Page 60 of The Song Rising

I adjusted my winter hood so only my eyes were uncovered. “Then let’s stretch our legs.”

Although Stoke-on-Trent was quiet in the small hours, it put me on edge. Even a notorious outlaw could be anonymous in the capital of all Scion, but not in settlements like these. It reminded me of Arthyen, the village where I had first met Nick. Its residents had been on a permanent quest to see unnaturalness in their neighbors.

We stole through the streets, passing darkened shops, small transmission screens, and houses with the occasional lit window. Maria went ahead to scout for cameras and guide us out of their way. I only managed to relax a little when the streetlamps were far behind us and we were out in the countryside. It wasn’t long before we crossed the regional boundary, which was marked by a billboard readingWELCOME TO THE NORTH WEST.

For a while, we risked the road, which had been recently cleared of snow. Ruined churches dotted our way. Tom found a sturdy branch to use as a staff. To distract myself from the blistering wind, I started counting stars. The sky was clearer here, and the stars burned far brighter than they did in London, where the blue haze of the streetlamps watered down their light. As I picked apart the broken necklaces of diamond, trying to find the constellations, I wondered why the Rephaim had taken the stars’ names as their own. I wondered why he had chosenArcturus.

After a truck gunned past us and blared its horn, we ducked under a barbed-wire fence into the fields, where snowdrifts were piled like whipped cream. More of it was falling, catching in my lashes. We had the tracker, but it was so disorienting, with the black sky above us and white as far as the eye could see below, that we finally risked switching on our flashlights. The world around us was drained of color, flickering with snowflakes.

“I can’t wait to advertise the Mime Order to the n-northerners. ‘Join Paige Mahoney for unexpected rambles through snow and shit,’” Maria bit out through chattering teeth.

I chased white powder from the tracker again. “Nobody s-said the revolution would be glamorous.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I like to think that in the great uprisings of history, they had beautiful d-dresses and decadence to go with the misery.”

Tom managed a chuckle.

“If my Scion History class on the French had it right,” I said, through numb lips, “the dresses and decadence were p-part of what caused those uprisings.”

“Stop spoiling my fun.”

We passed a row of pylons, steel goliaths in the frozen sea. The power lines above us were so laden with ice that some of them almost touched the ground. I reached into my jacket, where I had stashed some of the precious heat packs Nick had given me, and handed them out to the others. When I cracked one, warmth bled into my torso.

The conditions had one advantage: they stopped me thinking about anything but keeping warm. They stopped me thinking about Warden, about whether I had made the right choice in telling him that it was over. Thoughts like those would lead me down a darker path than the one I walked on now. Instead, I envisioned a glorious bonfire and promised it would be waiting for me at the end of every field we crossed, over every wall and fence we encountered. By the time the sun climbed over the horizon, turning the sky a moody red, my muscles were on fire, I could no longer feel my toes, and I was so caked in snow that the black of my coat and trousers had been engulfed by white.

The first we saw of the enclave was a lodging-house with a thatched roof, so covered in snow that it looked like an ornament for a cake. I could just see the clusters of white flowers on its windowsills.

“There,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken in hours. “Black hellebore.”

Maria squinted. “Where?”

Eliza pulled down her scarf. “You know black hellebore is white, don’t you?”

“Of course. N-nothing makes sense.” Maria stomped ahead. “These people had better have hot chocolate.”

We walked faster through the last stretch of field, coaxing our legs into carrying us just a little farther. It must have been too early for anyone to have cleared the snow from the village: the few parked cars were buried, and there was no evidence of roads or paths beneath it.

Something pricked at my sixth sense, stopping me in my tracks as Eliza circled around to the front of the lodging-house. I had the sudden notion that I had been somewhere like this before, though I was certain I had never set foot in the North West. There were no spirits. Not one. A warning beat in the pit of my stomach:stay away, stay away.

That was when Eliza let out a blood-stewing scream. It jolted adrenaline through my veins, giving me the strength to pull my knife from my boot and run over with Maria. We found Eliza beside a fence, one hand clamped over her mouth. The snow before her was marbled with crimson.

A bird croaked at us and fluttered off the wreckage of a human being. The ribcage was torn open, bone laid bare beneath drapes of flesh, and most of the left arm was missing, but the face, the face of a woman—untouched. Dark hair was strewn across the snow.

Shock made my ears ring. Human remains littered the village. The victims had been decapitated, dismembered, thrown, and mauled in the rage of an eternal hunger. A shroud of snow glistened over the bodies. A head had been tossed into another garden of hellebore, bruising the white blooms with blood. The weather had kept flies at bay, but they must have been lying here for a day, at least.

“What did this?” Maria muttered.

“Emim.” I turned my back on the slaughter.

“Let’s bury them.” Tom swallowed. “Poor bastards.”

“We don’t have time toburythem, Tom,” Eliza said, her voice cracking. “It could come back.”

Tom traded a look with Maria, whose pistol was in her hands. It wouldn’t help her. They might have learned a little about the Emim fromThe Rephaite Revelation, and now they knew what they did to flesh, but they had no idea what it was like to be in their presence.

My boots sank to the ankle as I followed my instinct to the edge of another field. When I found the source of my unrest, it took all my nerve not to run at once. I dug through the snow with gloved fingers, revealing a perfect circle of ice—too perfect to be naturally occurring.

This was where the monster had come through. The Ranthen knew how to close the doorways to the other side, but it was an art they had never shared with their human associates.

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