Velveteen (44 page)

Well, not again.

The swaying lights below grew brighter. Her insides tumbled. She wondered how long she would fall, if it would hurt horribly when she hit, and if she would be so lucky as to land on Clay, like Dorothy’s house on the wicked witch, and smash his ass flat.

She wondered how she had so much time to wonder.

Her speculation was cut short by an excruciating impact with something super hard and metallic. Pain ripped through her and she bounced a bit, airborne, before slamming back against it, sliding down sideways, and skidding on her butt across the gravelly floor of the Cellar. Velvet came to an abrupt stop against a wall of cell bars, the wind bellowing from her lungs along with some white squiggly memories.
They flopped on the still-shaking floor like worms, before dimming out and turning to ash.

Across from her, the holding cell was in shambles. The iron bars had toppled over into an impossibly twisted rib cage. That she’d landed at an angle and not impaled herself on one of the jutting rods like a piece of meat on a fork was a miracle. The cell itself was empty, except for the hissing column of light emanating from the gaslight swaying above.

Empty.

Like, with no Clay in it.

“Dammit!”

Velvet tried to scramble to her feet, but ended up kicking at the gravel ineffectually and plopping back down on her ass. She’d just found her footing and was pushing upward on the bars behind her when a whisper blew past her left ear.

Hisssssss
.

She gasped as a pair of claws clamped around her arms and pulled her roughly back against the cell behind her.

“Who’s got who?” The raspy voice curled its way into her ear like a tongue. “I’ve got her, Aloysius!”

The soft
shurr
ing of shuffling feet announced Clay’s approach. Grit and gravel popped, and the dim glow of soul flesh hung in the air, fox fire. Clay was coming for her, and this time he had no need of a body to hide inside.

“Come to turn yourself in, Clay?” Velvet struggled against her captor, clawing at his talonlike fingers as she watched the aura in the darkness become more solid.

Clay’s bare feet smoldered in the cracks of a dusty coating.
The monster had found some clothing. A torn shirt and pants, but no glasses, no charade that he was her old friend, Mr. Fassbinder.

That was over.

His smile was brilliant and easy. It turned her stomach and made her fight all the more against the damnable prisoner behind her, pinning her to his own cell.

“Now, Velvet, that’s no way to act. Pierre there has had a very rough day. All his compatriots have abandoned him and taken their rightful places in the daylight. How would you feel? Trapped in this pit? Oh, wait. But you
are
trapped and you just don’t know it yet.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” she spat.

“Feisty,” Pierre quipped.

“Isn’t she?” Clay held out his hand and stopped when she flinched, only to go ahead and brush her cheek. “I have a special place in my heart for our Velvet. We’re quite good friends. Did you know that, Pierre?”

The other soul grunted.

Velvet jerked away from Clay’s touch, repulsed. “How dare you touch me, after what you’ve done?”

“And what exactly do you think I’ve done?”

“I think you’ve been possessing a lonely butcher and making him kill girls!”

Clay sputtered with laughter. “No. No. Velvet, you’re too smart for that. Don’t get stuck in some easy theory that can be explained away by simple psychosis.”

She shot a glower of hatred in his direction. “Then why don’t you explain it? I think you owe me that much.”

“Owe you?” His voice turned shrill. “Well, maybe just a taste.”

He paced as he delivered his speech—one, Velvet suspected, he’d been practicing for a long time.

“I learned about Bonesaw from you, not the other way around. I never possessed him, nor watched any of the filthy things he did to his victims. To lump my work in with his, well, that just makes me sad. I’d hoped you’d think more highly of me.”

Velvet sneered. “That’s a laugh. And even if it is true, you’ve still destroyed the Latin Quarter, ensnared hundreds of people through possession. That’s unconscionable!”

“And one hundred percent justified.”

Rocks scattered in the distance, drawing all of their attention to a shaft of light slanting into the Cellar from above.

“Velvet!” Manny’s voice echoed across the cavern a moment before an explosion tore through the grid of rubber hoses above them, striping the darkness with flame and blasting the gloom away. The sound stole Pierre’s attention just enough for Velvet to wriggle free of his grimy clutches. His clawed fingers whistled through the air behind her.

