Page 113 of Decimation

I watch them go. I watch Charles help my brother into the back of the car, and then him get in after. He nods at me as he shuts the door as if we’re in this together, me and him. Buddies, or some such bullshit.

I don’t wait for the car to go, instead I’m running, sprinting, my legs carry me forward, up the steps, through the open door.

And the moment I cross the threshold, the smell hits me.

Blood. Smoke. Death.

My boots skid on the tile. The air is full of smoke so thick it is like a wall I have to push through. For a moment, my mind refuses to see all the carnage in front of me.

Bodies lie strewn across the great entrance hall, my men, Konstantine’s men too. Some are still moving, but most of them are dead.

I walk past them, step over them, continue on until I spot him.

Devin is in the doorway to the library, half propped against the frame as if he simply sat down to have a rest, but the posture is all wrong. A pool of his blood has spread out from under him, a dark, impossible mirror reflecting the chandelier far above him.

Fuck. Fucccck.

I don’t stop to check if he’s alive, it’s clear he’s dead or as good as.

“LEANDRA!” It rips from my throat, not a word but a raw, torn sound, a wolf’s howl stripped of all music.

The sound echoes. It bounds down the hallway, a frantic, mocking spectre leaping from wall to wall, rushing up the staircase to die in the upper galleries. It is answered by the profound, swallowing quiet of a tomb. That silence is worse than any scream. It is a negation. It suggests an ending.

My rage turns to ice water in my veins.

I have known fear, I have known terror but this, this right here? It is a new kind, a cold, absolute zero at the core of me. I am moving again, picking up pace, no longer running but sprinting so fast I think my legs might snap. The stairs groan under my weight.

On the landing is more evidence of the violence that has taken place here. Broken furniture, bullet holes gouging out half the plaster and bodies, so many more bodies.

I continue on, not checking any of them because what would be the point?

I start searching the rooms, growing more frantic as each one proves to be empty. She is here somewhere I know it.

“LEANDRA!”

Again, there is no reply. Nothing but that same awful silence.

I push through another door. It swings inward with a sigh of its well-oiled hinges, a sound obscenely civilized in this abattoir.

And then, I see her.

The world ends. It doesn’t shatter, burn, or fall into the sea. It simply ceases to exist. It becomes a vacuum, a silent, screaming void, and at its centre is a single, terrible image.

She is lying in the middle of the floor. She is on her back. Her arms are flung wide, not in a sprawl of violence, but in a gesture of terrible, forced surrender. Like an angel. A broken, fallen angel pinned to the earth in a grotesque parody of a crucifixion. She is naked.

That beautiful dark skin that I have traced with my lips, that curve of her hip that fits the cup of my hand with such divine precision, the secret hollows and shadowed vales of her body… all of it is laid bare as a map of suffering.

Livid bruises in the shape of possessive, brutal fingers bloom across her throat and upper arms. A starburst of burst capillaries mars the delicate skin of her chest. And her forehead, Christ, upon her brow, drawn with a thick, far too fucking steady finger, is a cross.

It is blood.

Her blood.

It is still wet, catching the last light with a glistening, obscene sheen.

Her eyes are shut. The long, dark fans of her lashes rest on her cheeks. Her lips are slightly parted. In the soft, forgiving twilight, she looks as if she could be sleeping. The most perfect, sculptural, peaceful sleep.

The scream that has been building in the marrow of my bones never comes. It is too vast for my throat.