The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [175]
“Hush, my spectral puppet,” Salvatia told him. She then turned to all the others in a display of mock modesty. “He’s a little overzealous. What can I say? There’s more of myself inside him than there ever was any of himself. Besides, this must be the work of a Dreg alone, if it’s going to work at all….”
“Bari,” Andrew called, his attentions this time not abandoning his brother’s opposing leering stance, Scratch’s mounting persuasions towards his Magdalene’s will drawing him threateningly closer.
Bari responded not to Andrew, but addressed Salvatia personally, almost arrestingly humbly, in an unbiased time-out, to ask Her Magdalene Majesty a most uncharacteristic question. “Salvatia, excuse me sincerely, but I, in the last recent moments before Ralston had fallen into my arms, had words with a number of your reclusive Magdalene sisters. Might I inquire, if I should allow your Dreg to take my Andrew’s life, and I become a dimensionally-challenged entity such as yourself, that I may become physical again through you like your sisters who anticipate the same redemption?”
“You wish to join me, Watchmaid?” Salvatia said with curious, brow-raised delight.
“At this point, yes,” Bari replied to her plainly.
Hearing this reply distracted Andrew promptly away from his overbearing brother. “What?”
Salvatia flexed her silvery-skinned palms and outstretched her arms as if awakened out of bed from a good night’s sleep, wrenching her dreamstate burdens away into a new morning yawn. Then, she addressed Bari stringently, black eye brows sunken together in fleshy folds over the glare of eyes blazing orange like pools of molten iron. She looked upon Bari this way, and imposed a vow to test her.
“Do you, Watchmaid Bari, who was once Bari Davenport, a very human young lady who chanced to fall in love with an Everborn, swear allegiance to me? I know more than you can fathom, Watchmaid Bari, and I certainly know more about you. Three of Erlandson’s lifetimes ago you were a woman who chose to take the place of his last Watchmaid, who now lives her final days human again and in a home for the elderly in Southhampton, England. You saw to him through his subsequent life as a popular film director and then through this one. Surely you’re aware of how important your ‘Born is, and of his true name as a Watcher from long ago, and how for three generations you’ve loved him so....”
“Enough,” Bari said to her. “It surprises me not that you know these things. You’ve been in your state for centuries as where I have barely a century to speak of. I’ve made up my mind, and you have nothing to lose. Simon BoLeve can go ahead and kill his brother, see if I care, and I won’t raise a single finger to stop him.”
“What?!” Andrew exclaimed, bewildered and betrayed.
“What?!” Ralston exclaimed, awakened fully and coherent in Bari’s arms, and Bari paid him no mind but to toss his body over her shoulders and back again into the depths of the dark embankment, his trenchcoat and limbs flailing through the air, his screams perishing into a haunted silence.
All this was at last enough to convince Scratch to abandon any lingering convictions and sentiment and to do the deed.
Andrew, whose slit of a mouth widened in horror suddenly, whose exposed alien-grey-skinned throat and neck diameter had decreased in size through the regression process, was easily beheaded in one swift stroke of his Dreg twin brother’s razor.
Andrew Erlandson’s severed head flung into the night, an airborne trail of liquid red blood hung and then fell in splotches to the terrace cement floor; his head fell the way of the embankment and down into the depths to where Ralston had vanished twice, where Melony had detected the first glimpses of the children down there. Andrew’s alien Halloween-disguised