“So why didn’t you help me, then?” she demands. Xawery simply smiles, unpleasantly: So many of those teeth! And all of them so stained and jagged, like a box of broken bone-needles.
“I would never deprive a fellow warrior of enemiess,” he tells her, mildly enough, smooth as milk in arsenic. And lets Chavah’s emptied skull drop, at last, with only a tiny splash.
Kotzeleh lunges, grabs, fires without aiming. Makes the gap, squeezes through. Runs runs runs, into stinking darkness.
But even a scuttle carries for miles, in this echo-chamber. Which means she can already hear Xawery, following.
* * *
Words in her veins, like some mnemonic virus. She mouths them in her sleep now, whether or not she wants to—the Saint’s confession playing dusk ‘til dawn behind her shut eyelids, a flickering newsreel on endless loop. Remembers them as cold and wet and hollow, the same way they came that first time, as she fought her way up-current: back towards the pipe she’d come from, back towards the manhole and the engine which covers it, with the reek of gas in front of her and the smell of lilies behind.
What iss it you kill for, Kotzsseleh? To live, only? Or doess your God require you to, even ass mine did?
Taking one corner after another, slipping on slimy stones, skinning her hands on the walls. The gas stings her eyes, but Kotzeleh runs on.
The Holy Land iss full of sstrange thingss indeed, ass I found when one came to me on the battlefield, offering ME ssurvival—at a price. But I never saw itss face, and when I woke in darknesss later, the hilt of my own ssword burnt my handss.
Through the first wall, past the bale of wire, that sad bundle inside it still smoking. Kotzeleh can hear the Taifun-gerat everywhere now, grinding-grating, like some horrible clockwork heart pumping out death.
Pray, they told me, to redeem this ssinful world. And sso have I prayed, almost consstantly, ssince they nailed me down in THAT. Yet I do not ssee that the world is much improved, for all my piety.
Loud, loud, almost deafening, and the gas so thick she can barely see, let alone run anymore. So Kotzeleh turns here instead, head swimming—and finds Xawery suddenly right up against her gun-barrel in a ragged blur of movement, peering down at her with those scarlet eyes whose sockets seem both hollow and painfully overfilled at once, like twin slit-pupilled blood-blisters.
“I never assked to become what I became,” he tells her. “Only to sserve God in my way, ass Ssaint Chrisstopher did—Chrisstopher, who ate human flessh and prayed with a dog’s tongue. Yet wass he ssaved.”
And: “No one is saved,” snarls Kotzeleh, feeling a great, grey wave of hopelessness roll up through her mouth. “No one. Not one.”
(Not even those who deserve to be.)
She doesn’t cry, though—she can’t. That other one, Katarczyna; she could cry. But she’s gone, and only Kotzeleh remains: Kotzeleh, her father’s little thorn, hard and sere and bitter and barren. Sharp enough to pierce this empty-rinded world to its black, black heart.
Kotzeleh, unable to weep over Lev’s stupid goodness, over her own realization that she actually did care for him—now, of all times, when there’s nothing left that matters anyway. When it’s too late for anything.
“No one is saved,” she repeats again, quieter. “And monsters . . . are only monsters.”
Monsters like you and I. Monster.
She feels her finger tighten on the trigger, and prays that the wave will be as fast as it seemed.
* * *
It doesn’t end like this, however. Obviously.
* * *
Kotzeleh and Saint Xawery, caught in the typhoon’s path. She smiles as the first blast perforates his midsection, loosing a flood of guts—but he just smiles back and hugs her to him, shrouding them both beneath what (at first view) looked like a mould-striped leather cloak, rather than a pair of folded, membranous bat-wings.
He bites her, instinctively insulating himself with her blood, and she—helpless, hating, equally instinctively—
—bites him back.
So the Taifun-gerat‘s wave passes over like the Angel of Death did in Egypt, engulfing but not consuming, shying from the same sign of blood which once kept Israel’s firstborn safe. And they stand there joined, waves of thought passing between them in a bright, arterial circuit: Kotzeleh, still fighting, even as her limbs cool and stiffen; the Saint, cradling her, firm and fair as any father, his armor digging little crescent-shaped scars into her torso’s hide. Musing, as he does—
Iss no one ssaved, truly? Not ever? But if I may be ssaved, so may you alsso, little Kotzsseleh. So may all we monssters . . . in time.
Years later, a whole new century, and she still can’t make up her mind: Could it be that he wanted her to follow her better impulses, just like Lev did, even when she was so utterly sure she had none left? To force her to re-evolve back up out of the muck, and take her place in a Crusade so new it needed no Pope to sanction it?
Vampire against vampire, monster against monster. Kotzeleh against the world which made her what she is, living or dead: A hunter, a killer. A true knight of zealous, self-legitimized genocide.