Page 71 of Girl, Entangled

Long shots rarely hit their targets, but when they did, they made the greatest goals.

She’d violated the dead once this week.

What was once more?

Ella reached down and got both hands around one of the 20-pound plates. It was all she could lift with her arms gone to water, and she didn’t throw it at him.

She summoned her best pitching stance and hurled it violently at the corpse of Thomas Greaves.

It took the skeleton across the ribs and the wire gave and the whole articulated frame came off the wall in a clattering rush, the great yoke of the shoulders folding, the long bones swinging loose and coming down in a heap on the rubber matting.

A noise emerged from Varro’s throat, although it was not a word. It was perhaps the closest thing to a scream his voicebox could muster, but despite its incoherence, Ella identified it as the overflowing of fury.

He came across the room at the fallen bones, and Ella let her knees buckle, let her head loll, let him see a half-dead woman swaying on her feet with nothing left.

He bought it because there was no guile in him to know guile when he saw it.

Varro hurtled in her direction without grace, three hundred and more pounds of him committed to the floor and the heap of his teacher, and Ella came up off her fake stagger, hauled another plate off the pile and swung it into the back of his skull with everything her ruined arms could find.

His head snapped forward. His feet kept going. His balance didn’t.

And the open iron mouth of the thing he’d built was waiting exactly where his momentum carried him.

The iron maiden was bolted to nothing. It stood on its own iron base and it had never been meant to take the weight of a charging giant, and Varro went into it with his arms flung out and the whole structure went over backward. For a moment the two of them moved as one mass, the man and the cabinet, tipping past the point of return, and then it crashed down onto the flagstones with a noise that Ella felt come up through her ankles.

One of the hinged doors swung shut as it fell.

It came down across him before he could clear it; the inner face with its rows of blackened points, and it met the back of his shoulder and the side of his thigh where they’d landed under it.

Not the killing closure the thing had been built for, not a body sealed between two sets of teeth, only the edge of it catching the edge of him as gravity took it.

But the spikes were iron and judging by the sudden eruption of blood, they penetrated flesh without issue. Varro’s whole frame convulsed under the weight of the door, and another inhuman sound tore from the executioner’s throat.

The door rebounded off him and swung open again on its hinge, and Ella saw the dark wet points lift away from him slick to the root.

He was pinned. The base of the cabinet had come down across his legs and the bulk of the iron lay over him, and he heaved at it with both arms, and for a sick second she thought he might simply lift it off himself and stand.

The whole structure rose an inch. Then his arm gave where the spikes had found it, and it dropped back, and he screamed soundlessly into the concrete.

Ella stood over him with the weight plate still hanging from one hand, her chest going like a bellows, and she did not come any closer.

The basement door fell from its frame. Bodies emerged at the top of the staircase.

And Simon Varro lay bleeding but alive, bested by a contraption from hundreds of years ago.

Ella collapsed onto her back and breathed through the pain in her chest, neck, arms, legs, jaw.

Wounds would heal. She would live another day.

Game over.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The bones of Thomas Greaves lay scattered across the rubber matting, and Ella stood among the wreckage of it all and tried to be sure the woman had been real.

The mind did things under poison. She knew that better than most. It built faces out of shadow and put voices into empty rooms, and Ella half wanted to file the whole thing under hallucination and be spared the burden of it.

A blonde woman in the corner of a basement. A door in a wall that no longer looked like a door. It would have been easier to have dreamed her.