Rituals (Cainsville 5)

The birds continued to dive and snatch bites of flesh, until the boy was covered in blood, and he'd stopped screaming and started to cry. That was all he could do. Lie against the branch and cry, sobbing deep sobs that were more terrible to hear than all the agonized screams of the guilty men.

"Just hurry," he said between sobs. "Please. I've done nothing wrong, but if you must take me, at least show mercy."

"They don't know what that is," Gabriel said.

I turned away and felt his arms go around me, wrapping tight around my head as if he could block the sound of the boy crying as I pressed my face to his chest.

"It's not fair," I said. "It's just--"

The scene disappeared, and in the darkness I heard a voice saying, "It's not fair!" A man's voice, echoing as if through an empty room. A clang followed, like chains. Then the thump of a fist on wood and a low laugh as a woman's voice said, "Do you think fair has anything to do with it, Duncan? It wasn't fair that you left me to care for our son, abandoned me--"

"He is not my son. You already admitted that, and there's no one here to lie for, Mary, so don't bother. You married me because I had a good trade, made a bit of money, and I was too besotted to wonder what a girl like you saw in an old man like me."

The scene cleared. We were in a room that stunk of old stone, with water weeping through the cracks. The man sat at a table, chained hand and foot. He wasn't "old"--maybe mid-thirties--but the woman across from him was little more than a girl. She wore a beautiful dress and bonnet, and it might seem as if she'd put on a pretty frock to brighten the day of her imprisoned husband, but the contrast between his filthy rags and her spotless gown seemed a deliberate slap in the face.

"You left us, Duncan," she said.

"With money," he said between gritted teeth. "My child or not, the boy doesn't deserve to suffer for his mother's sins."

"I need more."

"And you killed my family to get it?"

"So you would inherit your due."

"No, so you would inherit. I'm in here, framed for their murders. Does it amuse you, seeing me in chains, bound for the next ship to Australia? My only consolation is that you didn't get to see me hang from a noose. That the judge wasn't certain enough to sentence me to that."

"Oh, but I made sure he didn't. I bribed him."

Silence.

Mary smiled. "Do you know why I spared you, Duncan? Give me your right arm, and I'll show you."

He slowly stretched out his arm, gaze on hers. She reached down and brushed aside the thick black hairs.

"I did this while you slept, helped along by a sleeping draft."

As he stared at his arm, I leaned in to see a small red symbol, carefully incised in the skin as if by a razor-thin blade.

"No," he whispered.

"You've been marked for the sluagh." Her lips curved in a smile. "They'll come, and they'll find you convicted of murdering your entire family."

"But I didn't."

She leaned forward in her chair. "The sluagh don't care."

Duncan scrambled back so fast he toppled out of his chair as he clawed at the mark on his arm, clawed so hard his skin ran red with blood, as Mary's laughter echoed through the tiny room.

I turned toward Gabriel and caught only a flash of him before we were pitched into darkness again. When I landed, I heard Duncan screaming. It was the scream of a man running for his life. Except when I looked around, I wasn't in a forest...or any setting I recognized. I stood on the roof of an impossible house, with a castle balcony and yawning darkness below and spires behind me, jutting at all angles like spikes. Below, the landscape was equally impossible--a river running straight up a perpendicular mountainside, with twisted trees growing at ninety-degree angles. Duncan was trying to climb those trunks as if they were a ladder. Overhead, a rainbow of moons arched across the sky.

"We're in his dream," I said.

"This is a dream?"

Duncan screamed anew as a swarm of melltithiwyd dove at him.

"He didn't do anything," I said. "He absolutely, beyond a doubt, did not do anything."