1.34. Seraph Cult

The Verdugo

“I’m not cute,” Anna snarled.

“Yes you are,” Seth said.

“You may be hiding from the rest of me, thief, but I still have my teeth up here.”

“See, now that I know you won’t actually hurt me, the threats are cute. We’re bantering.”

“We’re not fucking bantering. You’ve gotten far too comfortable with me.”

“Yep.” Seth dug into his satchel and pulled a pair of dented binoculars out. A loaner from one of the pillowbrains. “You told me not to be scared of you. And I trust you.”

Anna lapsed into silence while she tried to get pissed off at that statement.

“And your whiskers are cute, too, by the way,” Seth added.

“This is never happening, do you understand? Never. Annalise is too cowardly and Lisa is too horny. But I’m here and I’m telling you for all of me that you need to give up.”

Seth did not reply. The birdsong was fading around them as the light waned.

“You are thinking with your cock and not your head,” Anna said. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re asking for, and I refuse to be responsible for the rest of your unlife. You think you want me because you’re an overgrown teenager with dumb, raging hormones. And if I give you what you think you want, and you realize the sun does not rise with my smile and my cunt doesn’t grant three wishes when you rub it, I’ll watch you lose all this pent-up lust for me, and it’ll turn into resentment and hatred as you realize your stupid, irreversible mistake. And I know how it’ll be all your damn fool fault, but the naïve idiot rest of me will be fucking miserable with the guilt of it. So I have to be the one with the big girl pants and tell you it is not happening, and if it’s the reason you’re staying, you can climb down this tree right now and fuck off back to civilization.”

Seth gave this tirade an absent “Mmhmm,” from behind the binoculars.

“Do you have anything to say to that?”

“Nope.”

“You told me if I said to, you’d give up,” she said.

“I told Annalise that, and I stand by it. Your other heads I’m taking with a grain of salt.”

“So you’re just going to ignore me? That’s your strategy?”

“Not ignoring you,” he said. “I’m listening. You’re scared.”

“Scared?”

“You’re scared that I’m treating this like a fling when you want something bigger out of it,” he said. “And I can’t make you un-scared by talking. Not while you’re Anna, anyway.”

“Fuck off, thief. I’m scared? I obliterated a seraph in its cave in front of you while you cried and shit your pants, and I’m scared. You don’t know shit about me. My other heads are too fucking nice—”

“Shhh.”

“Don’t you fucking shush me—”

Seth was full of hushed urgency and glued to his binoculars. “I see something.”

Her tuft-tipped ears quivered. “What?”

“Group of kindred with corpselamps.” He frowned. “Thought we were looking for a seraph. What are these guys doing here?”

“Show me,” Anna said. Seth held the binoculars to her eyes. She peered through and blinked them away. “Can’t turn my neck, thief. Hold me straight.”

“I’m trying.” Seth changed his grip on her. His hand slid below and held her there, like a penny-dreadful actor soliloquizing at a skull.

“Fuck’s sake,” she ground out, through the mouth he was holding partway closed.

“Don’t jostle. It’s a long way down.” His thumb laid along the line of her jaw, sinking into her cheek and pooching her lips forward. Thank St. Silas that her jugular was on her body down below so he couldn’t feel her pulse pick up. Of course it did. That’s what happens when someone has their hand near your neck.

It wasn’t oakmoss, the smell on his hands. Tobacco leaf, maybe. Focus.

Four men whose dark clothes blended with the colors of the gathering evening and oncoming autumn. They were trying to look hard for one another, to seem unbothered by the strange and dire business that had drawn them here. The most successful was in front, big and bald and bearded, a hooded lantern held in his hairy-backed hand. Amber light coming out of that, not the green of a corpselamp that a seraph might siphon; he knew what he was coming here to meet. The subtle hitch in his stride told her here was a veteran of violence, and she wondered from where. She could scarcely imagine a fellow baptized in the carnage of the Winter War could return and worship the butcher-birds.

“Seraph cult,” she said. “Coming to meet their master.”

He drew a sharp inhale. “Saints, really?”

“What else’d they be? This is what Tiago and I pieced together in Sondam. What that scarecrow got mixed up in. How’d you think we knew where to look?”

“I never… I guess I knew they existed, I thought they were out on the edges of the world. Like in Sektorbrav, or…”

She sneered at his hesitation. “Or Orwiny?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re here, too. More and more. Nihilists, madmen, worshippers of some Antisaint or another. These fuckers, though.” She shook her head, and then remembered her body was on the forest floor, shaking its severed neck. “Turning on your own people for a gray feather is fucking low-rent. Find the seraph. Should be coming in from the southwest, along that switchback.”

Seth returned her to his lap and peered back through the binoculars. A probing minute and then his body stiffened. “Saints preserve. There it is.”

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“Show,” she commanded, and she was in the air again, staring down the binoculars at a shambolic thing that looked halfway direwolf and halfway vulture, with a scabby, bulbous head perched on a body so cruelly striated with animal muscle it looked as though it were a wound winch, a quivering tensile knot of quadrupedal muscle that’d snap and whirl apart if it weren’t lashed to bones the size of staves.

“That thing looks more like a big dumb beast than a deity,” Seth said.

Anna blew a lock of silver hair out of the way. “Yokels are dumber.”

“But if this guy was part of it, what made him turn unlit? Is there something more going on, maybe?”

“Maybe. I don’t care. Fanatics don’t interest me other than they’ve got enough soul for the sword.”

“We gonna try taking one alive? Make him talk?”

“Stop acting like you know what you’re doing, il Gutierre,” she said. “There’s four of them plus a seraph, and three of us. Focus on coming out of this, and if one of them lives long enough to spout his horseshit, it’s a pleasant bonus before we lop his head off. Understand?”

He slow-blinked. His eyelashes were long, for a man. Long and dark. “You want me in this?”

“The fuck do you think? You said you’d live the life, this is the life. I need hands.”

“Okay. But promise—”

“Not promising anything.”

“Stop,” he hissed, and to her surprise, she did. “Promise you’ll use me how I should be.”

“And how’s that?”