Fire & Ash (20 page)

The reapers were in a tight arc around them. They kept revving their engines, and the sound seemed to beat on Benny’s chest.

“Nix,” he said, speaking just loud enough so she could hear him beneath the pulsing roar of the quads. “If you have to shoot, go for Brother Peter.”

Nix swung the pistol around toward the man.

Brother Peter saw this and smiled. Then he slashed down
with his clenched fist, and suddenly all the reapers cut their engines at once.

The silence was crushing. It collapsed the world into a surreal bubble that enclosed the ravine, the killers on the quads, and the three of them.

Where the hell is Lilah?
wondered Benny.
Did they already get her? Is she dead somewhere out in the forest?

Brother Peter sat in silence, studying them. When his gaze drifted over to Riot, his eyes widened for a moment.

“Sister Margaret,” he said, and the other reapers recoiled at his words. Some of them actually hissed and spat onto the dirt.

“Don’t call me that,” warned Riot.

“Why not? You are the daughter of Mother Rose, that traitorous witch.”

“My mama died a long time ago,” said Riot. “She was just another victim of Saint John and his sickness.”

At this, three of the reapers suddenly made as if to leap off their quads, but Brother Peter held up a hand. “No,” he said. “Words can’t harm the honored saint, and this child can’t tarnish her soul any more than it already is.”

“You can kiss my fanny,” suggested Riot.

“You pile sin upon sin,” said the reaper. “Have you no fear for your soul?”

“My soul’s just fine, thank you.” Her words were flippant, but Benny could hear the fear in her voice. Riot was a tough and brutal fighter, but she was clearly terrified of Brother Peter.

For his part, the reaper seemed not to care that Nix’s pistol was pointed at his head.

Brother Peter looked at Benny. “Do you know who I am?”

“I know,” said Benny. “But I don’t care.”

“You should care.”

“Look, all I care about is you and your goons getting back on your quads and leaving us alone. We didn’t do anything to you, and we don’t want any trouble.”

“Do you know how frightened you sound?”

“Do you know how you’d feel with a bullet in your brainpan?” asked Nix.

“At this range, little sister, you wouldn’t get more than two shots off, and then we’d open red mouths in your pretty skin.”

“Maybe,” conceded Nix. “First shot will still be through your ugly face.”

The reaper shook his head. “So what? Am I supposed to faint from fear? We’re reapers, child. We pray for the darkness to take us. Every morning, every night, we pray that Lord Thanatos takes us.”

“All praise his darkness,” intoned the reapers.

“You say that,” Nix said, “but I’ve seen some of your people run away, too.”

“I was the very first of the reapers,” said Brother Peter. “My companions are members of the Red Brotherhood. Ask Sister Margaret if she thinks we will run away. From you or from anything.”

Riot said nothing, which was not all that encouraging. Benny swallowed a lump of dry dust.

“If you want to test my faith, little sister,” said Brother Peter, “then pull the trigger.”

The gun was steady in Nix’s hand, but when Benny cut a
look at her, he could see lines of fear sweat running down her freckled face.

When Nix didn’t answer or fire, Brother Peter nodded. He pointed at Benny. “Yesterday you took something from one of my reapers. Something that was not yours to take.”

“Yeah? Says who?” asked Benny, trying to make his voice sound tough. It didn’t.

“I watched you do it through my binoculars. I saw you arrive, saw your fight with Brother Marcus, and saw you rob him after he’d gone into the darkness.”

Benny said nothing. It made him feel immensely disturbed to know that that had all been witnessed yesterday. He thought of the fight, of his tears, of how vulnerable he must have looked.

Brother Peter nodded to the satchel slung on Benny’s shoulder. “Today you came out here to defile and rob one of the gray people. That bag was not yours to take.”

Nix said, “This gun’s heavy. If you have a point, get to it.”

Benny almost smiled. It was the kind of line he read in novels, and she said it with the kind of bravado he’d tried for a moment ago. Nix was better at it than he was. Benny wasn’t sure if Nix had cribbed it from a book or if she was simply that incredibly cool. Probably both. Despite everything that was happening, he wanted to kiss her.

Brother Peter looked faintly amused, though the expression on his face in no way qualified as a smile. Benny remembered Riot saying that this freak never smiled.

