Page 16 of The Library at Hellebore
“It’ll be all right, my love,” he said, lips touched to each of her fingertips in turn. The love enshrined in his gaze was a holy thing and that holiness was what made it dangerous: worse wars had been waged by men with less faith than this one, who stood there looking like he’d bring the world down for this girl.
“Sully,” Delilah whispered.
“It’ll be all right,” he said again and I saw her shoulders drop. Later on, I’d find out how many times she’d died, how over the years Sullivan would find her broken-doll corpse on an altar over and over again: throat cut, ribs split, just rawmeat sometimes. Delilah, I would learn, was what they call a Lamb—an immortal sacrifice—and that the first time Sullivan had sat waiting for her to come back, he’d been thirteen years old.
Sullivan rested his forehead against Delilah’s before he pressed her into the embrace of the crowd, turning to regard his adversary. He said: “It took them eight generations of careful pollination and meticulously applied eugenics to create me. Do you really think you have a shot? I hold all my gods in me. Turn around and leave. We don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to die.”
He said all this as the other boy mimed hefting a weapon, his hands locking around thin air. No, not thin air. Not ultimately. A labryscoalescedinto reality as the boy made the motion to swing. The creation of the ax left grease smears in the air.
“If it helps at all, I do wish sometimes thatIwas never born,” said Sullivan, still with that strange hungry earnestness. “If I hadn’t come into this world, none of this would have happened. You wouldn’t have suffered whatever you did. Lila wouldn’t always be at risk. It’d be fine. All of it. If I knew all this could have been stopped, I’d have let my mother asphyxiate me. And I wouldn’t have to listen to the cicada-lords screaming in my head. Every night, every day, every hour of my existence. Buzzing away. I never sleep.” His voice again slipped into an abstracted softness, the words spoken for him and no one else. “Do you know what it’s like to never sleep? To only dream of wings?”
I saw it a second before the other boy did, the wet orange membrane closing over Sullivan’s eyes; saw it flutter against the corneal surface, saw mucus come away; saw the cicadas emerge, boiling from his tear ducts, distending his face.Sullivan opened his mouth and gods poured out of his throat and Delilah’s answering scream was a knife, cutting through the air. There was just enough time for Sullivan’s opponent to jolt backward, horror filling his expression.
“They’re so hungry,” said Sullivan, and his voice was plaintive—audible, somehow, clear as despair in spite of the bugs wriggling out of his mouth, slick from his saliva—as he sank his fingers into his would-be killer’s shirt, pulling him lover-close, a hand moving to cup the nape of the other boy’s throat. All the while, cicadas continued to pour, and pour, and the crowd, seized by an idiot animal terror, pulled back as the cicadas began to eat.
We watched the boy die.
If the universe had any mercy in it, the swarm would have blanketed him, obscured his death from view, but it didn’t. His death was a spectacle. We saw him denuded of skin, saw them burrow through the spongy tissue of his bones, and gnaw through heart and lung, liver and stomach. In seconds, he went from boy to Swiss cheese monument, a juddering colander trellised by strings of crawling, jewel-shelled insects.
I inhaled, sharp, as oily clots of organ patterned the floor. Beside me, I felt Portia do the same: a brisk gasp, although there was something sexual in its release, a panting want.
Out of nowhere, an unfamiliar voice, nasally, quintessentially New York: “Is thisturning you on?”
Portia responded with bared teeth, “What the fuck?”
I looked over to see a boy standing about five inches behind us and to the right of me. Something about his shit-eating smile said he couldn’t be much older than me, but his skin was precociously weathered and there was something equally ancient about his eyes, which were almost the white-blue ofa flame save for a drip of hazel like spilled petroleum. Upon noticing my scrutiny, he winked.
The boy went on, clownishly good-tempered. “You’re from the Raw Beef—”
“Excuseme?”
“—sorority, aren’t—”
“We’re not a sorority and that’s not whatsheis called.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or shriek, or to try to pinch myself awake, the juxtaposition of this argument and the slaughter unfolding so absurd, so truly bombastically weird, nothing seemed real any longer.
“Makes more sense than the name you’re using,” said the boy.
“Sense,” Portia repeated with a laugh that had as much to do with humor as a gut wound with comfort. “You’re the one—”
“I have so many questions for you, but give me a second,” said the boy, who clearly thought of himself as the funniest person in the room. He turned his attention to me. “Name’s Rowan. Heard about you from Johanna. She said you’re prickly. Didn’t tell me you were cute, though.”
I recoiled from his once-over. “How do you know my roommate?”
He waggled eyebrows in answer and said instead, turning back to Portia, “So what’s this about the Raw Grail offering immortal life? I hear that you girls have a partnership with Hellebore. Something about making soldiers for the Ministry? Because if so, I’d love to know more. I don’t personally want to live forever, but I have thiscondition—”
“Someone is being eaten alive here.” Portia pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. “I’d rather focus on that.”
“What’s death but going into another room?” said Rowan,peering over the carnage, utterly flip despite the fact that what was left of Sullivan’s victim was a porridgy smear on the floor. “Many other different rooms, in his case. Possibly hundreds. Oh, that’simpressive.”
“Thank you.”
Sullivan’s thoroughbred voice with its impeccable diction, its singer’s lilt, gently cut through the air. He was staring at us, his outfit wrecked, cicadas promenading over his shoulders, rappelling down his trouser legs, the light greasy and gold-red on their amber shells. I realized with a slight lurch in my stomach that they werecleaninghim, eating particulates of organ matter, tugging at the rucked seams: there was no helping the bloodstains but he could at least be unrumpled. That more than the gore, more than Sullivan’s languid expression, disturbed me.
He smoothed the last wrinkles from his collar, a cicada crawling up to rest on the first joint of his right index finger. Sullivan’s mouth bled in rivers still. Very informed gossip had it that the Ministry paid for more than the right to keep their pet families under scrutiny. Some said they were breeding new lines, developing living weapons. I had to wonder what Sullivan’s home life was like. Delilah kept her distance, her expression desperate, even lost. When Sullivan held out a longing look, she turned away, melting into the crowd.
“You might want to get that,” said Rowan, touching the knuckle of his thumb to his own lips.
