back a retch by sheer force of will, trembling so hard Robbie actually drew her forward, sliding his arm over her shoulders. He was cold as the stone walls, and his flesh was as hard…but he was her brother, and he had found her in the dark.
“A place by some pretty jessum trees, Kittycat. Keep your eyes closed.”
Chapter 31
The
It was bad, but there was hope. Russ Overton had limped into town, madder than a wet cat and all over mud, his clothes scorched from the shattering of the west charterstone. A group of men were hauling a chunk of granite from behind Ma Hainey’s boardinghouse—she’d braced two boards on it and used it to chop off chicken heads, so it was already blooded—to the west border in Cam Salthenry’s rickety wagon, with Russ perched atop the chunk of stone muttering charter-charms to prepare it. The instant they heaved it upright among the shattered ruins of the other stone, he could repair the boundary—and that same group of men would go with him to ride the circuit and keep any undead off the chartermage.
It was now a question of how long they could hold. They still had the
Jack wasn’t sanguine, though. The sun was sinking, and if Russ and the stone didn’t get to the west in time, it could get ugly. Underneath the stormclouds, a furnace of gold was turning orange and red, giving the entire town a coat of wet gilding. The
“Sheriff!” A boy’s voice, high and piping. “
It was Zachary Corcoran, and he was running down the street as fast as his thick little legs could pump, throwing up clods of mud and dirt. He gabbled, pointing to the northwest, and the pins-and-needles all over Gabe’s body were almost driven back by cold fear.
The dead from outside the boundary shambled, their jaws working, and Gabe finally had an answer for a question that had bothered him a long while. It had to do with the undead in the schoolhouse, and why they’d gone after Catherine.
It was Jack’s fault, actually. He’d buried Robert Browne in consecrated ground; Robbie would find charter- boundaries no bar to his passage. The thing in the claim had probably forced the boy to carry corpses over the line, to see if it could be done. Once over, those dead could spread contagion and break the charter-circuit from the
They clustered in shadows, some of them freshly dead—he recognized Amelia Gerhardt from one of the outlying farms, her head stuck at a strange angle and her eyes blazing with unholy red pinpricks as she shuffled toward him on bare, flayed feet. The sun flashed, clouds scudding and tearing as the wind rose, and the thing that had been Rich Gerhardt’s wife squealed and fell, its flesh smoking.
Zach Corcoran was sobbing with fright. The
“What are you
Jack Gabriel spread his arms. The pins-and-needles of grace rose through him, and he stilled the fruitless inner thrashing.
The surprise was how easy it was. He’d spent so long hiding it, avoiding the questions, like a hooded horse, just plodding ahead and refusing to look. But the space inside him that had opened at his Last Baptism dilated, and inside it, the still small voice spoke.
A pair of dark eyes and a sweet little face, dark curls and the feel of her against him. Her teeth sinking into his lip before the startlement passed, and then the sweetness and the thundercrack inside him as her name rose like the charter-bell’s clanging.
Grace burst free, a point of golden brilliance that shrank before it exploded outward. Time halted, and the wetness on his cheeks was not mud or blood or rain.
It was, after all, so easy. The Word spoke itself in silence, and the undead cringed from the sound. Their faces smoothed, the corpseglow leaving them in puffs of gold-laced steam, and Jack struggled to hold the place inside him open.
One question nagged him, though.
The golden light winked out, and he fell heavily to his knees with a splash of liquid dirt. The silence was immense, broken only by little Zach’s sobbing for air and Emmet Tilson’s wondering, breathless curse.
The charter-bell had stopped ringing. And now everyone in town would know what he was.
Gabe shut his eyes.
But when his group of Damnation’s citizens reached the schoolmarm’s house, they found it afire like half the northern part of town, smoke rising into a rapidly clearing sky.
He stood before the burning cottage, and the whispers rose in a tide behind him. The sun finished dying in the west, the stars peeping through torn clouds as the storm moved away.
The cold closed about him, and the pins-and-needles of grace left him, cold ash after a fire. His face froze, and the flames crackling through the snug little cottage mocked him.
Perhaps she had not reached the town after all. Or if she had, was she inside the flame and the…
“Gabe?” It was Russ Overton. Mud cracked on his face and his bloodshot eyes blinked furiously, a muscle in his stubbled cheek twitching. “The charterstone’s solid, it’ll hold. What now?”
