Page 103 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
“He’ll kill us,” Evangeline wailed.
Cordelia turned her head so that her lips were close to her mother’s ear, and whispered, “Let all that glitters fade away.”
In the last instant before the wind tore away consciousness as well, she heard a voice say, Tell everyone goodbye.
CHAPTER 36
“Easy,” Richard said. “Easy, love.”
Hester opened her eyes to the face she loved most in the world, which was, frankly, a horror. The knife had opened up his cheek, and if there hadn’t been so much blood, she expected that she’d be looking at his molars. But his eyes were still familiar, brown and deep-set and full of concern, and she clutched at his arm and let him help her to her feet.
For once, her knee wasn’t the thing that hurt most. It was her throat. She’d sung the water-note somehow—or something like singing—exhaled it, maybe, or had it pulled out of her. While it had been happening, she hadn’t felt it, but the instant the strange wind dropped, she felt as if she’d drunk boiling lye. She rubbed her neck, not that it did any good. God, if only I could grab the inside of my neck…
She noticed that Imogene was doing the same. Cordelia and her mother had been knocked flat by the wind—if it had been a wind—and Willard was crawling toward them.
“I guess it worked,” Richard said.
Hester rasped out a laugh, which only hurt worse. Yes. It had worked. She’d felt it work. She’d felt the wind lashing out, stripping away magic in great ragged sheets and sending it flying like shingles in a hurricane.
Willard got Cordelia to her feet. Evangeline was still lying crumpled in the grass, but not like a corpse. Hester could see her ribs moving as she breathed.
And what are we supposed to do with her now? Maybe Imogene was right, maybe we should kill her and dump her down a well—
The geese screamed. Richard spun around, dragging Hester with him, and she had a confused impression of the flock scattering, feathers erupting as they fled, not fighting but shrieking in absolute terror as they went.
Then she saw it.
Him.
Falada.
No longer a horse at all, but something else. He still glowed the same too-bright white, and his eyes were still green, but there were too many eyes and his legs had too many joints and his rib cage had cracked apart and the rib bones jutted up like teeth set in a jaw and then a tongue licked across them, rubbing lovingly across the points.
Richard laughed, the short, disbelieving laugh of a man witnessing the impossible.
Falada laughed back.
Evangeline sat up.
The familiar ran toward them. His leg joints rippled like a centipede and if Hester had had any time to think, she would have been sick, but it was all happening so fast. Now Falada was becoming strangely transparent, his skin turning to milky glass, and she could see the shadows of viscera inside, pulsing.
Evangeline thrust her arm out in front of her, the same gesture she had made at Hester. Falada did not miss a step. “NO!” the former sorcerer shouted. “Go back! I command you! I banish you! I—”
Bones crunched as Falada struck her. Hester twitched in Richard’s grip. The sound was so loud and so wet and it kept happening because Falada did not stop. He was dancing on top of the dead woman now, his hooves—if they were still hooves—hammering her into the dirt, as if determined not just to kill her but to bury her forever.
At last, he stopped. The dawn light streamed through him, casting strange, bobbing shadows on the grass. He might have been a stained-glass-window monster, the sort that lay brooding and defeated under the sandals of a saint.
The familiar swung from side to side, perhaps looking for his next target. Cordelia hung limply between Willard and Alice. Imogene had, perhaps wisely, gone flat against the ground.
Sickly green eyes locked on Richard and Hester.
There was no fear left in her. The wind had driven it all away. All she felt was a brief pang of regret that she had been such a fool about Richard. She could have spent every night of the last decade in his arms, and instead she’d been afraid of what? That he would stop loving her when she grew old?
Doesn’t seem like either of us will get the chance now, does it?
Richard pushed her back, trying to interpose his body between her and Falada. A brave, generous, utterly futile move. She suspected that he knew it as well as she did.
Falada stamped one many-jointed leg. She could see the grass rippling through it, only slightly distorted.
