1.14 Eldritch Flesh

The wagon was torn to pieces and spread across the grass like a butchered beast of canvas and tack. The actual butchered beast—a chestnut colt with a frozen look of equine terror on its foamstained mouth—lay a dozen paces off, strewn over a half-dozen more as though he had been dragged through a thresher. Eager insects studded his glistening entrails.

No human or humanoid corpses, not here. But Seth couldn’t imagine a person could leave this much blood behind and expect to survive. Four people couldn’t. The wagon’s peeled-out boards were sodden with it.

Seth had done, in his estimation, a splendid job at not throwing up. He figured that was the universe’s way of giving him an encouraging nudge closer to Anna, who was running her gloved palm along the wagon’s smashed flank.

Her physicality had changed, along with her head. The solid, assured steps of Annalise the Verdugo morphed into a fluid, feline slinking. Her shoulders and neck drooping forward into a predatory slouch. Even with the same tight-packed muscle and the same paperwhite, glyph-encrusted skin, the transformation was disconcertingly thorough.

“So,” Seth said. “New hair.”

Anna grunted.

“New head, even.”

Anna grunted again.

He observed her drop into a crouch, close to the ground, and sniff the earth. “Are you—you’re Annalise, right? Like the same person, still?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay. So is it like a hivemind, or—”

“Stop talking.”

“What?”

Her ink-black eyes glared over her hunched shoulder. “Stop talking, il Gutierre. You’re fucking my focus.”

“Ah. Sorry.” He tried to lean nonchalantly by a wedged-out wagon wheel. Demetrius stood nearby, giving him a skeptical expression. He shifted from foot to foot. “Is there anything I can—”

Anna practically snarled it: “Stop. Talking.”

Seth’s mouth snapped shut.

With a look of unkind satisfaction, Anna turned from him and knelt close to the ground. A flitting shadow across the blood-fed grass resolved into a little brown bird—the wood thrush from the carriage cage. It landed on her shoulder. She absently reached a finger out and brushed the top of its head. “It’s Sik-Ersetim,” she said. “Trail should be crushed grass, blood, and rusty fur. Look for a spring or a karst field. Piled underbrush. She’ll try to disguise the cave entrance.”

The bird nudged its head against her finger. Its marble eye fixed on Seth’s.

“Hey, Tiago,” he said.

The Tiago-possessed thrush fluttered its wing in an avian approximation of a wave, then took to the air once again. Anna stood and climbed back onto Demetrius. She leaned forward and her deep-cut frown softened as she scratched his pale mane. Then she refocused on Seth, and it slashed itself back on. “Up.”

Seth hastened onto Demetrius’ back. “We following that thrush?”

She didn’t reply—just sent Demetrius galloping again as soon as he’d settled. At least he knew the trick by now and managed to grab hold of her midsection before the horse’s sudden jerking acceleration sent him sprawling.

Anna kept her eyes to the sky, tracing her son’s flight. In the face of her stony silence, Seth watched the waving rush of the plain pass them by and tried to spot the path that Tiago was leading them on from his high eye. When that bored him, he found his attention, resentful as he was, straying back to the statuesque woman he was sharing a horse with.

Regardless of the head atop it, Annalise’s body was… distracting. The muscles in her shoulders and arms and stomach moved in elegant concert to guide her horse. Her butt and her thighs flexed as she posted in the saddle. He clung on and wondered if, under her tunic, she had a six-pack.

Bad time to be having these thoughts, Seth. It wasn’t the fox talking, but his own inner voice was just as unwelcome and correct as that furry bastard always was.

They were tracking an eldritch beast, and Annalise had temporarily replaced herself with some kind of seraph-hunting asshole, and he didn’t want to want any of this. But there was nothing to hold on to atop this damn horse but her.

He sought distraction. “So Sik-Ersetim is a species of seraph?”

“It’s her name. I’ve killed her before.”

“They come back?”

“Always,” she said. “Knew it was her as soon as I heard she’d taken a family. That’s what she does.”

The Tiago-bird called out in a high chipping cry, dipping downward and climbing again. Seth squinted past Anna’s pale shoulder and saw the divot in the earth—a low limestone cliff pushing up from the tall grass, with a thicket of brush and branches near its base. Caught on a gnarled branch, fluttering like a flag, was a scrap of fabric with cattails printed on it and a splotch of blood on its corner.

Anna scowled at this accidental banner, brought Demetrius to a halt, and slid from his back with the creak of leather. She retrieved the spear from its sconce on his side. Slowly, carefully, she approached the thicket. After a moment of heart-hammering hesitation, Seth followed.

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Anna nudged the spear’s leaf blade tip into the brush; it shifted a patch of dry grass and punched through. She pulled back and crouched to the hole she’d opened in the earth.

“Hidden entrance.” She pulled aside the plant matter and tossed the largest branches away. The narrow crease grew to a crack in the ground large enough to swallow a horse, limned with damp limestone and sloping precariously downward. The spear darted into the cave and tapped rock. “Right,” Anna said, and stood. “In you go.”