The man is a red pool around our feet, a body just beside Red's. I'm numb, but not too numb to have plunged my arm, which has become a long, drill-like appendage, into his body several times. I sense it crumpling, feel the sticky red substance coating my hands, smell the red aroma of blood, feel the metallic tang, metal everywhere, and everything has teeth. My mouth is dry as I fall to my feet, feeling heat against my legs, and move the body a few times. I shake Red twice, willing him to wake up. He looks like something out of a litter of dead mice I found on one of our first winters, curled up and eerily silent.

I had sucked all the life out of those mice. At the time it had stricken me as more sinister than killing them the way Mimsy kills things, but now, death is just death.

It takes all the strength in my body and then some to move into a standing position, but I do. "Trace."

Trace is not moving or speaking. No one is.

I kick the dead man aside. I kick him again, more powerfully, and I feel my entire face brindle with rage. "What are you waiting for?" I ask, which comes out as more of a roar than a polite question, the way Red would do it. "Heal him. Please."

Trace puts her hands on the body and I watch as the bullet inserts itself back into his chest, slowly reversing time as she recreates the voyage. I've never seen her this concentrated, but I also don't know what she's capable of when she becomes concentrated. Red always handled her carefully, like he suspected more, and with the vague content of her powers, I...

My face twitches again. "Middle kids. The house."
"What do you mean, the house?" Mary asks. She's upset, eyes darting between group members, but as Red's told me, she's not capable of feeling fear, so she's not going to jump to the conclusion that the group is screwed as fast as the rest of us.

"I mean enter the house and see if anyone else is inside," I say.

Damien asks, "What if there is?"

I leer at the house. Red had always said that we were the most dangerous thing to ever walk this earth, and that it was only a matter of time before we proved that to everyone living on it. Yet somehow, across several years, throughout the longest run of our lives and our time on the coast, we'd kept our hands almost clean of human blood. Red taught us to fear their retribution as much as we were supposed to fear their society even as we passed through it. Red was always looking over his shoulder in the cities, jittery, as afraid of them as they should have been of us. Is always. Is. Anyways, buddy, you're not here to dispense moral judgements, so I guess it looks like humanity's going to get a little taste of how dangerous we are. Finally, I shrug to the middle kids. "I think Gillian and Mary can take care of it. Right, girls?"

Mary's face cracks open into an ecstatic wide 'o', while Gillian just gives me a rough nod. The latter proceeds to bust the door down while Damien and Alex follow them into the house.

I fold my hands as I watch the others. Trace is still hunched over Red, blood receding into his body in a thin crimson arc, and the air is rank as it is sticky. It feels like summer in here, far too warm to be dead winter, and humid to boot. I wipe blood off my face and say to Kali, "We should go dispose of the body."

Kali gets up from where she's been kneeling at Red's side. "Can we trust them there?"

Elle and Angel are dumbfounded. Adaline shivers, her coat flecked with blood not from Red's... it's flecked with blood from the man. He's all over us. "Sure." I fix them both with the leader stare. I don't bring it out often. I'm not the leader.

Well, today... hopefully only today. Trace is a fast healer. He'll be fine. It's not like he's dead. We can't even die, or we would have by now. Six years? With this group? It would be impossible for something not to happen, so the fact that nothing has is at least twelve kinds of a miracle. I don't want to leave Red's side, but I can't look at him anymore like this. If I interrupt Trace by breaking down in front of her, I mess up her concentration which puts Red in danger, and lose all the power I have right now just through sheer force of character. I bite my tongue. My lips and tongue are bleeding heavily from the last few minutes, but I've been too numb to notice. Is this what Red has to think through all the time? Does he have to orchestrate every moment like it might be the last one he's in charge? It makes me want to take a bullet to the--

Not funny.

Nothing is funny. I think I'm going hysterical. This just... can't be happening. It can't. It doesn't make sense. I keep turning around to ask Red what to do about all this and he's not there to give advice. I end up grabbing Kali's hand with one of mine and the man in two more, one which I manifest from my right side, and I carry the man out until we're just outside the cellar. He's scruffy around the edges, unkempt but still bearing a certain kind of strength... I have no idea what would incentivize him to pick up that gun. I don't understand humans.

Could he have guessed what was really hiding in his cellar? Did he realize? Do people know? I watch the flesh burn as Kali dispassionately lights the man on fire, his corpse blazing blue as it goes up in moments. Kali's deadly as she is effective, and when she waves the flames back, they draw themselves out of existence, leaving nothing but dust and ash. She and I stand there longer than is necessary. She draws her hand out of mine and runs it across her cheek, a rattling hiss like a fire being extinguished by water emanating from her throat.

"Yeah," I agree. "Exactly."

"Red couldn't have been shot," Kali mutters. "He can't be shot."

"I know," I mutter.

"You don't know the half of it," Kali responds.

"I know him better than anyone," I growl.

"But he--" Kali stops herself. The wind blows around us. Night is setting on, and the only light comes from the inside of the house. I can feel ice on my feet, the wind at my back, and inside the house the creaking of floorboards fills me with a second kind of dread.

