Page 107 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

But how useless it was to speak in the face of Molly’s coolly mocking eyes. Cleo was rich. Powerful by a normal person’s standards. And she was too scared to even tell Percy the whole truth. Who could know better than she did what lay in store for her, or for Percy, if he tried to help?

Molly seemed to read his thoughts. Her head tilted, like she was observing the black ball of guilt and shame forming in his stomach. “You have so much faith in him, don’t you?”

He lifted his head to meet her gaze. “I do.”

“It hasn’t got you far. To a graveyard in Paris. While he bleeds and dies, maybe metres away.” She leaned forward, eyes keen for his reaction. “How does that feel?”

“Why are you doing this? You want the sheath? I’ll give it to you. Percy doesn’t need to be involved. It’s coming, it’s on the way, and I’ll hand it over, no questions asked, so long as you givehim back alive. He’s done you no wrong, and you must…” How Joe hated to admit it, to tap into those memories, but he felt he had little choice. “If you remember that Cleo loved him, then you must remember him. He’s good, and he’s kind, and he’s strong, and he doesn’t deserve this.”

Lifting her chin, she looked down her nose at him. “Deserve what? What is it you think I’m going to do to him?”

Perplexed, trying to figure out just exactly how mad she was, he shouted, “To die! Here, tonight, alone in this cemetery. To be taken away from me. A man who loves him. Deeply and forever. He doesn’t deserve that, any more than I do!”

“Oh, but Joe, Percy won’t remember a thing afterwards. You needn’t worry about that. He won’t remember the pain, or his death, or you. Not really. It will be a memory of a memory of a memory, and nothing more. Until one day, he’ll wonder, did any of this really happen? Were you ever real? Or were you just a daydream?”

“What?” The word came weak, eking out of his gut, his brain joining the dots before his mind would allow him to accept the horror of Percy’s fate.

“He won’t die tonight,” Molly went on. “Not forever. Just for a short, difficult time, much like I did. Only not as painful as when I did. And then I’ll fix him. Because I do remember.” Her voice was silken as that of any lover, silken as his own was so many long mornings, by Percy’s side, his arms around him, pouring out a thousand heartfelt promises of unending love and devotion. “I remember him. I remember his body. I remember his smile. I remember that Cleo wasn’t his one, any more than he was hers. But you are. You’re the one for him. His great love in this life that I’m choosing to cut short. Or, youwere…”

Molly slid down from the grave, and Joe, despite himself, took a step back. She clicked Cleo’s long fingers, and her two zombie off-siders appeared out of the darkness.

“But now he’s mine. And when I reunite the sheath and the spear, when I tear this world of yours apart, he’ll still be mine. When I’ve dismantled your governments, your monarchies, your entire society, and rebuilt it all by myself, he’ll be by my side. And you’ll be gone. You, and all those like you.” Molly ran her eyes over Joe’s black cloth, from his shoes all the way up to the collar at his throat, that for the first time in his life felt like it was choking him, as he remembered he was a walking, talking vision of the Church. A symbol of the beliefs and people that had set Molly’s body on fire, strangled her, tortured her, taken her head and set it on a plaque in a pub for four hundred years.

Her voice seethed over her lips with a hatred she’d kept under wraps until that very moment. “Tell me, how does thatfeel, priest?”

Tareq and Waleed closed in on either side of Joe, and even as his subconscious instincts prepared his muscles to fight, the shocked words ripped out of him, “Wait, you thinkI’mthe morally questionable half of this relationship?”

Waleed’s strong fist, recently reattached to his body, but thoroughly functional again, swung at Joe’s stomach at speed, to be blocked by his strong wrist. “I killed one guy! One! Deliberately. But he left me with no other choice.”

Tareq looped an arm around to take Joe’s neck. Joe ducked, ramming an elbow beneath his ribs, eliciting not even a breath of pain. Waleed’s arms slammed down on his shoulders from behind. He thrust his wrists across each other like a cross, slammed Waleed’s full weight against his back as he bent, and threw him over his head to the concrete.

Joe backed up, Tareq in fast pursuit.

What would Percy do?

He’d aim to kill and not think twice about it.

And that was the only way Joe was going to get to him in time.

Standard zombie protocol.

In one smooth motion, he flipped the blade, raised it high, and rammed it down. With a flash, it smashed straight through Tareq’s right eye. His head slammed back, his body followed, and he landed on the sharp corner of a grave, his shattered brains spilling out onto the ground with a squelching smack.

All the force of Waleed’s powerful form came at him, but he still had the paring knife in his arm holster. It took but the simplest twitch of Joe’s wrist to grab the thing, twist it, and drive it sideways straight through Waleed’s ear. He slowed, stumbled, then fell flat at Joe’s feet.

Molly’s voice drifted across the silent path. “I didn’t expect that from you?—”

Another knife came from his pocket and missed her by an inch. It was his last, and he ran for it, but by the time he had his hand on it, she’d slipped behind an enormous gravestone. He was quick in pursuit, but the graves were thick and many, and the dark hid her from his sight.

She showed little fear beyond a basic self-preservation instinct when she called out, seemingly from where he’d just been, “They won’t be happy now.”

They?

Blood running like ice in his veins, Joe retraced his steps towards her voice, knife at the ready, hoping to take her out, but already aware of what horror he was likely to find instead.

A sliver of moonlight sparkled on the chunks of brain that lined the pavement—glinted and shivered, as the pieces twitched, trembled, vibrated in place, then flipped, flopped, and made their way slowly but as one mass towards the half-empty cavity of Tareq’s skull.

“No,” Joe whispered. “No.” Then he spun around, searching fruitlessly for Molly, and yelled, “This isn’t a fair fight!”

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