Twilight of the Wolves (32 page)

But she was human. She was human and the world was silent.

And the Moon would never shine again.

And she would howl no more.

The suns rise and the city is ours. Luca is ours. There are no soldiers killing the young men but many Invaders are dead. Dead at my hands, at the hands of many others. Silent blades killing the night. Thousands of bodies left to rot in the daylight.

The cheers and chanting continues, all voices united. My body light, heady, dizzy as I stumble through the city seeing the starving and mutilated cheering alongside those who are yet whole. None of us lost but all gained. The Deathwalkers prowl the city and take them away, remove the Invaders from our land forever. The walking shadows, the hands and mouths of the Goddess bringing all the newdead to the shore and the ocean. He was a boy once, before he was a wraith. They all were.

Happy, elated, I smile and people touch me, we call one
another Sister, and we laugh. An overwhelming ecstasy in the air thinning the years of pain, making it a memory, containable, something we can walk away from, lock away, murder.

But they swarm around him and I run to him screaming, my joints cracking and creaking, screaming so loud that I can’t make a sound, my lungs ragged and torn, my voice stolen away. They surround him as he stands over his dead father, crying.

Alyc, too young to understand. Too young to see this and ever forget it.

The Deathwalkers, ten of them, crowd around, their song harrowing but calming, as if I know it and have known it since before I was born. They take him in their hands and the roots keep me where I stand, mouth hanging open, blood beating the sludge of my life harder and faster until I can barely stand. They pull at him and raise him up and the heart within me is gnawed on by the gods who have cursed everything and stolen away all that ever held meaning. Before my eyes, they take him and my body is an empty husk of dried meat and I’ve seen this before in the memories of my shadow, the only thing he left behind.

The screams echo in my head and your eyes appear and a wolf cries a thousand years away but it echoes to the present and I reach to him, pushing Death away, pushing all of them away, shouting out their song, drowning out the dead to make room for the living. I push and I scream and I kick and I tear at them until the boy is in my arms.

Alyc, my heart, I hold him, kiss him, run my hands over him to keep him alive, Oh my heart, what are you doing? Where are you going? Where are you going, dear heart?

My eyes close and his face pressed against my cheek, he whispers, Daddy’s gone, and I cry though I try not to but I cry harder and harder until Alyc holds me and consoles me and I can still taste his father’s blood as the Deathwalkers turn and disappear into the shadows, my vision a blur, Lord Alexander’s body just a heap of ash in the wind, and the tears will not stop
even as the wolves all howl in my head from thousands of days ago when the forest still sang for me and the Moon still shone and Alyc holds me together even as my body crumbles away and I tell him this is the last day in my body and he whispers, stroking my hair, Auntie, there are better worlds than this.

“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.

Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what’s correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is.

Our authors disagree with each other; their styles vary as widely as their concerns. What matters is the will to create books that won’t be easy to assimilate. We take risks, not for the sake of risk-taking, but for the things that might come out of it.