Connie fought against him, driving her elbow into his stomach, head butting him with the back of her skull, stamping on his feet, and all the while trying to free an arm so that she could wave the red cloth ribbon under his nose. He snapped at her, trying to bite her hand, trying to bite her face.
The girl knew about those ribbons. The reapers soaked them every few days in a noxious chemical mixture that made the gray people react the same way they did around other dead. When the chemical was strong, the dead totally ignored the reapers.
“How long since you dipped your streamers, Connie?” she asked.
Connie’s face, already pale, went whiter still.
She screamed. Loud and terrible.
And then the girl was moving. She lunged in and slammed the steel pommel of her knife against the dead reaper’s temple, knocking his head sideways. That loosened his hold, and the girl grabbed the shoulder of Connie’s shirt and gave her a single violent pull. Connie staggered three awkward steps backward, then fell over Griff, who was trying to get to his feet.
The girl ducked low and slashed Jason’s ankles, cutting the tendons. Even though the man was past feeling pain, his skeleton still needed those tendons in order to stand. Jason toppled into the dust.
Connie was still screaming, but now her horror was directed at Griff, who crawled toward her, teeth bared, fingers scrabbling for purchase on her trouser cuffs. In her panic and confusion Connie had lost herself completely, forgetting everything she’d learned, everything that had helped her survive this long since the Fall.
The girl knew that Connie was going to die.
She almost let her die.
Almost.
Instead, with a sigh of disgust, the girl jumped forward and kicked Griff in the side of the head with the flat of her foot. It toppled the dead man onto his side. Connie stopped moving and stared.
The girl walked up behind Griff, used another kick to knock him flat on his stomach, crouched, and drove the point of her knife into the cleft formed by the bottom notch of the skull and the upper part of the spine. The brain stem. The knife slid in without effort, and Griff instantly went still. No death twitch, no transition. Living death, and then the forever kind of death.
Jason was eight feet away, crawling toward them.
The girl looked at him, then turned to stare down at Connie.
“I told you before and this’ll be the last time,” said the girl. “Run away. Tell my mother and Saint John and all the others to leave me alone.”
“They won’t. You’ve sinned against the church and against your mother. The reapers will never stop. You belong with us. You belong to the church, heart and soul, flesh and bone. You know that, Sister Mar—”
The girl moved like lightning and crouched over the reaper, the bloody tip of her knife pricking the softness under Connie’s chin.
“Call me that again and I’ll butcher you like a hog and leave you to bleed out here. I’ll leave you to Jason and the flies
and the scorpions. Y’all think I’m joshing you?”
Connie shook her head.
The girl leaned closer. “Tell them, Connie. Tell them to leave me be.”
A tear broke from the corner of the reaper’s eye. “They won’t. The reapers will never stop. You know that. You know that they’ll never stop looking for you. And they will find you and they will kill you. You belong to the Night Church. You belong with us.”
“I don’t belong to anybody!” snarled the girl. “Why can’t you get that through your head? I don’t belong to the church or to my mother or Saint John or anybody. Leave me alone.”
Jason was inches away now. The girl pivoted away from Connie, knocked Jason flat, and ended him the way she had ended Griff. A single thrust delivered with the cold precision of a perfect killer.
Exactly the way she had killed before. Exactly the way she had ended the lives of countless gray people. And countless living people.
The girl stood up and backed away from the living reaper and the two dead men.
“Y’all just used up whatever bit of mercy I had left,” she said. “Don’t let me see you again.”
With that she turned and walked away.
She didn’t look back. Didn’t watch to see if Connie got up and grabbed a weapon.