that my neck popped. I opened my eyes and stared up into his face. His features had hardened, and I wondered why I’d ever thought him pretty at all.
“In her way,” Isaac replied, “the Twice-Damned has served us well. That she did so unwittingly is of no concern to me.”
And Isobel said, “She has guarded the Mother and the Child, and she has traveled the long Night Road to bring them to us. Faithless, yes, faithless and treacherous and disbelieving. Infidel. But she has surely earned some meager reward for her tribulations. Some favor before death.”
“If that’s your wish, my Lady,” said Charlee.
“Fuck you,” I said, and I spat in his face. He smirked again and wiped my spittle away.
“We’ve come, at last, to the end of a tale,” Isobel continued. “The end of one, which is also the beginning of another. There is a little space on the threshold for . . .” And Isobel trailed off and was silent for a moment. Charlee tightened his grip on my hair, and I glared up at him, unable to look away.
“. . . an act of mercy,” Isobel finished.
“Our poor cousin cannot speak,” said Isaac.
“So she cannot whisper secrets,” added his sister.
“Siobhan Quinn, we shall allow you—” began Isaac.
“—one final caress,” finished Isobel.
I tried to pull free, and Charlee drove his knee into my back. He let my hair go then, and I crumpled to the ground, doubled over and tasting my own blood. Charlee had said he was older than me by at least a few decades, and he was a lot stronger than me. And, to tell the truth, I’d never been any good at the hand-to-hand melee shit. I’d always relied on guns and crossbows and enchanted lockets and pointy sticks and what the hell ever else got the job done.
“Cousin Selwyn is our smiling little lamb,” Isobel said. “She told us much about you, Twice-Damned, before we took her tongue.”
I’d seen what was in the cage.
Whatever else happened, I wouldn’t be leaving Mount Auburn with Selwyn. I was pretty damn sure I wouldn’t be leaving at all. And I discovered that being fairly damn certain of my guaranteed doom, it cleared my head a little.
“Get up,” Charlee growled, sounding hardly like himself at all. He grabbed my left shoulder and lifted me roughly to my feet.
“What’s your percentage in all this?” I asked him. “Short con or long?”
He didn’t reply. Instead, Charlee with two e’s took the Madonna from me, and shoved me, stumbling, towards the cage. The twins had stepped aside, moving as one, and there was Selwyn waiting behind the cold iron bars. It wasn’t necessary for Charlee to push me again. I walked the rest of the way on my own.
In a dream of a fairy-tale forest and a burning autumn field, a girl with my name had said, “You saw. You saw us in a cage, an awful sort of cage. You saw that the twins had locked us up inside a cage.”
Days and days ago, Selwyn had said, “In their eyes, of course, it makes me an abomination.”
“We have shown mercy on her, also,” said Isobel, and there was no hint of sarcasm in her voice. The madwoman absolutely believed what she was saying. “Twice-Damned, by the All Mother we have given her a gift, a gift that even my brother and I are denied.”
Selwyn stared out at me, and her star-sapphire eyes had turned a rusty shade of amber, like blood in a glass of beer. There was nothing in those eyes but suffering.
“We are making her whole,” said Isobel.
You saw that the twins had locked us up inside a cage.
The woman that had been Selwyn Throckmorton was quickly being gnawed apart by whatever corrosive spell of germ-line genetic transmutation the twins had cast on her. She crouched in one filthy corner, her knees pulled up close to her chest. In places, her flesh bubbled and steamed as if someone had poured acid on it. Bones popped and shifted beneath her mottled skin as the double helices of her DNA were ripped apart and rebuilt. Tears streamed from her eyes, but they were the tears of a ghoul, sticky and yellow, pustulant. She opened her mouth, and only a strangled, choking sound escaped her ruined lips.
Do you know what’s on the other side of the meadow, Quinn?
Whatever angle Selwyn had been playing, it had cost her everything. Like Mean Mister B, she’d crossed the twins, and like him, she’d been