With one massive hand the chimei seized the blade and broke it. It made a disdainful noise and flung the pieces into the darkness. Then it encircled Rin’s neck with its arms, clinging to her back like a child—a giant, monstrous child. Its arms pressed against her windpipe. Rin’s eyes bulged. She couldn’t breathe. She fell to her knees and clambered desperately over the dirt toward the dropped torch.
She felt the chimei’s breath hot on her neck. It scratched at her face, pulled at her lips and nostrils the way a child might.
“Play with me,” it insisted in Kesegi’s voice. “Why won’t you
Rin’s fingers found the torch. She seized it and jabbed it blindly upward.
The burning end smashed into the chimei’s exposed face with a loud sizzle. The beast screeched and flung itself off Rin. It writhed in the dirt, limbs twitching at bizarre angles as it keened loudly in pain.
Rin screamed, too—her hair had caught fire. She pulled up her hood and rubbed the cloth over her head to smother the flames.
“Sister, please,” the chimei gasped. In its agony it somehow managed to sound even more like Kesegi.
She crawled doggedly toward it, pointedly looking away from its eyes. She clutched the torch tightly in her right hand. She had to burn it again. Burning it seemed to be the only way to hurt it.
This time it spoke in Altan’s voice.
This time she couldn’t stop herself from looking.
At first it only had Altan’s face, and then it
Raw, smoking, he snarled at her.
Staving off the chimei’s attempts to claw off her face, she pinned it against the ground, jamming down its arms with her knees.
She had to burn its face off. The faces were the source of its power. The chimei had collected a mass of likenesses from every person it had killed, every face it had torn off. It sustained itself on human likenesses, and now it tried to obtain hers.
She forced the torch into its face.
The chimei screamed again.
She had never heard Altan scream, not in reality, but she was certain that it would have sounded like this.
“Please,” sobbed Altan, his voice raw. “
Rin clenched her teeth and tightened her grip on the torch, pressed it harder against the chimei’s head. The smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils. She choked; the smoke made her tear up but she did not stop. She tried to rip her gaze away, but the chimei’s eyes were arresting. It held her eyes. It forced her to look.
“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against
her rib cage.
But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
But no, that didn’t make sense . . .
She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.
She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.
She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.
She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.
“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.
Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.
Rin climbed off the corpse and sucked in a great, heaving breath. Then she vomited.