The station agent scrambled down the broken shambles of the Cellar stairs, Rancho in tow, their feet clouded in dust and an avalanche of shattered stone.

Velvet allowed herself the briefest smile and was about to respond to Manny, when Clay leapt the gap between them, a blur in the air that slammed into her like a bag of bricks. She dropped flat onto her back. Before she had time to react, he wrapped his thick hand across her mouth.

He slid in close to her face, his body heavy against her naked vulnerability. Clay’s lips threatened to press hers, and whispered, “You want so desperately to know what happened to me, don’t you? What could turn a perfectly reasonable Salvage man into someone like me? Well.” He glowered in Manny’s direction. “Your answer is rummaging her way toward us. Ask
her
why some people seem to never dim. Even though they progress and change and could not possibly have anything remaining to learn.”

Velvet was stunned by the implication.

Manny wouldn’t hold someone back from moving on. Would she? It was a trick. Another ruse. How could Velvet believe a murderer? He was probably lying about possessing Bonesaw.

Lying like they were, Clay’s hand on her mouth, his body against hers, Velvet was taken back to a memory. Thrust back into the shed, back into her body, still warm and scared. Back to Bonesaw’s knives and his need.

“Love me?” Bonesaw pleaded, his waxy lips parted pitifully even as his knife slipped into the flesh of her leg, stabbing between muscle and bone. Velvet screamed into the oily rag in her mouth, the sound coming out less like a cry for help than a goose honking.

The killer backed away and looked down at her in genuine alarm. He reached out and tore the dirty cloth from her mouth.

“Please!” she panted. “Please don’t. You don’t have to.”

He nodded his head hopefully. “You love me?”

Velvet thought she could do it, thought she could play his game, pretend for him. Days of starvation and torture had weakened her spirit, her will to survive, but not her spine.

“Not fucking likely!” she yelled, then spat at him.

Bonesaw quivered, and his expression changed to the one you get when you’ve just bitten into something rotten. His eyes closed solemnly and he nodded, as though responding to some silent question. Then he drove his knife into Velvet’s chest and held it there.

It felt like he’d only punched her. She was numb and in shock, she guessed. Velvet glanced down at the handle protruding from her dirty shirt like a key in a lock. Bonesaw cocked his head and grinned.

Then twisted it.

A floodgate of pain tore open, and Velvet felt her body seizing, even as she was already outside of it, standing beside her killer, screaming obscenities and crying out for her body to stop spasming and jerking in the old-fashioned school chair. An inky puddle blossomed in the dust at her body’s feet.

Too much.

Velvet slammed back into her present.

The memory exploded.

She was back in the Cellar and Clay was still muffling her, but pulled his hand away as Velvet heaved the first wave of
squiggly glowing nerve endings against his palm. He glowered at the mess and looked back at her with disgust just in time for the second stream of puke to splatter his face. He gagged, sputtering the nerves from his open mouth. He recoiled and spat.

Velvet knew an opportunity when she saw one.

She angled her body just slightly and brought her knee up with the full force of her hate into Aloysius Clay’s crotch. When it connected, the man howled, grabbed for his junk, and fell over on his side, moaning. Behind them, Pierre mimicked his master’s pain with an empathetic groan.

Just then a loud commotion, shoe leather pounding gravel, scraped from nearby.

Rounding the corner of the broken cages, Manny screamed, “Velvet! Catch!” and launched a glimmering object into the air, a tail of ribbon streaming behind it.

Her interrogation key!

Velvet vaulted and snatched it out of the air, twisting as she landed in a feral crouch before Clay. She wasn’t sure if the key could do more than simply incapacitate. She’d never used it that way, but on occasion, with the nastier convicts, she’d certainly had the urge.

After everything he’d done, if Clay truly believed he was being held back from dimming, she planned to help him out with that … a lot.

He pushed himself up to a seated position, back against the cell bars, his boy Pierre helping to steady him, pulling at his clothes.

“That’s good,” Velvet growled. “Hold him just like that.”

Clay’s eyes goggled, and his mouth dropped open as she lunged at him, stepping on his knee to get some height, and then slashing at him in a wide arc. Velvet kicked off the bars, spun, and landed a few feet away. White squiggles gleamed and dripped from the teeth of the key. She snapped her head back in the killer’s direction to see him fumbling with his jaw. The flesh and muscle that kept it in place were severed clean. It flopped open like a Pez dispenser and rested on his chest. Clay’s tongue twitched as he gurgled and mewled and glowered.

