Page 51 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
Simultaneously, their heads snap toward us, and as one, they open their black mouths impossibly wide. Neirin seizes my wrist and drags me away.
We run through street and alley, but every step finds another dead end, another patch of coal bubbling out of the ground and seeking the sun. The fairies move like puppets on strings. I look around wildly, desperately, and somehow I still miss the one that seizes my arm and yanks me away.
She takes me to the ground, her talons slicing through my coat and shirt into my stomach. She lets out a rattle from deep in her chest. Her mouth gapes like a cave, and my free arm drives the point of my sword through it.
Her eyes go wide. Tar leaks through her teeth.
I heave her off and scramble up, a boot on her chest as I yank the blade out with a vile squelch.
“Habren!” Neirin bellows.
He’s at the bell tower.
If I was fast when running from John Branshaw, I’m a bullet with thirty undead fairies at my heel. They lurch and stagger, burdened by their sickness and rot. I clear the door to the bell tower and Neirin slams it shut.
He starts for the stairs and shouts back, “I’ll need your sword!”
I nod and give chase. The mob bangs at the door.
“That won’t hold,” I tell him.
“I’m counting on it!”
The stairs wind up and up, and I’m sweating and chafing with effort as I burst into the belfry behind Neirin, only to almost collide with the giant, shining bronze bell. We edge around the trapdoor we entered through, looking down at the approaching undead fairies. They scramble over each other, crusted limbs groaning, coal growths scraping viciously against stone. They move like a many-armed insect, a hive devouring itself.
“When I tell you…” Neirin says, “cut the rope.”
The bell is too big to fit through the trapdoor, so I don’t understand what he intends to do.
The slash on my stomach strains, and I groan as I hold my sword at the ready. Neirin raises a hand.
“Hold,” he says.
My chest heaves.
“Hold.”
My arms ache above me; the wound tears deeper.
“Hold!”
Their gargling, choking screams are just below us.
“Now!”
My sword slices through the rope. The bell hovers in the air.
An ungodly guttural moan fills the tower, and the bell begins to warp. It folds in on itself, the bronze creaking and shrieking loud enough that a twitch seizes my body, and I cover my ears.
With a twist of Neirin’s hand, the bell melts.
Bronze leaks from its moorings and crashes through the trapdoor like rotten fruit dropping from a tree. The metal follows the path of Neirin’s hand, lapping and racing down the stairs, encasing the creatures chasing us, devouring all in its path.
Neirin’s face contorts. He doubles over, covering his mouth and nose with his hand, gagging. I can still smell nothing, but I swear I can hear the metal as it hardens—a strange hissing and cracking noise—and skin sizzling beneath.
“It’s rancid,” Neirin chokes out.
In that moment, I’m rather glad I’m not one of the teg.He looks like he could be sick.
