Dreadful Skin (19 page)
Authors: Cherie Priest
Tags: #Fantasy, #Horror, #Fiction, #Historical, #General
She’d taken
him
to bits. I could see the parts that made him a man strewn across the floor, splattered near the altar.
Leonard, though.
He was down, draped and limp, outstretched along the floor in what was left of the aisle. His stomach was gone, his intestines stretched and curling, hanging from the ends of the nearest standing pew. His mouth was open, and he was gasping quietly, fishlike, gasping while his tattered chest fought to pull in air and while his heart…his heart pumped poison to all the parts of him that remained.
“Oh Leonard,
no
.”
But even as I watched, yes. He was coming together. He was mending.
“No.” The sound bubbled up out of his mouth. The word came out covered in spit and blood. He rocked his head back and forth.
No. No. No
.
I felt helpless. I felt small. My hands were working themselves back into something like hands, less like claws—and there was this poor, dear boy, dying and not dying. Changing. No. Not Leonard. Not him, too.
Melissa saw.
She stood, abandoning the remains of the thing that I guess was once Daniel, and she held up that big Spanish knife I’d given her. It slipped in her grip. She was soaked in blood, drenched in it.
***
I looked away. I looked for McKenzie, but he was gone. A spot of blood and wet dirt marked the spot where he’d fallen—but not stayed.
***
Melissa climbed past the broken pews. She stared down at him, and if the blood hadn’t obscured her face so thoroughly, I might have known more of what she was thinking when she said to him, before she brought the knife down on his throat and carved out the last of his life,
“
Thank you
.”