"Kali?"

Kali closes her eyes. "Look. I don't want to sound pretentious, but you wouldn't understand. You're always on his good side. He's a lot scarier when you're not... on that."

"I don't think anyone's on his bad side," I respond, folding my arms. The gray smear of ash on the dry ground, razed of grass by Kali's flames as quickly as it was human remains, is unsettling in a way I can't give words too. The third arm retracts back into my side. "He has this crazy idea in his head that he can save us all."

"He's wrong."

"I know," I say. "But when I'm around him I can almost believe it."

Kali kicks the ground in front of her. "That's so sentimental."

"Some of us have to be. It keeps us..." I begin..

"Don't say human like it's something positive. Don't you dare."

"I was going to say alive," I decide.

Kali shakes her head. "Of course you were. Think we raised our kill count in the house?"

I open the door. The interior is furnished in such a way that it seems hard to believe anyone else could live here. A deer head with several pieces of paper stuck into its antlers hangs on one wall. The room is overfurnished, with two sofas and dozens of thick gray papers, and there is only one door in the room, which leads to the kitchen. I don't understand how things are decorated, but I can tell you, definitively, that it is an ugly kitchen. Still, there's soup out on the counter, growing cold, and the fridge has been torn open. Mary is busy poking open bottles of ketchup with a fork and licking it off the table. Gillian has some bread while Damien is just holding a juice bottle, slumped against the table.

Kali squeezes in after me and snorts hard when she sees them there. "You kidding?"

Something about the noise makes every hair on my back stand up. My jaw locks and I feel my eye twitch, causing me to grab the doorframe. "Hey. Kali. Can you give me ten minutes?"

Whatever semblance of a smile was there a second ago just as quickly dissipates. "Just so you know ahead of time, he's definitely not getting up that quickly."
Ha! Funny! "No, Kali, I wasn't under the assumption that he'd be up in a few seconds--"

"Under the assumption? You sound just like him," Mary says, swinging her feet back and forth on a dead man's stool. Tomato paste smears her face, tinting it red. The others' eyes glint in the dull, malfunctioning light of a lamp they must have turned on, and I can smell the human weight of this place as much as I can still taste that awful awful dead human charred flesh all in my mouth, as if I had gone in and torn him to ribbon with my own teeth.

"Thanks," I say. "I'll tell the others we're spending the night here. Maybe tomorrow, too, if he's not up yet. Can Trace move him?"

"I wouldn't," Kali warns.

"Then I wont," I say. If he doesn't wake up, everything is over. Guess we're leaving him alone.

Ten minutes.

I should have asked for twenty.

As I walk down the stairs from the small, elevated house, I pass the barn and break into a sprint, to prove that I can. I fall onto four legs and feel my face split into bone, two separate consciousnesses raising to do battle with mine. I promised I wouldn't do it, but this could be just what he needs if everything goes wrong. Two rival minds remind me I shouldn't be thinking about anything at all, and as we hit the barbed wire fence, two skulls, one vulpine, one feline, rip the wire to shreds with their teeth. We feel a barb under one of our pads and continue walking, the pain as fleeting as smoke. There is no blood to be spilled out of this body.

My body is a knife and an oasis.

The simple sense of not being alone is enough to console us, to lead us away from the chaos out into the deserts. We sense death like touch, a thousand copper lifelines threading the air, and so many are short or still, no longer vibrating while they wait for spring to revive the living things from where they slumber. We turn all three heads towards the barn, and we take in the thin copper reforming itself from nothing. Time works backwards. Nature is afflicted by an aberration, someone who has stepped outside of its rules.

It has been so long since we toggled with the threads of life, and we are not interfering. At the very least, it's there, which means that he is alive, that things are going to be fine. The subconscious part of me that's still thinking on the frantic level of the panicked human of a few minutes ago (and you're usually so calm, what a shame) slackens with relief.

Can you imagine if it was one of them instead of the three of you? This would be agony.

We run laps around the perimeter for a while, getting energy out of our system, enjoying the lack of thought. Once or twice we see Mimsy out there, wandering the perimeter with a stick in her mouth or hand. She's as gray as the sky, darkening with the coming night, and when we feel the first rain coming on we pick her up in the feline mouth and drag her back. When we set her down within the barriers, she watches us with profound interest, shifting back into a girl. She's still too short to reach the deer's head, which is strung with strange lights, but she pets the skull of a cat, one of the three heads of the beastly chimaera, and smiles. We watch through haunted eyes as she draws back.

"It will be alright, won't it? Trace is healing him?" she asks.

I shift back, collapsing into myself, and try to feign confidence. 'Feign' is the operative word, but I'm beginning to get the feeling that lying is eighty percent of the job. "Of course he will. What would we do without Red?" I ask. Yeah. What would we do without you? She must not have realized it was rhetorical, because she blinks pensively. Her white hair framing her ornery face and round, large eyes, she says at last, "Nothing. We would have died a long time ago."