Page 3 of The Sacrifice

Rolling my eyes, I hurl the rock at the nearest specter. Flecks of skin and black blood spurt from its shoulder. Bones haven’t formed yet. A shame ghost stuffing can’t be ground sugar. More herd around the one I hit, gathering, staggering like a ragged line of broken, naked dolls. Black-veined skin, fractured porcelain flesh, tiny chasms between teeth. There are so many—more than the small hundred or so in our cemetery. The Veil between us and the Waste must have thinned early to sprinkle them into our realm. And our city is the sacrificial altar upon its border.

At least this gap of the Wailing Woods spans a mile. With the Veil thinning, it’s dangerous to enter the woods, but it would be more dangerous anywhere else.

The dead try to follow, but the sister trees will protect us far more than any walls or swords.

All the ghosts smell is blood. Sarai’s blood. Never mine.

I slip on a sheet of ice. It cracks, soaking the ends of my frost-dampened skirts. I bunch up the towels, thankful they don’t meet the bitter groundwater.

Scrambling over the snows, I set my gaze on the sister trees and force my legs to move. A bone-deep chill seeps through my dress and burrows into my skin. As if the ghosts are licking my spine to nip at my nerves.

Several feet ahead of me, Sarai crosses the tree line into the woods, marked by the bone fences. And swinging strings of teeth clattering like organic musical notes. My shoulders sag in relief because the dead shuffle away from the trees, away from the souls of the Sacrificed.

Once I arrive in the woods, I swallow a knot in my throat and step over roots tangled with bones. Whole corpses have fused into the larger trees. Like sacred corpse collectors, the trees bear the skulls of the Sacrificed, growing them into their mighty bodies to stare back at us with unseeing eyes. Blood weeps from the tree bark like sap.

But I’m more concerned about the blood between Sarai’s thighs. It already calls to my vym.

“Had to be on Hollow Night,” she moans and curls onto the ground, spreading for me. Sarai is a word binder. The irony that she never forgets what people say, but she still chose me as a friend.

“It’s not night yet,” I remind her, kneeling down before her, ignoring how my knees sink into the waterlogged earth, forming imprints in the frost and mud. “Just hold on. Be strong like I know you are, Sarai.”

My friend’s breath turns shallow as her eyes glaze over from pain. Wasting no time, I retrieve the small razor blade sewn into my cloak, alongside others. She shouldn’t have to be strong here. Sarai should be in a warm bed, a fire crackling in the hearth, and the Sisters gathered around her with hot towels and boiling water. If it were any other night...

More wails echo from the trees as if the Sacrificed are preparing for a new arrival.

“I tried to get back to the Convent, but the Brothers are all over the Borderlands tonight. I hid in the cemetery until I could get to your house, but the corpses—”

“I promise I won’t say anything about your thighs,” I interrupt, distracting my friend, my smile curving to the right as I distract her while bunching her skirts up to her hips.

“Like you have any room to talk,” she retorts, throwing her head back with a groan.

Too much room since my thighs never touch due to my spindly limbs and bony arms.

After stripping Sarai’s stockings down to her knees, I peel back the rags to discover more blood. She’s expelling more than most do. Another groan. Sarai’s thighs clench. Her hands are clammy with cold sweat. Fear shivers down my spine at the thought of losing my one friend.

Picking up the razor blade, I slash two clean stripes down my right arm, overlapping the fine silver lines of old scars birthed over my lifetime of blood-binding. No tremors rattle my hand as the blood spills into my other palm.

I chant no words and use no herbs. The first time, the binding had skittered out of me. Now, the vym as I prefer to call it, flows from my veins, tingling like static at the tips of my fingers.

Ever gray as soft, seeking smoke, my vym creeps to Sarai’s deep, pre-labor wound. Scrawled upon my skin and inscribed in my scars, my ink turns to chaotic, swirling calligraphy as I bind the blood into her veins, cleaving her body of the tiny corpse as frail and undeveloped as a boneless sparrow.

The vym binds my blood once it’s served its purpose. For the first time since we entered, the wails fade to soft echoes, ebbing to whispers, followed by a reverent silence.

Something hard twists beneath my legs. Sarai flicks her eyes to the space between her legs, trembling when the tree roots surround the preserved sac with the pallid little corpse. The Corpse Collectors gather it into their long, knotted fingers and pull the lifeless form to join the Sacrificed. Old corpses act as protectors over the smallest ones just as the woods protect us from the ghosts and monsters every night and day. Everything on this side of the Waste is guarded by the god-eater’s great wall. I shiver when I imagine my blood dripping from that bark, my bones fused into the tree roots to become a protector spirit.

Tonight, I must protect myself.

While I lean on my heels and study the trees around us, a healed and restored Sarai wastes no time. Swiping the mud off her hands and flinging her hair back, wild waves—a rich mahogany compared to my driftwood gray.

“Get up, Quinn,” she commands, reaching down to tug my elbow. Practical as always. Miscarriages are as common as the snowfalls here in the Borderlands. “We need to go before more dead rise.”

An ear-splitting, mournful scream pierces the night, curdling my blood. Sarai shoots her head up, her spine snapping straight.

“Was that—”

I nod. “A banshee.”

“If the banshees are close, then...” Sarai trails off, gooseflesh forming on her arms. My chest tightens.

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