Page 67 of The Library at Hellebore

“And a lot of Rowan is in me.”

“Always liked a good threesome.”

I didn’t laugh, although Adam did in wheezing gusts, each exhalation causing more of him to flake away. Embers floated up through the late light prisming through the stained glass, and the air glittered gold where it wasn’t a blood-tinged mirage of reflected saints.

“I can’t take you apart for good because your daddy’s the fucking devil. Gods know I’ve tried before. Do you remember when I blew up your hand?”

“Mhm. It’s why Gracelynn died.”

I didn’t flinch. I’m proud of that, will die proud of my poker face then.

“You heal. You keep healing. So long as you’re alive, you’re going to heal from whatever I do to you.” I wafted my cigarette over where the last of his intestines drooled from his belly, his abdomen mostly hollow now. His spine winked from what was left.

“Entirely.” And this he said in his own voice, thank every god named by a desperate soul. I don’t know what I’d have done otherwise.

“But deathworkers,” I said. “They’re something else.”

“Oh, Li, youdidn’t.”

“You probably know about rabies and why you should avoid touching woodland animals even if they seem harmless. If you get bitten by a rabid squirrel, you can, of course, take a vaccine and be assured that it has a one hundred percent success rate. But you have to take it within ten days. You have to be pumped full of it before the symptoms show up. Otherwise, that’s it. Nothing to do then but keep you sedated and comfortable until you die horribly, sorry, good luck with your next life.” This close, I could feel it: the nuclear reactor compacted into the very heart of him, the godlike power that would let him burn and burn and burn with life eternal until whatever destiny he’d been promised came to wed him. The thought made me faintly nauseous. “Any kind of skin-to-skin contact is the equivalent of being exposed to immediately symptomatic super-rabies.”

“You killed us both.”

His expression unwound from me the first real laugh I’d laughed in a year, and the sound tightened over the nacreous emptiness like a noose. Adam stared at me like a man who’dbeen expecting a birthday party but arrived instead at his own funeral. It only made me guffaw harder, which wasn’t without its costs. I spat blood onto the ground when I was done, mopping the corner of my mouth with the knuckle of my right thumb; it left a cherry-red streak over the back of my hand.

Time can teach you such a fortune of things. Like a broken heart. Like rage. Sadly, it wasn’t something I could sustain forever. Death was as hungry as grief and I was still human. With every passing second it seemed like there was more of it and less of me. I’d have to cede extremities soon—tracts of skin, whatever was extraneous—to this last furious Hail Mary I was making.

“Oh, come on, Adam, we’re mortal. At least, I am.” What good was all this if I couldn’t gloat a little? “I’ve been dying for a while. And I know you’ll die too because everything dies. If you don’t, though, I’m counting on it being such a problem for you that you won’t have the mental capacity to do more than keep it at bay—making you easy prey. Point is: either way,I win.”

The last I couldn’t help but snarl before the world erupted again in immolating white, a killing heat convulsing toward me. But it didn’t get far. I suffocated that torrential flame with the marrow from Adam’s bones, wrapping him in spongy curtains of pink and fatty yellow until at last he yielded and the light spluttered out. Sweat drenched me. I tasted salt on my lips, although that could have been more from the internal bleeding.

When the glare died completely away, Adam said:

“I still don’t get it, Li.”

“Don’t get what?”

“Your self-righteous act,” he said. Adam seemed further diminished, no longer even an effigy of himself, but a shadow teased out in pen strokes. Only his eyes were unchanged, blue and lustrous as glazed ceramic.

“We’re alike, you and I. We’re both real monsters. There’s a universe where we make that worthwhile.” He laughed and now it was Gracelynn’s soft, gauzy chuckle that wafted out of him. Even though it was crawling out of Adam’s throat, it sounded as it always did:kind.If I hadn’t loathed him before, I would have learned to hate him then. Our dead deserved more than this scavenging. “You and I, carving out a world together.”

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Oh?”

I finished my cigarette, flicking the stub into the bruise-yellow gloom, the amber like that of a contusion only beginning to heal. It was getting harder now to maintain my cavalier facade. An ache nuzzled through the bones of my fingers, up my arms, fanning downward over shoulder blades and spine to pool in my hips; it felt like what I’d always imagined arthritis to feel like, a dull yet consuming agony.This is what old must feel like,I thought.

And then:I will never know for sure.

“We are bothrealmonsters, yes,” I said, resenting his phrasing, the pride slicking the words. “But we’re not the same kind of monsters. You do it because you love that bloody work. Because it makes you feel powerful.”

“And it doesn’t make you feel the same?”

I recalled vividly then how Ford had screamed when Adam fished the guts out from the man’s belly: that high-pitched, panting, piggish shriek that went on even as he choked on hisown blood. It had reminded me of my stepfather and how he’d wailed all those years ago as I broke him like a wishbone, my fantasy fulfilled in lieu of his own. Had I felt powerful then? Had I felt powerful each time after? There’d certainly been a kind of rightness, a sense that what was happening was somehow good and just: a fulfillment of some primordial promise, one made long before even the first microbe appeared in the first oceans. It was something you could stitch a life from.

“No.”

“Then why do you do it? Why—” He gagged on the remnants of that sentence, ichor dribbling through his teeth, a viscid blackness that held clumps of what I knew to be tissue matter, bile and dark sticky bubbles of venous blood.

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