The Worm in Every Heart by Gemma Files Page B

clearing’s seared floor, so fragrant yet with ash; and ah, but that fire had burned brightly, for all it was only a heap of corpses doused in lamp-oil. Brown corpse melting to black, black rivulets twining like veins across the soaked earth, black snakes rising in their wake. A black river, abruptly, in full flood, lapping the British soldier’s remains in as well with no visible distinction—rearing, seeping, clotting—knitting both together like some prescient scab, the kind that outlines itself before a wound has even been opened.
    One hot whiff caught on the wind, a brief, intestinal stink: Eau de massacre. One sentient platelet left swimming in a sea of blood, shed and unshed alike.
    Beyond the fire’s sodden ring, Desbarrats Grammar had already slashed the first layer of leaves aside and forged on ahead into the jungle (bent on finding any kind of explanation for the night’s work, or his sadly smirched reputation, that did not involve the word Rhakshasa), leaving Romesh Singh to plead vainly after him—sick to heart and increasingly cold, with his empty hands ineffectually raised against the drumming rain.
    (For the bell tolled in him still, o my beloved—fluid, subterranean. Mateless, but crying for its mate. And this suited me so well I would have smiled to see it, had I but the lips to smile with—or the eyes to see.)
    Such a lack, however, was easily remedied.
    â€œRomesh Singh,” I called him, softly. He turned.
    Upright now, a loosely wavering column of matte black against the clearing’s larger blackness—hollow, scarring, extruded from the space between all things—I drew myself in tight, and called Grammar’s all-too-familiar face to me, simultaneously making myself both a spine to hold it up and a skull to hang it on. I let flesh drip over me, pore by pore.
    Over the flesh, I drew skin; over the skin, blood.
    Naked under the rain’s caress, I opened Grammar’s eyes—so blind, so pale, so very, very British, in the raw mask that was his truest reflection—and raised them, meeting Romesh Singh’s.
    â€œMy good soldier,” I said.
    He swallowed, pupils wide, his dry throat grating tentatively back upon itself.
    â€œThou . . . ” he began. “Thou art . . . ”
    â€œOh, I.” Stepping, cat-sure on Grammar’s smooth-soled feet, to print the mud between us. “A wandering minstrel, I,” I said. “A knight of air and darkness.”
    â€œ . . . Rhakshasa,” finished Romesh Singh.
    He said it with a sigh, so soft the word was part of his exhalation. That fatal—that only—name. I nodded at the sound. To prove the truth of his assumption, I spread my hands—my fingers—on which the claws bend back so far they are not really claws at all, but twisting knives of sharpest horn.
    â€œShreds and patches,” I said. “Dead man’s fingernails.”
    And I peeled back Grammar’s lips, to show how my teeth arced up from his narrow British jaw like some ill-timed jest, sharp and yellow as a carrion dog’s.
    Yet Romesh Singh held his ground, back straight, like the warrior he was.
    (For we both knew Grammar was too far ahead now to hear him, even if he chose to call for help. But no man really wishes aid at such a moment, o my beloved—not when his longest-held dream finally stalks towards him on nude white feet, arms out, and smiling.)
    â€œLet down thy hair, my brother,” I suggested, “that I may feel its weight.”
    Lightly, surely, I laid my claws on either side of Romesh Singh’s jaw and worked the muscles like hinges, pinching his lips open—and though I had hoped (if I could) to grant him a gentle exit, my hunger soon betrayed itself in their sharpness, rimming the corner of his mouth with blood.
    He gasped, swallowing it.
    â€œBe merciful to me,” he whispered. “As . . . he would be.”
    Oh, loyal,