Not Quite Human

Chapter 27

Neil pressed himself against the wall and couldn't move.
Andrew lay on the floor in front of him. The details registered in pieces, the way terrible things do - the blood, the stillness, the distance between Andrew's head and the rest of him. They were supposed to be safe. Neil had promised him they would be safe.
He didn't register Hissana's hand on his shoulder until it was already there. He let himself be steered - down the corridor, into a room, into a chair - without quite deciding to. Hissana said something about water, about calming down, and left. Neil sat and stared at the middle distance.
He didn't understand. Master was dead. The castle was supposed to be protected - Damien had said so, specifically, that nothing could enter without an invitation. So how had this happened? Was it Michael? He tried to reach for Loki and felt nothing - a strange fuzzy blankness where the connection should have been, like pressing on a bruise and finding the nerves weren't responding.
Hissana returned with a cup of something cold and pale. He said it would help settle the nerves. Neil drank it slowly, watching Hissana's face, noticing something in his expression that he couldn't name.
"You won't be able to call pet spirits in here," Hissana said, almost gently. "This room is sealed."
He walked to the door and locked it.
Neil tried to stand. His legs didn't cooperate. His arms felt distant, like they belonged to someone else. The room stayed where it was but the edges of it went soft. He opened his mouth to call for help and heard only noise come out - not words, not anything useful.
He looked at Hissana and hoped his eyes could carry what his voice couldn't.
Hissana looked back at him with an expression that Neil, even now, could only read as sad. "I'm not going to kill you," he said quietly. "I need a little of your blood. That's all. You won't die - I promise you that much."
He rolled back the carpet.
The rune beneath it was extraordinary - dense and intricate, years of careful work compressed into a pattern that covered most of the floor. He lifted Neil from the chair without difficulty, the tonic still doing its work, and placed him at the centre of it. Then he turned to the coal and lifted what lay in it.
The iron had been heating for a long time. It was the colour of grey ash when it touched Neil's face - the right side, just below the temple. Neil made a sound that Hissana didn't let himself hear too clearly. The shape that formed was a dragon, lean and precise, its tail beginning at the lower cheek and reaching toward the forehead, crossing the brow but leaving the eye untouched. Hissana waited until the image was clean and complete.
When the dragon began to glow red, he drew a small blade across Neil's wrist.
The blood met the rune and the rune responded - growing outward, brightening, feeding. The miasma thickened in the room. Outside, the sky shifted to a sick, luminous red, and then a portion of it tore open: a darkness deeper than ordinary dark, the entrance to Ement.
Hissana set down the blade and looked at what he'd done.
He had killed Andrew. A boy who had survived everything master had put him through, who had found the courage to trust Neil, who had been three days away from something that might have been a real life. Hissana had taken that from him. And now this - a boy who had also done nothing, marked and bled for a cause he'd never chosen.
He genuinely loved Abbadon. That had never been a performance. But Margie had raised him. She had been the whole of his world before Abbadon was, and whatever she asked of him lived in a part of him that love hadn't been able to reach, no matter how many years passed.
Miorag stepped through the shadows into the room, looked at the open tear in the sky, and smiled with the contentment of something that had waited a very long time.
They arrived shortly after. Too late to stop it, not too late for everything.
Damien crossed to Neil immediately, pulled him from the rune, and spoke a closing spell against his wrist. Neil's pulse was there - weak, but present. Damien held that fact carefully, like something he didn't want to put down.
Abbadon stood in the doorway and looked at Hissana.
He looked for a long time. He took in the rune, the open sky, the blade, the boy on the floor. He took in the expression on Hissana's face - shame, he recognised it, had seen it before in other contexts, never thought he'd see it directed at him. He heard his grandfather chuckle somewhere to his left, delighted by the specific quality of this pain.
Had all of it been a lie? Every quiet evening, every word spoken in the dark when Abbadon was struggling and Hissana knew exactly what to say - had any of it been real? He crossed the room without deciding to, sword in hand, his heart asking questions his face had stopped being able to form.

Hissana reached up and touched his face. Both hands, carefully, the way he always had. He looked at Abbadon for the last time - taking in the sharpness of him, the eyes that had once been fierce and were now something else entirely, something Hissana had no right to have caused.
He knew what his betrayal had done. He knew the particular shape of Abbadon's heart well enough to understand that this was not something it would recover from easily, if at all.
He leaned close and whispered the only true thing he had left to give - that he had loved him. That it had always been real. That he was sorry.
Then he took the sword from Abbadon's unresisting hand, pressed it once to his lips, and drove it into his own heart.
Abbadon caught him before he hit the floor. He didn't know when he'd moved. He sat there with Hissana in his arms and his grandfather laughing somewhere behind him, and he didn't look up, and he didn't let go.