turning gray.
He half-coughed, half-spat blood, as if he could somehow clear his throat enough to say something, and failed. Bowed over, face pointed at the ground, he charged.
He barreled right past Green Eyes and the reaper-thing.
“Callan!” Christoff shouted, louder than before, a little more desperate.
Without even looking, Callan barreled into the left arm of the clockwork man.
The arm didn’t budge. Metal, held firm by resistance, like a piece of the building. Had we been more coordinated, maybe Ty, Tiff, and Alexis might have been able to ease up the pressure and stop trying to push the doors closed, giving the clockwork man less bookcase to leverage himself against, but we weren’t, and they couldn’t. If they eased up, there was nothing to stop him from simply striding inside, the remaining Others following.
Callan sprawled at the automaton’s feet, and one of the homonculi seized the opportunity to bite deep into his thigh.
More of the homonculi swarmed him, burying him beneath their collective mass.
The rest of the people in the room backed up until their backs were to walls or furniture, as the reaper-thing ventured to the room’s center.
I couldn’t do anything. Even if I were there, I couldn’t save him, and I wasn’t in a position to use the distraction.
I was here. With all the others.
“Kathryn,” I said, addressing my oldest cousin. “Peter.”
Kathryn looked shell shocked. She’d cursed Ellie out for being too slow on the draw, but now that they were confronted with the entirety of this reality, Kathy was the one having trouble getting a grip.
She’d dressed business casual, and it seemed to accentuate how very out of place she was. She might have wanted to look more like a lawyer, more imposing than her two hundred pound build would suggest. She was tall, her dirty blonde hair dyed brown and tied back into a severe ponytail, and her suit jacket made her broad shoulders look broader, while masking her stomach. In a courtroom or business meeting, she would have been a tyrant. Now she was the second tallest person in the room next to Callan, who was in the process of losing a few feet of height to tooth and claw, and probably the heaviest.
“Help him,” I told her.
Ten or twenty minutes ago, I might have added, ‘Or you all die.‘
But Kathryn looked at me. She could see all of me, not just a face with lines across it. A body that was more branch than flesh, with only skin and bone and muscle down the center of my face, the sides of the neck, and down the center of my torso. My sweatshirt hung open, so I could reach into the side of my chest, and the shirt beneath was tattered enough to show the damage. There was more flesh at the legs and buttocks, out of sight, and I hadn’t yet seen my groin turn to wood and bird, but I assumed it was a matter of time.
I still had a gaping hole in the middle of my chest. It had narrowly missed my ‘heart’.
It was, perhaps, the final piece she needed to grasp all of this. I was pretty sure I didn’t need to belabor the obvious. The Thorburns were fucked up, but they weren’t stupid. Mostly.
I think she got it. She took the lead, grabbing the chair by the desk. Holding it by the backrest, she swung it at a homonculus, killing the thing.
The reaper-thing moved its arm-scythe, raising it a fraction, and Kathryn threw herself to the side, almost falling in her haste to back off.
Only a slight movement of the bone scythe, but Kathryn had reacted severely.
Callan was still struggling as he was eaten alive by both the toxin and the homonculi. Alexis, Tiff and Ty were a dangerously short distance from the reaper, still doing what they could with the bookshelf, keeping the clockwork man in place.
Peter was circling around, and the reaper seemed particularly interested in him.
Kathryn had a clear path to the bookshelf, automaton and just behind the automaton, Callan.
She didn’t take it.
“I’m a mom,” Kathryn said.
“So?” Peter asked.
The reaper was still tracking him, turning as Peter walked around.