Flesh and Bone (Benny Imura 3)

At the same time, it unnerved him that this maniac could somehow tell that he and Nix had killed people. Since that terrible night when Mrs. Riley was murdered, Nix and Benny had been in several bloody confrontations, first with Charlie Pink-eye’s gang and then with Preacher Jack’s killers at Gameland. They had plenty of blood on their hands; and the fact that the men they’d killed were absolutely evil did very little to help either of them sleep at night. The fact remained that they had both taken human lives. That fact had gouged marks into each of their souls that no amount of justification could remove.

And this man could see that.

How? Who was he?

Run, warned Tom again, get away from him. Go—now!

“Have you come to let the darkness take you?” The man wore a strange little smile as he spoke those words, and he seemed oblivious to Nix’s pistol and Benny’s sword. “The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. Do you not agree?”

“Um . . . no?” replied Benny uncertainly. “Not today, thanks.”

Saint John’s eyes were filled with a strange light, as if he could read Benny’s thoughts. Benny thought it might have been ordinary madness, but there was something else, too. Something he had never seen before, and it chilled him to the bone. It was a light of absolute fanatical belief. Not a simple faith, like Benny had seen in the eyes of way-station monks like Brother David, nor the desperate hope that was always present in the eyes of Pastor Kellogg back home. No, this was something else. This was a kind of insanity. And this man seemed to be engaged in his own inner conversation with things only he could see. Gods? Monsters?

Chong had quoted a passage to Benny after the Gameland affair was over. It was something a German philosopher named Nietzsche had written more than a century ago. “‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,’” Chong recited as the four of them walked away from Tom’s grave and the column of smoke that rose above the dust and fire and ash of Gameland. “‘And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’”

The very thought of that had chilled Benny back then, and it returned now as a cold breath on the nape of his neck, because he was absolutely positive that it explained what he was seeing right now. This man—this complete stranger and utter wacko—was someone who had looked far too long into the abyss. Benny knew this with an intuitive flash, because looking into his eyes was like looking into the very same abyss. Into a bottomless well of horror and death. These thoughts, complex as they were, tumbled through his mind in less than a second.

Behind them, somewhere in the woods, Benny could hear more shouts. Riot’s voice, and Sarah’s. Then the roars of the quads as the reapers hunted them.

Saint John nodded gravely to Nix.

“Nyx,” he said, his eyes taking on a dreamy quality, “daughter of Chaos, mother of Darkness and Light. Mother of the Fates, Sleep, Death, Strife, and Pain. Sweet mother of all shadows.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Benny could see the gun trembling in Nix’s hand.

Saint John said, “Please . . . forgive me my weakness, but I beg you to tell me—are you her? Did Mother Rose call you from the darkness in our hour of need?”

“Look, just back off,” warned Nix, taking her pistol in two hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we don’t want trouble.”

“Trouble?” The man looked mystified. “You, of all that walk this earth, have nothing to fear from me—or any of our kindred.” He suddenly smiled, and for a moment that smile seemed genuinely happy.

Nix cleared her throat. “Mister, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Whoever you think we are—we’re not. We’re not part of whatever you’re doing, and we don’t want to be. We just want to leave, okay? Don’t try anything and don’t try to follow us or I swear to God that I’ll shoot you.”

The man who called himself Saint John of the Knife nodded, as if Nix had said something he both understood and liked. “Yes, yes, Goddess, I understand that the darkness is yours to give, and I welcome it with all my heart. I am a reaper, and I am yours body and soul until the darkness closes around us all!” His words, strange as they were, had the cadence of a church litany, and that made Benny’s skin crawl. “Kill me now, or come with me to spread darkness to the heathens out there.” He pointed to the field. “And then I would be so honored to kneel before you and accept your gift. A bullet, a knife . . . each is a path to glory.”

“Nix,” Benny said cautiously, “let’s go.”

They began backing away from Saint John. At first he smiled, apparently thinking that they were going to lead him in some kind of insane charge out onto the field, but when he saw that Nix and Benny were merely increasing the distance to go around him, his expression changed. At first it was lit by an expectant hopefulness, his smile lingering; and then his face grew confused.

“Holy one,” called Saint John, “where are you going?”

“Far, far away from here,” said Nix, “you incredible freak.”

Even as she said it, Benny knew that it was a mistake.

A terrible mistake.

The reaper’s expression changed once more; the confusion melted away to reveal harsh lines of an ice-cold rage.

“You are not her,” growled Saint John in a low, feral voice. His pale face grew flushed, and his dark eyes filled with a dreadful light. “You steal the name of my goddess and you profane everything that is holy.”

He spat onto the ground between them.

“I never said that I was.”

Benny pulled her arm. “Nix, come on.”

“And you, boy,” growled Saint John, “you damn yourself by speaking her holy name, and you do it in the presence of a saint of her son’s sacred Night Church. No fire exists in hell to burn that blasphemy from your soul.”