Mourning Cloak Read Online Free PDF Page B

pulse beats in his neck, his veins stand out. I push harder. “Did they do this to you at the hospital? Are you saying that eerie men and cloaks are
made
there?” Disbelief colors my voice. The creatures of the night have haunted Highwind for centuries. The hospital was built a few decades ago.
    His breath seizes up, his eyes roll back in his head. He’s beyond answering now, and I shake my head at Toro, telling him to let g eyhim to o.
    Toro’s long fingers roll, as if he winds invisible yarn into a ball. “Take this, friend,” he says to the eerie man, who, with bared teeth and agonized expression, looks less human than ever. “Take the memories that the white coats buried deep and hid from you.” Toro makes a gesture as if casting a net on the eerie man’s face.
    The eerie man blinks once, twice, rapidly. Something dawns—joy, recognition, I can’t tell. He cries out, “Danae!” and then he is still.
    He is gone and whatever of himself he recovered in those last moments is gone with him.
    Toro brushes the eerie man’s eyes shut. “May Taurin guide your soul to him,
ishtaur
.” Darkchild. I suppose I am one, too, now. Out of Taurin’s light, far from his grace.
    Mercy given, prayer said, Toro rocks on his heels. “So. The hospital.” He is weary, but unsurprised.
    I narrow my eyes. “You knew.”
    “I have suspected.”
    “Is that why you denied Sera her last rites? Because she worked there?” I clench my fists. The eerie man was wrong. Had to be wrong. “Where she healed people?”
    “She cut people. You know that is forbidden.” Toro’s voice is flat, oddly gentle. This is an old argument, but I cannot keep from poking at it, picking at the scab, making the wound bleed all over again.
    “She
helped
people. She saved lives. She did more than you ever did in all the years you spent with my army. More than
Taurin
did.”
    He winces, at my blasphemy or my indictment, I don’t know. Don’t care. “No, not because of that. But because…she changed.”
    “You think they changed her? Changed Sera?” Anger blooms through my disbelief.
I’ll kill them. I’ll kill all those smirking, soft-voiced, pale-skinned directors if they betrayed her.
Sera had been so damned
proud
when they’d promoted her. “Like they did this unfortunate creature—and her.”
    We look at the place Flutter had melted into. Flutter, more mist than human. Is Sera a cloak too? Is that why Flutter came—to tell me? Is that why they—whoever they were—had sent the eerie men, the cloak, whatever had attacked Flutter?
    I rise, ignoring the groan of my aching knees. “I have to find her.”
     
    She’s dripped straight through the floor and foundation and into the abandoned mine tunnels below. It takes me most of a day and three hundred and seventy eight repetitions of the Great Invocation to find her, a bundle of mist amidst the darkness. When I reach out to her, my hand passes through her knee—and then her talons are at my throat, very much sharp, very much present.
    “
Lalita vey
,” I whisper, knowing that only Taurin’s prayers stand between me and the cloak’s reflexes. My mouth is as dry as the desert sand, and the words have to be dredged up from my memory. They ooze up like a little water from the bottom of a dry well. “
Lalita vey. Eilendi.
”
Please,
I think, but dare not say anything other than ritual words.
    Flutter blinks, comes to herself, drops her hand. She looks at it as if it belongs to someone else, as though she cannot quite fathom how it has gotten attached to her wrist. Then sheit st. The hides it in the folds of her frayed cloak-wings.
    “What happened?” I ask, soft as breath.
    “Dissolution.” Her voice is distant, her gaze shifts to a point above my head. “They hit me, and I—became nothing. Just atoms in space.”
    “You found yourself back again, though.”
    “The words,” she whispers. “The Invocation. Reminding even the atoms who made them and what they were made for.