As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.
It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl—Pie, to her brother—had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.
Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child’s covered form.
“Took her down!” it told the dead coyote in its arms. “Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy!”
Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn’t it? The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right, as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life’s wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.
Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from
(Entragian her it them)
even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched overblown prideful praying boy . . .