His eyes burned with hatred.

“It’s not enough, is it, Clay? You’ll find your way out of here and become their leader again, won’t you? That’s what they’re expecting.”

He cocked his head to the side, memories slipping from the wound into his tousled dark locks.

“Well, it’s not going to happen. They’ll have to find a new leader. You’re otherwise engaged.”

“Fuck you,” Clay garbled.

Velvet screamed and stabbed the key into the soul’s gaping maw. She worked at the back of his throat, sawing at his tongue until the hateful protuberance broke free in her fist.

She held it in front of his blinking eyes, a quickly dimming slug filleted over her palm, its pale white guts draining down her wrist in slithering wet streaks.

“You’ll never utter another vile word, Clay. Your lies can rot in that insane head of yours.”

Velvet tossed the tongue onto the man’s lap and watched as he fumbled with it, tried futilely to put it back into his
mouth, and finally went slack, his memories slithering out of his torn jaw in a plume of sparks.

He fell over on his side and seized. A blinding flash pulsed from the gaping hole of his jaw and spread beneath his flesh like oxygen feeding a fire, consuming him from the inside. His skin turned as black as creosote and he stilled suddenly.

Gone. Dimmed to hell, she hoped.

Behind him in the cage, his minion wept quietly.

Velvet crouched next to Clay’s burned form and clutched a handful of the graying ashes, held them up to her lips, and blew them into the cell. She wiped the rest off on the cold Cellar ground.

She didn’t want his ashes on her.

He didn’t deserve that.

Manny approached with a robe and wrapped it around Velvet’s shoulders. Velvet suddenly felt faint, as though the weight of the situation had finally occurred to her. The Latin Quarter was all but empty, the world as they knew it had changed in an instant, and for the first time, she’d been unable to control herself, as though she’d been on autopilot.

The violence had poured out of her, unbridled.

She glanced over Manny’s shoulder and winced as she saw Nick in the distance. He wore a look of stunned horror that made her heart ache. Logan and Luisa flanked him, heads cocked, trying to figure out what they’d just witnessed.

They would all see her differently now that the violence was out on display.

That was probably for the best.

“Is it true?” Velvet stared into Manny’s eyes.

“Is what true?” Manny stared back, her gaze steelier than Velvet had ever seen.

“Clay told me something …,” she began.

“Clay’s gone. Nothing else matters.”

“But …”

“Nothing. Else. Matters.” Manny turned and disappeared into the depths of the Cellar.

V
elvet’s team followed her out of the Cellar, chattering away eagerly.

“Oh, man,” Nick said, covering his mouth as though he’d be sick. “That was harsh.”

Luisa was stony-faced. Logan grinned wickedly.

“That was some ninja shit, Velvet.” Logan threw some fake gang sign. “Respect.”

The station was quiet and still. A handful of souls wandered amid the fallen glass and shattered columns; the walls were a web of cracks, as though silvered ivy had taken over and spread in their absence.

Velvet turned to Nick, held her hand out, and laced her fingers in his. “The crystal balls?” she asked.

“Shattered. All nine of them,” he answered. “The Departurists made the mistake of being too curious. They
carried them right to us when they came looking for Clay.
Bam!
” He slammed his fist into his other palm, but when he glanced back at her, his eyes squinted with something.

Sympathy, Velvet thought. She didn’t want that.

“That’s good. The souls are free.” Were probably passing through the primary crack right then.

A calm washed over her as they passed through the wrought-iron gates into the Shattered Hall, and then after a few missteps found the crack that led them to the alley next to the Paper Aviary. She spilled through first and searched the shredded clothing for the keys she’d collected from Manny’s desk and Miss Antonia.

Still there.

Nick brought her a long wool jacket. She didn’t think to ask where he’d found it and didn’t think she wanted to know, considering how close they were to the Paper Aviary. They wandered in silence back to the Retrieval dormitory. Kipper and Isadora stood at the door, as though guarding their home, their faces even more ashen than normal, devastated, broken. Kipper reached out and touched Velvet’s arm.