Page 66 of All Her Ghosts

“You are not hearing me. I am theonlyauthority here. I am theonlything you should be worried about. Bring the helicopter down.”

The megaphone spits static. The bird hangs in the air, dangling like a lost Christmas ornament from the sky. And every second they wait is another grain of sand in the hourglass, Cain inching closer and closer to death.

Because of them.

Because of me.

Because of what they did togetme.

“Miss Green,”the pilot says at last.“We understand there areextenuating circumstances at play here. Surrender now and your cooperation will be taken into consideration. You have three seconds to comply before we will be forced to fire. Three. Two—”

I tried.

Body crumpling, I surge up and out. The man in the open door has enough time to jerk a leg back in, “What the h—” he starts before my fingers close bone-deep in his body, gripping his soul around the scruff. I drag him halfway out. In these close quarters, I grab the pilot for good measure. Rage flows out of me, a frozen mist boiling, creeping up its iron guts, icing over the windscreen. Grinding my teeth, I force my hands open just a little—don’t squeeze, don’t hurt, even if it’swhat they deserve.

But every second the rage threatens to consume me. Bigger than I am, older than the oceans, it’s so difficult to remember to be gentle in the face of it, to besmallandscared, to be human and to remember what human means. My fingers twitch, a light pressure around their little candle flames, flickering so warm between my frozen fingers, a poor mockery of Bas’s bonfire blaze.

My bone and whole fingers, a broken memory of the girl I used to be.

The girl I still am, in love and in pain, with a shining harvest god sobbing over his father’s dying body in the wreckage of my mother’s RV.

Breathing slowly, an unsteady bubble of calm, I give the souls in my cupped palms a little tug. Not enough to break the ties that hold them to their flesh, just strain them a little, red threads of fate stretching taut, until they come face to snarling face with me—just so they canhear mebecause apparently, we’re having troublecommunicating.

Staring them straight in their terrified souls, biting every word, I reiterate, “Bring the helicopter down.Now.”

Funny how they remember their badge but lose pieces of their faces.

Funnier—even misremembering their mouths, the exact contour of their noses—I can see my monstrous reflection in their frightened eyes.

I don’t recognize myself. Or maybe, I just don’t like the thing I see, truer and older than my human self.

Swallowing hard, I push the anger down. I struggle to hold on to the immediacy of time, the terror of a teenage girl-shaped thing. I let the pilot go and ease his frantic head back inside his meat, but I keep my grip on the scruff of the second man.

My hand pressed tight over his mouth, my lips to his ear, I whisper, “Do you understand what I am now? Do you understand what your people did?”

And god, but it would be so easy to snuff out his light. It jumps and gutters against my fingers; wouldn’t take more than a stray thought to smother it.

Doesn’t he deserve it? Even now, faced with my reality, he doesn’t understand. He bares his teeth in my face, straightens his shoulders to stare down death with dignity andhow dare he?

How dare he after what hetook from me?

Hail batters the helicopter rotors. Wind howls, flinging it aside. Carefully, gentle as a child with an ant’s nest and a magnifying glass, I tug the man out of his skin again, inch by excruciating inch. Ice clouds his eyes. Snowflakes settle on his lashes. My hand aches to close, to crush, but I hold it so extremely still—hold him so obviously hostage, spine arched backward and body rigid. The rifle slips from his empty fingers, sliding across the helicopter floor and out, shattering on the ground below. The rotors roar so loud, struggling in the frost, I don’thear it hit. I can’t hear anything but the drone of the motor and the screaming wound in my chest—

Home, home, home.

Punching buttons and levers, the pilot brings the helicopter down.

The second the rotors slow, I shove the second soul away from me, cast it into the wind. Spinning, I grip the pilot by the spine before he can leave his chair.

“Not you,” I snarl. “We need you. Sit.”

Forcing him back into his seat, I pause just a second to make sure he’ll listen before I snap back into my body. Every inch of me aches; I ignore it. Broken fingernails scrabbling in the dirt, I drag myself to the RV door, leaning heavy in the frame. God, I can’t look. Can’t breathe. The stench of blood hangs so thick in the air it turns my stomach, thick and visceral andwrong. Cain’s eyes flicker, barely seeing me, his face so terribly pale.

Catching the recognition in his babynapper’s face, Bas turns, tear tracks steaming on his cheeks. He meets my gaze and his eyes are blinding—black as an empty, shattered sky and yet, so painfully bright, seeping divine gold. His hands on the blood-soaked hoodie held tight to Cain’s side glow red as banked coals and I know—

He is the only thing holding Cain together now. He is death’s other half, fighting his own nature, trying so hard to stave off the harvest.

Swallowing, I croak, “I got us a ride.”