Page 78 of The Scarlet Ball

I roared, wrenching myself free from her grasp before she could depress the plunger. Even with a fraction of the dose the syringe contained, it surged into my veins like a pack of dogs on fire, and I staggered back, landing hard on my rear as Mrs. Howard shuffled backward on her knees with a marked lack of grace and stood again.

“My God, will I enjoy being as strong as you are,” she said mostly to herself, and I ripped the syringe out, throwing it at her. I was already weakening, the syringe falling on the ground beneath us, bouncing off of Mielle’s shoulder where she lay unmoving.

“You sick old bitch, do you think—?” My words were already slowing, and it was easy for Mrs. Howard to cut through them crisply.

“I don’t think, you little whore, I know. Or rather, I will know what it is to step into your skin and leave mine behind. I will leave behind the dross and step forward into the light.”

“Are you reading for Lady Macbeth? Those are some good lines.” My words were slurring so badly that she could pretend she didn’t hear me, and she returned to the cauldron, now giving off a noxious scent of burned blood and hair.

She didn’t even have the decency to wince when she opened her skin. She held some tool designed to puncture rather than cut, and in a moment, she bled from the center of her forehead at her hairline, the place before her ears, the place behind the point of her jaw, and the base of her throat.

She’ll have to wear those thick jeweled collars, I thought dazedly, and then I remembered, no, she wouldn’t. My throat wasn’t scarred at all.

“I call the road so that I may walk, I call the road so that I may run, and when I come to the place that is my home—”

I was sinking. I could feel every beat of my heart, every thread of my dress, and I was so tired. The only reason I didn’t close my eyes was because it would please her, and if all I had left was denying her something, anything, I would do it.

She kept chanting, the road, the road, the fucking road, and the word deny snagged in my brain like a fishhook. She might win, but she sure as hell didn’t get to do it clean, and I reached for the white-handled knife still buried in my hand.

It might have been barbed for how it felt coming out, and it was as heavy as an anvil in my right hand. I glanced up at Mrs. Howard, still chanting, and I brought the blade up to my face, stroked it along my cheek once, then twice.

I’m no whipping girl. Of course I was going for the stitches, but my hand wavered like a drunk seagull in flight. I might have gotten a few stitches free, but then the knife skidded, sliding down my cheek. The pain was so sharp it burned straight through whatever she’d dosed me with. I opened my mouth in a silent cry, and then, inspired, I dropped the knife and reached up with my good hand. It took me a few tries but I managed to grip the loose peeling flap of skin with my fingertips. It was slippery with blood, and even dazed as I was, I wanted to be sick for how it felt, digging through the slick blood and the nerves that had grown there since the last time the Howards’ face had come off.

I must have made some sound, because Mrs. Howard suddenly stopped chanting, her head snapping over to me.

“What in the name of the Lord are you doing?”

Clever people don’t ask questions to which the answers are obvious, I thought with a kind of gremlin delight, and I grabbed and pulled.

It was a blinding and unthinking pain. My mouth filled with sour spit. I actually gagged, and the only way I got through it was by doing it quickly, a fast jerk like a dog pulling the skin off of a rat. It was the worst thing I had ever felt, and despite it, I half screamed with laughter as Mrs. Howard froze, staring at me with her mouth open.

I tore through the stitches that were there after all, and I split the skin in a long jagged diagonal that swept under my eye and over the bridge of my nose. It came apart from my lips with a ripping agony that left blood in my mouth, and then I held up that patch of skin as if it were a trophy.

“There,” I said, bubbling over with triumph and horror. “You may have that back, and I shall send you the rest as soon as I get around to it.”

I flung the skin at her feet, and she stepped back in disgust, her lip curling as if she had a face of her own to be revealed under the one that she showed to the world. In the powerful light, she looked younger suddenly, as if her certainty was something that she had built for herself brick by brick and now it was being torn down. Well, good. More things should break.

The burst of fury spurred me to my feet and I staggered toward the door. I felt as if I had boiled coffee and drunk it like water. A crude raw strength ran through my veins and I had no idea how long it would last, but I would use it while I could. I smiled with my real face and nothing had ever felt better.

I got my hand on the door and my hand burned when I touched the handle. Warded, naturally, and I realized what she must have been doing all those long days at the club. Away from her common cares, closeted with the books she and her friends had been hoarding for decades. What a scholar she was.

The wood in front of me was hot to the touch; from beyond it came a great roar from a throat that was no longer shaped like a man’s. Perhaps he thought she was in some kind of danger, perhaps it was only that he smelled her blood, but it had made him desperate. It had reminded him he was starving.

“Don’t,” she shouted, afraid at last, and that was all it took for me to throw open the door.

On the other side, Mr. Howard still wore his human form, and that was how they did it, wasn’t it? That was how they got you to open the door, to trust them, to spend decades with them. They fought for you, they killed for you, and for a second, I was certain that Mr. Howard was going to kill me. I wasn’t his granddaughter, standing there with her face half ripped off. I was food, and right now, I wasn’t even food that could fight.

Then he knocked me aside, and I remembered that there was someone he wanted more than me. There was someone he had wanted for a lifetime, and now she stood bleeding before him.

He closed his hand over Mrs. Howard’s wrist, and wisps of smoke drifted up from where he held her. Her face turned dead white, and she wavered on her feet before he got his other hand around her waist to steady her. The stink of burning fabric filled the air, and underneath it, immediately, something sweet and greasy as well. She was burning, I realized, and she looked straight into her husband’s eyes, even now refusing to admit that she had lost her dominion over him.

Mr. Howard’s human shape wavered, shivered, and then burned away entire as the fire regained dominance. He had been human for decades, but he was done with that now. He clasped his wife closer.

At the last minute, before her hair burst into flame, before the conflagration took her down to blackened bone, I saw the horror on her face, not at the fire but at the fact that she had lost, and something in me broke like the string holding up a puppet. All the strength went out of my legs, and I dropped to the ground like a doll thrown carelessly away.

No. No. This is no time for faints and vapors. Get up, get out.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the Howards, locked so tight together that you could not tell where one began and the other ended. The heat was almost brutally contained, as if Mr. Howard had none to spare for anyone but his wife. She was dead, but still she burned, and at the white-hot center of the blaze, she was changing, passing from flesh to meat to charcoal. All of the ambition, all of the schemes and cruelty and good works and bad ones, it was all gone, and in a moment, he would see what was left and lose his goddamn mind.