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I don’t know who first called them demons. It’s a church word, so it must have come from the enclaves, but the demons I’ve seen don’t have forked tails or devilish grins. They aren’t even red, save for their eyes.
Still, they say demons are spirits freed from hell by the fifth trumpet, along with cancer and microplastics, which slink into people’s souls and change them into monsters. I don’t know about the trumpets, but one thing is true: people change.
Of course, the hiding is how they’re caught, most often.
They change their habits, and change is always the first sign of a demon.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
She came to us as any apocalypse does: slowly at first, and then all at once.
A patchwork monster. A nonsense of scales and fur which bore no resemblance to the girl I’d loved or the woman I’d married. Except, of course, that I loved her.
She knew me then, at the beginning of ourselves, and she knew me now, here at the end, when she did not even know herself.
I couldn’t stop smiling—the euphoric, hysteric smile of a woman who has been lying on her lover’s grave and has just felt the earth move beneath her.
Grief ages you,
Why do people change, Sir John? Because they are cursed, pursued, poisoned, trapped, under siege. Because they have to.
Once you understand why (I spoke a little louder, to discourage further interruptions), the how is simple.
Finch always said there were certain places where it was easier to tell stories, and to hear them: around a fire at night, in the mist at dawn, on a porch at dusk. In-between places, balanced on the border between familiar and strange.
“Everyone thinks you get sick because you begin to change, but it’s the opposite: you change because you get sick. Because you have to.”
“For all the fucking good it’s done me. Cancer. Jesus.”
At six, I’d thought love was a full belly; at sixteen, I’d thought it was wildflowers and gooseberries and Mayapple’s mouth on mine. At seventeen, I knew better: love is whatever you’re willing to kill for.
“Oh, you bastard.” Sir John swallowed. “It’s not—” “Who was the demon, to you?” He swallowed a second time. Closed his eyes. “My wife.” “Of course,” I said, and laughed a little.
Nothing grows on a grave while you’re standing on it.
“Wouldn’t you do the same, for someone you loved?”
Finch had never been very affectionate with me—I was her apprentice more than her daughter. But she’d been willing to kill for me, and so she must have loved me, after all. As I loved May, as Sir John loved his wife, as God loved the world: with blood on our hands.
Had I not slain my own mother for her, and poisoned a Knight of the Enclaves? Had I not abandoned my people and broken my vows for her?
“No, she won’t! You think your wife loves you so much better than mine?”
“You’d have made a hell of a knight, butcherbird.” It was not a compliment, but only a grudging recognition: like for like.
May’s red, red eyes fixed on me. With love maybe, or with hunger, or maybe she could no longer tell them apart.
I could cling to her, like that loyal bride to her groom, until both of us were covered in blood—or I could let her run free. And hope that, one day, I could run after her.
I’d decided, as I walked back down the mountain, alone, that Sir John had it wrong. An outlander doesn’t prove her love by dying young, but by living as long as she can. She eats berries grown in bad earth and licks the poison from her lips; she makes her wedding bed from barbed wire and cinder blocks; she falls in love at the end of the world. And when death comes for her—too soon, too fucking soon—she becomes something else. Something that survives.
but I can pick at the seams, tell different stories. I can tell them of the shrike, who changed because she had to, and the sick bride, who did the same. I can tell them to mistrust the church and to leave their offerings in the hills, instead, for the strange new creatures that live there.
He loved her so much that he held tight to her even as she changed in his arms, even as her talons tore through muscle and cartilage. He held her so long that she fell in love with him, or remembered that she loved him already. And because she loved him, she kept herself to a single shape, though it chafed like the bars of a cage.