“If you give me what you took,” said Brother Peter, “the bag on your shoulder and whatever you took from my reaper, we will let you go.”

“Oh, really?” said Riot with so much acid that it could have burned the paint off a tank.

“Really,” said Brother Peter.

“Last time I checked,” continued Riot, “you reapers only left people alive when they got down on their knees and kissed your knives. Isn’t that how it works? We get to live if we become reapers too?”

“Oh, fallen sister,” said Brother Peter in a sorrowful tone, “there is no place for you in the Night Church. You are an outcast, forgotten of god, unworthy of the darkness. You are an excommunicate and a blasphemer and you will be punished by a long life of suffering.”

“Suits me,” said Riot.

“Yeah, works for me, too,” agreed Nix.

Benny nodded.

“Really,” repeated Brother Peter. “That appeals to you? A life spent wandering blind and disfigured, screaming for mercy without a tongue, shunned by everyone because your face will bear the mark of damnation upon it.”

Riot proved that her earlier demonstration of foul language had only been a warm-up. She described an act so physically appalling and improbable that even Benny winced—and he appreciated this kind of thing. Several of the reapers blanched and fingered their knives.

“You prove your worthlessness with every breath.” Brother Peter dismissed Riot with a casual wave of his hand and turned his focus back to Benny. “Make your choice, little brother. You can walk away, unharmed, untouched, alive if you give me what does not belong to you. Return what you took from my reaper, and hand over the bag you stole from the dead.”

Benny looked at him, at the other reapers, and at the vast, unforgiving world around them as if it was able to offer answers to the madness of the moment. He held his sword with one hand and touched the strap of the satchel.

“Give me the bag,” said Brother Peter in a voice that was eerily calm. He could have been commenting on the weather. “Give it to me and live.”

“It’s a trick,” said Riot. “Don’t do it.”

“Benny, you can’t,” said Nix.

Benny smiled.

“Sure,” he said.

46

“W
HAT
?”

Nix, Riot, and Brother Peter all said it at the same time.

Benny shrugged and lowered his sword. He slid the bag off his shoulder and held it out. “I said, sure. Take it.”

Brother Peter studied him with suspicious eyes. “It would be unwise to try a fast one, little brother, I’ll—”

“I know. Red mouths, tongues cut out. What is it with you guys and threats? You need to work on your people skills.”

Everyone was staring at Benny. He smiled and swung the bag back and forth. His heart thumped like a crazy monkey, but he was sure he was managing a pretty good reckless smile. It hurt his face to keep it in place.

Brother Peter snapped his fingers, and one of the Red Brothers dismounted and stepped forward to take the bag. Nix shifted the pistol toward him, and the reaper stopped.

“If he takes another step,” said Benny, “she’ll blow his head off and then she’ll shoot you.”

The reaper threw a questioning glance at Brother Peter, who gestured for him to remain where he was. Instead he dismounted and held his hand out to Benny.

“The bag,” he said.

Benny wondered if there was even the slightest chance that Brother Peter was not going to kill him the moment he handed over the bag. Riot said that the reaper had a dozen knives hidden in special pockets and that he could draw and cut faster than lightning. She’d seen him do it too many times.

So Benny slung the satchel at him instead of handing it over. He slung it hard, hoping to catch Peter in the mouth, but the man simply snatched it out of the air. He opened the flap, and the dry wind rifled the pages. Brother Peter nodded approval.

“Now give me what you stole from my reaper yesterday,” he said.

“Ah,” said Benny. “That’s going to be a problem.”

Brother Peter lifted an eyebrow.

“I don’t actually
have
that stuff,” said Benny. “I gave it to Captain Ledger. Maybe you know him? Big guy, real grumpy, has this huge dog?”

“Joe Ledger.” Brother Peter pronounced the name slowly, tasting it, hating it but enjoying it too. Benny could see all that flicker through Peter’s dark eyes, and he also enjoyed the look of profound discomfort that rippled across the faces of the other reapers.

Joe scares the pee of out them,
he thought. It elevated the ranger another notch in his book.

“That’s the guy,” Benny said. “So . . . you’re going to have to ask
him
for it.”

“No,” said Brother Peter, “I think you’ll go and get it from him and bring it back to me here.”

“You think I’d really do something that stupid just because you ask?”

“I’m not asking you, little brother. I’m telling you.”

Benny shook his head. “No. I played fair. I gave you what we took from the zom. Not going to argue jurisdiction over that stuff. But the stuff I took off the reaper yesterday belongs to me. Your reaper attacked me. That means that anything I took from him is mine by rights. Spoils of war.”

“This isn’t a war, boy.”

“Well, what the hell do you call it?”

“You are defying god’s will.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

Brother Peter sighed. “Then let me simplify things for you. I’ll send you back to Sanctuary. You’ll get whatever you gave to Joe Ledger and bring it back here to me.”

“Why on earth would I do something stupid like that?”

Brother Peter did not answer. Not in words.

He stood a yard away from Nix, apparently ignoring the gun pointed at his head. And then he moved. So hideously fast that there was no time to react or cry out. Brother Peter snatched the pistol from Nix’s hand, spun her, and wrapped an arm around her throat. He let the pistol fall and suddenly there was a knife in his hand, the edge of the blade pressed against the soft flesh beneath Nix’s jaw.

Benny’s sword flashed from its scabbard, but Brother Peter froze him in place with seven horrible words.

“I will paint you with her blood.”

The pistol lay on the ground by Brother Peter’s foot. He kicked it into the ravine.

“And now,” he said calmly, “tell me again that you refuse to get what belongs to me. Tell me, boy, and watch this girl’s life flow out of her.”

“No!” cried Benny.

Nix stared at Benny with wide eyes filled with total terror.

The reapers began climbing off their quads, grins forming on their tattooed faces.

Riot pivoted and aimed her slingshot at the nearest one, but Benny knew that it was no good. She could bring the man down, Benny could take the next few with his sword, but that knife was already at Nix’s throat.

Then suddenly there was a sharp metallic sound behind the reapers. A sound so specific that everyone knew what it was before they turned and looked.

A slide being racked on an automatic pistol.

The Lost Girl rose up out of the tall grass behind the half circle of reapers, her big automatic pistol held in a two-handed grip.

“Let Nix go,” she said in her graveyard whisper of a voice, “or I’ll blow your head off.”

The reapers froze in place, some with weapons half-drawn. Brother Peter turned to face Lilah.

“Kill me and she dies too.”

“You’re threatening to kill her anyway. Might as well kill you first.”

“My reapers of the Red Brotherhood will slaughter you.”

Lilah said, “Look into my eyes. Tell me if you think I care.”

Brother Peter did look into her eyes, and Benny thought he could see something shift in the man’s expression. It was not fear—Benny didn’t think this man was capable of that emotion—but perhaps it was a kind of understanding, of acceptance.

He lowered his knife and gave Nix a small push. She
staggered forward, and Benny caught her with one arm. Nix immediately wheeled and tried to kick Brother Peter in the groin. He parried the kick as effortlessly as if he was swatting a fly.

“Nix,” cautioned Benny as he pulled her away from the reaper. She jerked free of his grip and drew her sword.
Dojigiri
glittered in the bright sunlight, but for all its deadly promise, Brother Peter seemed not to care in the slightest.

Lilah’s pistol was rock-steady in her grip. “Get out of here.”

Without an iota of haste, Brother Peter slid his knife back into its sheath. “Listen to me,” he said softly. “We all walk away from this moment. But understand me—I want what you gave to Captain Ledger. You
will
bring it to me.”

“Why do you think we’d even consider it?” snapped Nix.

Brother Peter held out his arm, pointing across the miles toward Sanctuary. “Because I think you care about those people at Sanctuary. The sick, the helpless.” He paused. “The children.”

Benny heard Riot’s sharp intake of breath.

“You think that Sanctuary is a fortress,” said the reaper, “that you’re safe there.”

“We
are
,” said Nix firmly.

Brother Peter picked up the satchel and stowed it in the rear compartment of his quad. “Fail to bring me what you stole and you’ll learn exactly how safe Sanctuary is.”

“She’s right,” said Benny. “Try anything and the army will stop you.”

Brother Peter snorted. The reapers laughed. Harsh, brutal laughs that seemed to be fueled by some certain knowledge
of what Brother Peter was suggesting. They winked at one another and traded high fives.